37 GIMP Essential Projects for Graphic Design ers

1. 37 Design Projects Intro: Hello and welcome to my Gimp essentials class for graphic designers. My name is Chris Barker, and I've been in the graphic design industry for 30 years. Yes, I'm that old, but that just means I have a lot of experience to share with you to help you jumpstart your career as a graphic designer, which is why you're here right? To be a graphic designer. Now real quick, this is not just another graphic design course, it's much more than that. How so? Well, I'm glad you asked. Alright, so here's the thing. You cannot start your graphic design career until wait for it. You have a portfolio to show potential clients. You can learn all you want about graphic design, just about anywhere. But you have to take that knowledge and create a portfolio to show off your graphic design skills, which is exactly what you're going to have once you're done with this course. So I've designed this course to teach you not only all the tools you'll need to start as a graphic designer, including, but not limited to, layers, layer masks, Layer Styles, texts, filters, blending modes, how to create custom shapes and banners and badges, OMA, you're going to learn a lot about Gimp and graphic design in this class. But more importantly, to help you create your graphic design portfolio and the process, I've developed over 30 real-world projects that specifically focus learning something new about Gimp. And when you've completed a project, you will have another unique piece for your portfolio. Plus, I'm going to share with you additional pro tips on creating your own logo, your business card, and networking for jump starting your new career. So if you're ready to learn graphic design from a 30-year pro and more importantly to heavy completed portfolio to show off your new skills, to jumpstart your grabbing design career. Now is the time to sign up and get started today. I'm looking forward to helping you achieve your career goals by helping you build your graphic design portfolio and of course, learning gap in the process. Now one more thing before you leave, There's one other thing that I need to let you know. And that is, I've included a free Gimp essentials guide for graphic designers. You can use this guide throughout the course and is going to give you additional tips on the tools and the techniques that you're learning. Plus, it includes information about each of the different design projects that you'd need to complete for your portfolio. You can print it out, take notes, and use it as a reference throughout the class when you're offline. So if you're ready to jumpstart your graphic design career, this is the course to help you achieve your dreams. Sign up now, risk-free To get started. Have an awesome day and I can't wait to see you on the inside. 2. Project 01: Fix Exposure Issues: All right, so we're gonna go ahead and start editing our images so we can start building our portfolio to show off our Gimp skills. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to adjust an image for its exposure because this particular image is over exposed. So let's go ahead and open up that file by going up to File selecting open. Then we're going to navigate to Section four, Lecture 13, and open up our exposure JPEG file. And as you can see, the image is over exposed. So it's really easy to fix and gamma. But as you know, we want to work non-destructively that way. If our client comes back and says, I don't like that edit, please adjust. You can either adjust the duplicate layer that you applied the edit to or you can delete it and start over. Or if you applied a layer mask as part of the edit, you can edit that particular layer mask. So let's start off by duplicating the layer. And let's click on this icon right here to duplicate it. Let's go ahead and rename this layer by double-clicking right here. I'm just going to call it exposure edit. All right, now let's grab our exposure tool by going up to colors and selecting exposure. So from here we have a couple of options. We have the black level which adjust the black point or the shadows. Because when you apply this exposure edit, it tends to flatten the image a little bit if you have to go too far because the image is to over or two under exposed. So we're going to click right here and drag to the left to make it darker, to the right, to make it brighter, we don't want it brighter, so I'm just going to slide it over here to the left. I don't wanna go too far because I don't want to muddy up the image or make it to flat. So maybe right about there. And then we can grab our black level and move it to the right or to the left as needed. So to the right, it's going to increase the blacks or the shadows or make them darker. So in a way it's going to level out your exposure adjustment, so it's not as flat. Now I find that to be a bit too flat still. So I'm gonna go ahead and increase the exposure just a little bit. Now, this isn't one of my favorite tools for adjusting exposure. Even though it does say exposure, it's probably not the best tool. So let's go ahead and cancel out of this. And what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna go up two colors and select levels. So from here, we can see the histogram of our image. And we can see there's not a lot of detail in here, but that's because the algorithm being used to read or show histogram is being affected by the overexposure of the image. We have a lot of highlights in the image. So it's tending to skew the data for the Histogram. So what we need to do is choose a different algorithm. So if you ever come across this, all you have to do is come over here and click on this icon. And the histogram is now showing the detail throughout the image. So what we wanna do is adjust the midpoint, which is right here in the center. We have our Blacks and shadows on the sign and our whites and our highlights over here. So our white points and our black points again, these are terms that you should know. As a digital artist, and you want to check those terms out that are included in the guide that came with this class. So go ahead and check that out. Let's go ahead and adjust the midpoint by sliding it to the right, to the left will make the image more overexposed. And to the right, we will begin correcting the image for the correct exposure. So the outcome with this particular tool is much better than exposure. So if you've ever gone to exposure and you've tried to adjust the exposure of an image and you didn't like the results. This is a much better option. So let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after. Now we can always go a little bit darker if we want. And then we can adjust the opacity to fine tune our edit in case we want to tone it down later on. So I'm gonna go right around 0.5 for my midpoint, which I can see right here. I'm gonna go ahead and click OK. Now I do know this is a little too intense, so I may want to go ahead and drop the opacity down just a little bit. And then this way I have the option of coming back and increasing the opacity again, if my client doesn't like the image and still thinks it's still overexposed. So this just gives us a little bit more flexibility. Come back at a later date and adjusted as needed. Now, before you close out the file, what you need to do is you need to save it as an x c, f file so that the layers are intact. And then we can have that option of adjusting them later on. So to do that, all we have to do is go up to file and select Save As it will automatically apply the FCF file format to the name. And then he can just give it a new name like edit one, edit two, et cetera. In case you have multiple edits for that same particular image that you want to show your client. Alright, so that's how you adjust the exposure non-destructively for your images. Now it's your turn. What I want you to do is I want you to find an image on your own. Another image, not this one, that is either overexposed or underexposed. And then apply the Levels adjustment so that you can correct the exposure for that image. Now the reason why we're choosing a different image and not this one is because if we have thousands of students in this class and everybody is using the exact same photo for their portfolio, then that's going to look a little odd. If a prospect, a client or whatever is looking at different portfolios and seeing the same image being corrected in the same way, we want to create a unique portfolio with our own images. So if you're a photographer and you have some photography skills, you may want to expose some images over or under and then fix them and Gimp. And then that way nobody has the same photo as you. Now, I do have a list of places where you can go and you can download free stock images that you can use for your portfolio. So again, that's in the GIMP essentials guides will check that out to find where you can download some free images for your portfolio, her head, so that's it for editing your image for exposure. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to make your images pop. So add more contrast to make them much more dynamic and not as flat as they may currently be. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 3. Project 02: How To Add Contrast: Hello and welcome back. Alright, in this lesson we're gonna learn how to make our images pop because maybe they're too flat and we wanna make them a little bit more vibrant by adding a little bit of contrast and fixing the image overall. So let's go ahead and dive right in by opening up our pop one image located in our lecture 14 folder, which is in section four. Overall, this image isn't that bad, but it is a little plant and it will become more apparent once we edit this image. So we're gonna use the same tool we used to adjust our exposure in the last lesson, which is levels. So let's go up to colors and select levels. So we're still on the algorithm that we used in the previous lesson, and I prefer the linear histograms, so I'm gonna go ahead and select that. So here we have peaks and valleys, and this basically represents the histogram, like I mentioned in the previous lesson. So what we want typically and most situations for most images is detail going from the far left of the histogram all the way to the right side of the histogram. So for this particular image, we can see there's no information or no detail right here. We have a gap. We also have a gap over here. And this tends to cause the image to be flat. When you fill in this area with information, it will add contrast to the image, make it pop. And you will have an image with a wider dynamic range. Again, these are terms we need to know as digital artists. And as I mentioned before, you're going to go into the GIMP essentials Guide to locate the digital terms you need to know. So for now, what we wanna do is we want to stretch this histogram from here all the way to the left and from here all the way to the right. So what we can do is we can adjust the black point, which is represented by this little icon right here, which is kinda hard to see, but it's a little triangle. We have a white point over here. So waypoint would be a part of the image that is pure white. Black points are an area that should be pure black. If we also take a look at our histogram, we can see it's divided up into different sections. So we have a line right here, so we have a little column. We have another area here or in another column, and here, here and here. So each one of these represents a different part of the dynamic range. And on the left side we have our bullet points, which is represented by this little icon here and this column to the right of that we have shadows, mid points or the mid tones, highlights and the white points. So this is the information that makes up our images. And when they're flat, you have something that looks like this. Now, they're not all going to have a gap on the left and the right and might be one or the other. So to adjust it or to stretch the histogram so that we can fill in detail in the gaps. All we have to do is click on icon and drag it to the right until it aligns with that edge of the histogram. We will also do the same for the white points. Now, this works out pretty well for this image, although it is a little bit darker than I liked. So we don't always have to adjust directly to the edge of the histogram. There's no set rule or hard rule that says that's what you have to do. You do what you think looks best. So I'm gonna go ahead and drop this down to around 25. So just like that, we take a flat image with a low amount of contrast. And by adjusting the black and white points, we increase the contrast and add more detail in the rest of the image, which creates a more contrasty image or makes that image pop. Because now we have a full dynamic range of that particular scene. We can also adjust the midpoint if we wanted to, to increase or decrease the exposure based on what we learned in the previous lesson. I'm gonna go ahead and leave that as is. I think the exposure is fine, just where it's at. And then I'm going to click OK. Now we do have our edit done and we wanna go ahead and save it. But there is something that we didn't do. So what do you think we didn't do and should have done for this particular edit? That's right. We should have duplicated the layer before we applied our edit. So now if I save this and come back, I've ruined the image because of applied the edit to the original layer. So always remember duplicate your layers and apply your edits to those layers so you work non-destructively. I did this on purpose Just as a learning experience and we can reinforce the idea of working non-destructively. So your assignment, your project, your homework is to find another image of your own that is flat that you can apply what you learn to make the image pop. Once you've done that and you're ready to put that in your portfolio, you'll be ready to move onto the next lesson, which is going to be learning how to make your image pop with more precision and control versus the levels tool. So we're gonna be looking at a new tool and Gimp to give us more precision and control over edits. It's going to be pretty awesome. So when you're ready for that, I'll see you then. 4. Project 03: Add Contrast Method 2: Hello and welcome back. Ra, We're going to take another image and make it pop. But this time we're going to use a different tool. And it's called curves. So let's go ahead and get started by opening up our image for this tutorial. It's in lecture 15. Go ahead and double-click on pop two. So this image, like the one previously, is a little flat and we're going to boost the contrast in order to make the image pop. So we're going to first duplicate the layer so we can work non-destructively. Now we can do it from the icons down here, but we can also do it from the layer itself by right-clicking and selecting the layer attribute, duplicate layer. Let's go ahead and rename it, pop, edit. And we're gonna go under colors again and select curves so we can make our adjustment. If you want to, you can actually make these panels larger or smaller by clicking a corner and dragging in and out. Now, just like our levels tool, we do have a histogram. It's showing the data for this image are shadows and black points are on the left, highlights and waypoints on the right and mid-points where the mid tones are right here in the middle. Now, this particular tool does give us more precision and controlled because we do have a linear line right here that goes from the bottom left to the top right. That will allow you to adjust the different parts of the dynamic range of your image. Black points, shadows, mid tones, highlights, and the white points. So unlike the levels tool, we're not adjusting a slider or icons at the bottom. Instead we're manipulating this particular line right here. So all we have to do is click anywhere on the line and you're left with an anchor point. So this will allow you to manipulate different parts of that dynamic range, whether it's the shadows are the highlights or whatever else you want to work on. So if we click and drag this linear line up is going to increase the exposure, lower, it's going to decrease the exposure. Okay? So we can also apply different anchor points, like I mentioned, in the different parts of the image or the dynamic range that we want to control. And then when we adjust the midpoint, in this case, it's just adjusting the contrast in the mid tones of the image. And because we have an anchor point here and here, it's not really affecting the shadows and the highlights. So this gives us more precision and control versus the levels tool. I'm gonna go ahead and click right here to reset my linear lines. We can create more contrast in the highlights and the shadows to make the image pop. So what we're going to do is we're going to click right here and the highlights and drag up. Now overall, the image is brighter and it's more so in the highlights, then the shadows, we do have some brightness coming into the shadows because the linear line is higher than it was before. So what we wanna do now is we want to click in the shadow area here and drag this part of the linear line down so we can make the shadows and the black points darker. So just like that, we make our image pop. How cool is that? All right, so I loved the curves tool and I preferred over the levels tool because it does give us that precision and control to adjust exactly where we want to apply that contrast for our creative vision. Not only that, but we can also control individual color channels by coming up here and clicking on one of the color channels from here so I can adjust the linear line and a way to remove color casts so you can use it to color correct your images as well. So we're not going to do that right now. We're just going to adjust the master channel, which is all three channels at once versus individually. The other thing I want to mention real quick is this type of edit is a very popular edit and it's known as an S curve at it. And that's because if you take a look at the linear line, it kinda looks like an ass. It's kinda flat, but it does represent the letter S, and that's why it's called an S curve. So if you hear me referring to an S curve in the future, you will know why. So again, you can adjust these to your liking, but if you go too far, then you may end up clipping data in the highlights and the shadows because you went too far or over edited. So again, you're going to adjust this based on your own personal preference and your own creative vision. So once again, we're going to find our own image applied, this type of edit. And then we'll have another type of edit that we can put in our portfolio. All right, so once you're done with that, in the next lesson, we're going to work on changing the colors in our images. It's pretty awesome, so I can't wait to share that with you and I'll see you again real soon. 5. Project 04: How To Change Colors: Alright, so we're gonna go ahead and learn how to change colors in our images and this lesson. So let's go ahead and get started by opening up an image from our lecture, 16, Fuller. And we're going to start off with Adjust Colors, a one. The tool we're going to use is under colors again, and it is the hue saturation tool. So the saturation will allow you to increase or decrease the color saturation and your image. And if you go down to minus 100, you will remove all the colors and end up with a black and white image. Although this is one way of converting to black and white, it's not my recommended way of doing it and we're going to learn how to do that properly in an upcoming lesson. So for now I'm just gonna put this back to 0 because what we want to do is change our colors and that's what the hue adjustments allow you to do. The changes, the color I'll we had to do is adjust our hue slider by clicking and dragging to the left or to the right. How cool is that? Alright, so right now I am adjusting all the colors in the image. But if I want to target a specific color, I can actually do that. Let's come down here and click on reset. So we have red, yellow, green, cyan blue, and magenta. So we can select any one of these in target, that specific color channel. Let's start off with red and change the colors of red. So pretty much the entire image has red in it. If we adjust yellow, not very much is changing. I see a little bit right here in the watch and a little bit in the necklace. So for this particular image, it's not really allowing us to target a specific color because there's really not that many colors in it. So in this case, we could just use hue slider with the master option selected to target the entire image. But let's say we want to target a specific color. Let's see how that works. Let's go ahead and cancel out of this. And let's go ahead and open up our second image. This time, let's say we want to target the orange in this image. We're gonna go to colors, hue and saturation again. And let's select yellow. We're going to adjust the hue and nothing is happening. And that's because even though we want to target yellow, there's really no yellow in it. The orange is more red. So in this case we can adjust the red. And you may notice that in her skin tones, it's changing colors as well, because there's red in her skin as well, or orange and our skin. And that's basically coming from the reflections of the room or the building that she's standing next to. If we try and target the color on her lips right here, the blue, we can do that, I believe with science. So let's go ahead and try that. So there we are definitely targeting just the cyan colors. And that color is present in other parts of her makeup as well. These lines here we can see a little green here that ellipse are really green and some other areas as well. So those are your options for adjusting your colors with this particular tool. So go ahead, try it out on these images and then grab one of your own images to do a color change. And then you can place that in your portfolio. And then in the next lesson we're going to learn how to color correct our images. 6. Project 05: How To Fix Color Casts: All right, so are you ready for another awesome tutorial? Fantastic. I'm glad you're ready. Because in this tutorial we are going to learn about a new adjustment tool to help us remove color casts and images. Especially when you take photos of people under certain types of lighting. That color cast from that light can make the skin tones look unnatural. So I'm gonna show you how to use this adjustment tool to remove color casts and images to make those skin tones look much more natural. Alright, let's go ahead and open up our images by going to File Open and navigating to our lecture 17 folder, we have three images we're going to cover in this tutorial. Go ahead and hold down your shift key and click on the last file to select all three, and then click open and gemfile open all three at the same time. And we're gonna talk about this image first. So go ahead and click on that tab. So when it comes to color cas, it's going to be one of those types of edits that is probably going to take a little bit more time to perfect. And it's going to take time and experience to be able to see the color casts in images. So for example, this one is probably the hardest of the three images to see the color cast, but overall, the image is more red than I think it should be, at least for the skin tones because his skin tones are pretty red. And we can also see that reddish color tone or that color cast in the concrete brick behind them as well. So hopefully you're seeing that if not, you may want to turn down the lights in the area where you're at and close your windows and that will make it easier to see the color casts in images. The next image is much more blue versus the last one. In the highlights and the shadows, we have a more bluish tone versus red or even yellow. But I do have a question for you or you may have a question for me. And that is, should we be color correcting the color cast in this image or other images and general, well, that really depends on the creative vision that you have for a particular image and the mood that you want to create with that particular image. So for example, in this image, maybe the photographer intended for the overall color of the image to be bluish, to create a certain mood for this particular image. In that case, there's no reason to correct for that color cast. If that's the mood the person OR that photographer wanted for that particular image. So we don't always necessarily want to remove the color cast if it's creating a specific mood for that image. Now this next image has a strong yellow color cast to it. And that's because of the tungsten lighting that was used to capture this portrait. But the problem with that is it makes her skin tones look unnatural and unhealthy. But then again, maybe that's what the photographer wanted because maybe she does have an illness. Maybe she's a cancer patient or a cancer survivor. And that's the mood the photographer wanted to create for this particular image. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to fix this particular image. So you know how to remove the color cast in this one and then you can take that knowledge for your own images and four-year client images. Now the first thing that we need to do, of course, is to duplicate our layer here. So I'm going to right-click here and select Duplicate Layer. And I'm going to rename it color, cast edit. We're gonna go up two colors and select Color balance. So from here we can adjust the colors either in the shadows, mid tones, highlights, or all three. Just below that we have cyan, magenta and yellow on the left, red, green, and blue on the right. So since we want to remove the yellow, we want to add blue. So we're going to click and drag this over to the right. And when you do that, that removes a good portion of that yellow color cast. We still have a lot of yellow in her skin tones. And in this area here we have highlights and then some shadows over here. So I'm going to target the highlights first. So let's go ahead and click here again and add some blue and the highlights. I need to do a little bit more. So I'm just gonna keep going over. And let's try it again in the shadows. Maybe a little more. Now let's take a look at before, which is very yellow. And our edit, which is much more natural and neutral, at least in that yellow color cast. All right, so that's how you correct for a color cast in images. Now you can take this knowledge and apply it to these other two images to practice. Then you want to find your own image again for your portfolio. And then in the next lesson, we're going to work on converting our images from color to black and white. And I'm gonna share with you my little secret formula for creating awesome black and white photos. So when you're ready for that, I'll see you then. 7. Project 06: Color Image to B&W: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson, I want to share with you my preferred method for converting color images to black and white. Let's go to our lecture 18 folder and open up our black and white conversion file. So as you know, we can go up to colors, select hue and saturation, and drop the saturation down to minus 100 to get a black and white image, which is fine because it does give us what we want, a black and white image. But we can control the individual color channels, like we did when we did our color changes and a previous lesson to come up with a more dynamic black and white image or even a more creative final edit. I'm gonna go ahead and reset the color here. And then we can just grab each one of our different color channels and adjust the saturation for each one of those. So let's go ahead and do that. And then we can grab our lightness lighter here to make those individual color channels lighter or darker. So right now I have yellow selected and I can move it to the left to make the colors and that color channel darker. There's really nothing in the image for that particular color channel. So I'm gonna go ahead and move on to cyan and make that channel darker. So now we can see the image is changing based on where I'm applying the brightness or the darkness, I want it darker. So I'm gonna go ahead and go down to around minus 15. I'm going to select magenta, and I'm also going to make that one just a little bit darker. Let's also try blue. Let's make that one a little bit brighter. So overall that's making the image flatter. I don't want that, so I'm gonna go ahead and make it a little bit darker. Now let's take a look at the before and after. So this gives you a little bit more precision and control to make certain parts of the image brighter or darker depending on your creative vision. I'm gonna go ahead and reset a couple of these colors here. Actually, I want this one down to 0. When I'll move this back to 0. And I'm going to increase the saturation of this one just to leave that color channel. So this is known as spot coloring. So this was once a very popular type of effect. It's not as popular today as it was maybe 15-20 years ago. But some clients still like this type of effect. And you can get this effect with just adjusting the master channel and adjusting the saturation. You have to go into the individual channels to get this type of effect. So it's up to you what you want to do, a full black and white or a spot color for your portfolio. But again, what you wanna do is find your own image, adjust it to your own personal creative vision, and then put the images side-by-side for your portfolio. 8. Project 07: Creative Color Tint: So far, we've made adjustments and corrections to our images in this tutorial and the next, we're going to get a little bit more creative. So in this first one, I'm going to show you how to add a creative color tint to your images. So if you're ready to get started on that, let's do it. So let's go ahead and start off by opening up our image for this lesson called colored tent in our lecture 19 folder. So there's a couple of different ways we can add a color tint to our images. Let's do the quickest way, which is going up two, colours and colour temperature. And you can adjust the color temperature of the image, which refers to how warm or how cool the image is. So we can make it warmer by adjusting the intended temperature slider to the right. And that's going to make the overall image warmer or adding a yellow color tint. We go the opposite way. It's going to make it cooler. So depending on the mood you want for that particular image, you can adjust that via this option. We can also apply a color tent with a solid colored layer above it and then adjusting the opacity for it. Let's first duplicate this layer and call it tint edit. Let's come down here, click on this icon to create a new layer. I'm just gonna call it tint layer. And then I want to select fill with foreground color. And then we're going to come over here to our foreground color. Click on this box here, and then we can choose any color that we want to apply to the image. So I'm just gonna do, I don't know, let's try a hot pink color. You can choose whatever you want. Click OK, then come back over here and click OK again. And then we get that solid color layer above it. So anyhow, we just need to adjust the opacity to see the layer below it. So that's adding that color overlay or that color tint to the image below. Again, we're going to adjust this to our own personal liking. And you may find that this particular type of edit will make the image a little flatter. So what we can do is we can go back to colors and select curves to apply an S curve to that image layer to add some contrast to it. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that as well. And then let's go ahead and group these two layers together so we can quickly see the before and after. So let's select our tent layer. Right-click, select New Lear group, and that puts a layer group, layer above everything else. Let's double-click and call this tent edit. And then we just need to add these two layers to this group layer by coming down here, clicking on a layer and dragging and dropping over that group area. And then you'll know it's inside because that thumbnail for that layer will shift to the right and comparison to the others. So I'm going to grab this one click and drag. I actually have a little white line right here. So once you see that white line, you can release and then it will be added to that grouped layer. So let's collapse it. And then we can take a look at the before and after to see if maybe we need to edit that tweak or adjusted according to our own creative vision, right? So those are a couple different ways to apply a color tint to your images and guess what time it is. That's right. It's time to find your own image. Apply your creative vision to it with a particular color tint of your choice. And then add the before and after together for your portfolio, our aid. So once you're done with that, in the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at how to create a cinematic effect in GIMP. It's gonna be awesome. So I'll see you real soon.