Learn How To Use GIMP To Edit Your Photos Like a Pro

1. GIMP Made Easy Introduction: Hello and welcome to my Gimp for beginners class. My name is Chris Barker and I am your instructor. This Gimp class was designed specifically for beginners to learn how to use game for editing your images. I've included photos you can use to follow along with as you learn how to use all the photo editing tools and Gump. This class includes all the tools you'll need to use for editing your photos like levels, curves, white balance, hue and saturation, shadow and highlights, exposure adjustments and more. Plus, your going to learn how to use some of the advanced tools for retouching or photos like the fuzzy select tool, the Lasso Tool, masks, dodging and burning. He'll verse clone and more. But before you begin learning these tools, we're gonna start off with the basics like how to install Gimp, how to set up the interface, how to set up your preferences, saving and exporting your images. And again, much more. You're also going to discover what layers and layer mask are, how blending modes can add some creativity to your images and a whole lot more. You will also find 25 projects included that you can complete an upload for feedback. So check out the projects and resources section below this video to find out how to upload your images. So if you're ready to learn all about Gimp, let's do it. 4. Install GIMP on Linux: Alright, so there's a few different ways we can install gimp on Linux. I want to show you the quickest and easiest way to get the most recent version of gamma. And then I'll show you how to update it for future versions of gimp. So let's go to our Linux application folder here, and let's find the GIMP application. So from here we can install via this button, but not yet. And that's because this version of gimp is a much older version, which is 2.8. We want the most recent, which is to ten at the time of this tutorial, which is May of 2019. So yes, you could install it from here and then update it with your software update or application, but that's gonna take twice as long. So what we're gonna do is we're going to right-click and open up our terminal. And then you need to navigate to your Gimp essentials guide where we talk about the Linux installation because there's some information there that you need to add inside of your terminal in order to bypass installing 2.8 and installing 2 directly. So what we need to do is we need to install a personal package archive or a PPA. So just copy that information, paste it in, and then hit enter, go ahead and type in your password, and then it will begin installing it. But first is gonna give you this little message, just hit enter again, and then it will install that PPA. Right now that it's done, we can go back and click on Install, and it will install Gimp 2.1. Oh, let's click on Launch to see which version we have installed. Let's go up to help select about. And here's my version of Gimp as of May 2018. And again, yours may be different if you're installing at a later date and there's a newer version available. Okay, so what happens when you want to update gamble when there's a new version available. So in that situation, what you wanna do is go to your applications and locate your software update application. Run that, and then it will check for updates. If it finds any, it will list all the different software and applications that have a new version. And then you can update them from here. 5. Project 1: How To Make Your Images "POP": So here's the image. We're going to learn how to make our images pop. So you can find this image in the folder of images you downloaded from the previous section. So go up to File, select Open, navigate to those image folders, go inside of section three and select, make it pop, click on open. And then we'll go ahead and get started. Now real quick, before I show you how to make this image pop, I wanna make sure that we're all looking at the same interface because your interface may look a little different if you're brand new to Gimp. And you may have individual Windows versus one singular window like I have right now. So to fix that, go up to Windows and select Single Window mode, and that will put all the different windows into one interface like this. Now the other thing is I'm using what is known as a dark theme. And I've increased the size of my tool icons over here on the left. Now, we're going to learn about all of that in an upcoming lesson. For now, we're just going to concentrate on improving our images so we can quickly learn how to edit our images in GIMP. So this image looks like it's okay. The colors are pretty vibrant. Overall. We can see a lot of detail, but the image is kinda flat. Now if we take a look at the Edit I've already done, just to show you a real quick the before and after. We can see that this edit has more contrast. And that's because the original image doesn't have detail in the shadows, in the highlights. Now it's hard to see directly looking at this image, but we have a tool in GIMP that will let us see where the detail is missing. And then when we fix it, we add contrast to the image and that helps make the image pop. So let's take a look at that tool. We're gonna go up two colors, scroll down and click on levels. Now, from here, we have our levels tool, which will allow us to adjust the color levels and the contrast in our image. Now there's a lot of information going on inside of this tool and we're not going to cover all of it right now we'll go into more detail about some of these other options later on in the class. I just don't want to overwhelm you with too much information right now. I just want to give you the basics so you can start editing your images and Gimp. So right now what I want you to do is I want you to focus on this area right here. This is known as a histogram. And if you've done photography before, you probably are familiar with histograms. So if we take a look at this histogram, we can see there's a lot of detail in this image. Over here on the right, we have our highlights. Over on the left we have our shadows. Now, if you're opening up your own images and Gimp and you're not really seen these peaks and valleys and it's real flat. You can switch the mode that levels is in to better see the details or the peaks and the valleys in the histogram. And that's simply by clicking on this icon right here. And it will expand the histogram to make it taller and more visible. So you're mostly going to have to do this when you have images that are brightly back lit or possibly in other scenarios as well. So if you're not seeing the histogram, just click on this icon for now, we're just going to stay in this mode. So the thing I want you to notice about this particular histogram is the detail in it and what's lacking. If you take a look over here on the shadow side, we see a little bit of detail right here, but there's a huge gap right here with no information in the histogram. So that's telling us that the shadows are missing details in this area. So what we wanna do is we want to stretch the histogram to the left. Because ideally in most situations, you want your histogram to have detail from the far left to the far right. And that increases the dynamic range of that image and gives you more detail from shadows to midpoints, the highlights. Now I'm throwing a lot of digital terms out there right now. And if you're not familiar with them, we will go over them throughout the class. But I've also put together a list of these digital terms you should know and you can find that in the GIMP essentials guide. So if you want to learn more about those before you progress with the rest of the class, I recommend checking out those terms. Alright, so back to our histogram. What we wanna do like I mentioned, is stretched this to the left to fill in the gap. And that's going to add detail in that area. And it's going to add contrast, which is going to make our images pop. So there's a couple of different ways we can do it. So if we take a look right here, we have a little box that we can type in a number. Or we can use these arrow keys here to move the content to the left. Now the histogram itself isn't moving yet. When you adjust this and click OK and come back in, you will then see that the histogram is stretched out from the left to the right. Now the easiest way to fill in this gap is the click on this little icon right here. And it's kinda hard to see when it's set at 0. But if you just click on it and drag it to the right or to the left, you can fix your image and fill in that gap with detail. So as I move it to the right, you will see that the image is getting darker and is getting more contrast, which is making our image pop. And of course, if you go too far, you will begin clipping data in the shadows and losing detail and the image is going to look unnatural so you don't wanna go too far. What you wanna do, ideally in most situations is to place this little icon right up along the edge of the histogram where that detail is currently in the image. So right around 30 is a good place to put it. But for me personally, I find this to be too dark and too much contrast. So I'm going to drop this down to around 25 just to tone it down a little bit. And then the next question you may have is, well, which one is right? And how do I know where to set it exactly? Well, it all depends on your personal preference. You may prefer an image with more contrast versus what I like. So it's just a give and take on deciphering what you prefer versus what somebody else may prefer and adjusting your edits according to your personal style. Now the other thing that's going to effect what you see, of course, is your monitor yourself. If you take a look at your images on your laptop monitor and compare it to your smart phone and your tablet and your monitor at work, you're going to notice that all the images look different. So you probably noticed that already. And that's just based on the quality of that particular monitor. How it's able to display the colors and the shadows and highlights. It's not going to be the same for all devices. So that's a story for another day. So let's go ahead and get back to editing our image. Now, the other thing you may wanna do is you may want to take a look at your highlights. And we can see that there's a teeny tiny gap right here. So you may want to move this icon to the left to fill in that gap. And when you do, it's increasing the contrast a little bit more and making the image pop that much more. We can also take a look at a before and after, before we commit to this particular edit to see if we want to further tweak the edit. So if we just click on our preview icon here, we can see the before and after. Alright, so that's how you edit your images to make them pop. Now what I want you to do now is I want you to make sure that you still have this image open for the next tutorial. And here's why I want to show you how to read touch your images by removing blemishes and stray hairs. So if we take a look at this image up close, we have a pimple here, a couple stray hairs here and here that I want to remove. And I want to show you how easy it is to reattach your images in the next tutorial. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 6. Project 2: How To Remove Blemishes: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're gonna go ahead and read touch our image now. So the first thing we're gonna do is grab our zoom tool, which is located right here on our toolbar. Go ahead and click right there. And there's a couple of different ways that you can use the zoom tool to zoom in and out. All you have to do is click once and it will begin zooming in. Every time you click. Now if you want to zoom out, you can go to your tool options right here and click on zoom out, and then it will zoom out. Now we do have a keyboard shortcut. I don't want to overwhelm you with too much information again, but I just want to share this with you real quick. If you hold down your control key, if you're on Linux or a Windows machine, or the Command key if you're on a Mac, that will allow you to zoom out even though you have the zoom in option selected. So hold down command or control, and you will then zoom out. Once you release, you will then be able to zoom back in. Now, my favorite way of zooming in is to click and drag around the area that I want to zoom into. And once I release my mouse button, it will automatically zoom in our hey, let's go ahead and read, touch our image. So the tool we want to use for retouching is called a healing tool, which is located right here on our toolbar. So go ahead and click on that. And then what we're going to do is we're going to paint in the area that we want to reattach with a brush. So in our tool options, we have the options for adjusting our brush. So again, we're going to cover our brushes and more detail later in the course. Right now we're just going to use the default options to learn how to retouched and Gimp. Now the problem is once we click on an area that we want to reattach and want to remove this pimple right here. It's not really doing anything when I click in that area, if you take a look down here, we get a little message that says, set a source image first. So what we need to do is we need to tell Gimp where we want to retouched from. Because what GIMP is going to do is it's going to say, OK, you want me to or retouched this pimple from this part of the image. And it's going to take the detail, the contrast, the colors, the textures of that area that you define for Gimp and use it, cover up your blemish or your stray hair or whatever it is you want to read, touch. So it's like a band-aid. It's going to take that information from one part of the image and apply a Band-Aid over the area that you want to read touch. And it's going to take all the information and blend it together to make it look as natural as possible. Alright, so let's try it out. Now in order to tell Gimp where we want to retouched from, we have to hold down our control key or our command key. If we're on a Mac and we want to choose an area that is similar to. The area that we're retouching. So in this case, our pimple. So let's plays are mouse cursor rate over this area. Hold down your control or command key, and click one time. Once you release your Control or Command key, you will then be left with this little circle right here. This is where GIMP is going to take this information to remove this information. Now to do that, all we have to do is come over to our pimple without holding down any other keys. We just click once with our left mouse button. And boom, it's gone. How cool is that? I love it. Now, we don't always have to just click once to remove it. Sometimes we may want to paint in a continuous stroke to remove a larger blemish. For example, are stray hairs up here at the top. Let's take a look at how we can do that. But first, what I would recommend doing is I would recommend adjusting the brush size according to the size of the area that needs to be retouched. Now for our pimple down here, the size brush was fine, which is a size of 50 by default, I think mine says 51. So either way, that size was fined for that pimple, but for our straight hair, we wanna make our brush size smaller. So let's come over to our Tool Options. And we're going to click on the outer edge right here where it says sides, there's little bar and you're going to get these double arrows when you hover in this area. So just do that, click and drag to the left. Now we can also double-click right here and type in a number which I'm going to do. I'm just gonna type in 15. I'm going to delete the last two zeros there and then click your tab key. And then the brush size is resized accordingly. Now, just like before, we need to redefine where GIMP is going to reattach from. So hold down your control or your command key and just click anywhere in this area, onetime K, So this is the source area. And now instead of clicking once, I'm going to click and drag along the hair to remove that stray hairs. So go ahead and do that as well. We're going to start down here at the bottom, click and drag up. And you're also gonna notice that area that we defined as the area to clone or to heal from or to fix from is moving as we brush upwards. And as we get into this other hair, it's going to add that extra hair in there. So let's go ahead and undo that by going up to Edit and selecting undo. So this time instead of starting from the bottom, we want to start right above the area that we defined for GIMP. That way we're not adding any extra hairs back into the image. So I'm going to click, drag down and then drag bag up to remove that hair. I can also click and continue removing these hairs as well. The only problem is the texture down here is slightly different from here. So if you want to remove these stray hairs, you're going to have to hold down your command or control key to redefine where you're going to read touch from. And then you can fix any other part of the image that you want. Let's go ahead and click over here and remove this stray here. I'm going to also redefined by clicking here. They also have a little blemish that I'm going to remove and then I can continue editing the rest of the image as needed. So go ahead, play around with the heel tool and practice defining the areas to tell Gimp where to read touch from. Once you're done with that, again, keep this image open because in the next tutorial, I want to show you how to resize your image properly for on line use. Now when you're editing your images, you may be tempted to just save the file posted on Facebook, but we wanna make sure that it's the correct size so that we're not uploading images that are too large. And there's a little trick to ensure that our images are still of a high-quality. Because sometimes when you upload to Facebook, your image may not look as good as it does in GIMP. And that's because Facebook is compressing the file when you upload it and lowering the quality of the image. So we're going to learn how to save our images for Facebook in the next lesson. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 7. Project 3: How To Re-size & Save Your Image: Hello and welcome back our eye. We are now going to learn how to properly resize our images for online use. Now you could take the image as it is right now and upload it for your Facebook page or your website or wherever you want to place it on line. But the image is too large, it's gonna take longer to upload versus properly sizing it. And anybody that wants to view it, it's going to take them longer to download that image to view it. Now one image may not be a big deal, but if it is too large, then it will hinder the experience or the people that want to view it. And if you have, let's say 50 images at the wrong size there, too large, then it's going to take that much longer to upload them because they are too large. So let's learn how to resize our images for Facebook. So let's take a look at the sizes recommended for Facebook posting. So if we take a look at this guide here from the Social Media Examiner, you can do a Google search for this, and then you'll find the different sizes for posting your images on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and some other places as well. So if we scroll down, we can see there are some different sizes for Facebook images. And these are the recommended sizes. So your Facebook profile should be 180 by 180 pixels and the dimensions for the cover image should be 820 by 312. Now these were the sizes recommended in 2018, but I think Facebook just changed their layout. So you'll need to do a search for the most recent sizes. So do a search for 2019 instead of 2018. Now if we scroll down, we can see the size is recommended for Facebook posts, which is 940 by 788 pixels, which is a horizontal image. Now, you don't have to be restricted to that height. You can go much taller, but the recommended width is right here, 940 pixels wide. So we're going to resize our image here and Gimp to be 940 pixels wide. But there's something else that we need to change for the size of this image as well. So let's do that by going up to image and selecting scale image. So from here we can see the width and the height in pixels. We can also change this to inches, which is seven by ten inches tall, and then the resolution is 300. Now if you're not familiar with resolution, we are going to cover that in more detail later on in the class. But for now, just real quick, 300 for the resolution is too much for online use. When you want to print out an image, let's say a five by 78 by ten or whatever the case may be. You want to set the resolution to 300. For print use. Now for online use, we want a maximum of 72 for the resolution. So we can go ahead and click in here, select everything, and then type in 72. And if your icon looks like this right here, this links the two together. And then when you hit your tab key, it automatically changes the y resolution, which is the height to 72 as well. If it looks like this, then you have to manually type it in. The other thing you're going to notice is when you resize it to 72 for the resolution, the width and the height changes from seven by ten to 30 by 45, but the pixels stayed the same. Now, that's a little confusing and we'll explain that later on in the class. So the other thing we wanna do is we want to take that maximum width that Facebook recommends, which is 940, and type it in to the width to change the size of our image. And then when we click our tab key, it's going to automatically calculate the height to keep that image in proportion. And again, you need to make sure that this icon is turned on or linked. So those are the new dimensions right here, 940 by 14-19 for this image, once we click scale, Gimp will do its magic, resize it, and then it will become smaller because you did make the overall image smaller. Now all we have to do is export this file either in one of two different file formats in order to save the new size. So we can upload it to Facebook. So to do that, we're going to go up to File, scroll down and select Export as. Let's give it a new name. I'm just going to put two on the end of it. And then the file is a JPEG file, and that's what the original file format is. Again, we'll go over file formats later on in the class. But you can use JPEG for Facebook. The thing though, is when you upload to Facebook, what they're doing to your image is they're going to take that image and compress it to make that image file size smaller. So in the process you lose quality. So you may have noticed that already that when you upload your images to Facebook, they don't look as good as they do in whatever program you were using at the time. Let's say Gimp. And you may wonder why that is. Well, it's because there are compressing the file. So the one thing that we can do to try and alleviate some of that compression and create a better quality image after compression is to change the file format to P and G. So just erase JPEG and then type in PNG, and then it will be saved at this new file format. You can also come down here to select file type and choose from one of these different options down here, there's a ton of them, but PNG is listed right here, and here's the extension we just typed in PNG. So now when you export this file in this format, you can use this file to upload to Facebook and hopefully the quality of the image matches what you see in GIMP. So we do have some other options here. Once we click on our Export button, I would just recommend keeping everything at default for now until we learn more about these other options, we can go ahead and click Export. Gimp will then export that file for you to upload to Facebook. How cool is that? Our, hey, you now know how to make your images pop, how to remove blemishes and stray hairs, and how to resize and save for Facebook. All right, so that's the end of our quick start guide for working with images in GIMP. In the next section, we're going to start learning more about Gimp in more detail. So if you're ready to get started on learning all about Gimp, let's do it. 8. GIMP Crash Course: How To Customize the Interface: All right, so in this lesson we're going to learn where everything is and we're going to customize our interface for our own personal preference. Alright, let's start off by opening up an image, by going to file and selecting open. We're going to navigate to the images we downloaded from the first section. We're gonna go into Section Four and open up our interface file right here. So we're not really doing anything with this particular file. It's just there for visual reference so we can see it in relation to the rest of the interface. Now you may notice that I have three individual windows right now I have a left and right panel. And then my middle interface right here with my document open. Now I did show you in a previous lesson how to combine all three. So let's go ahead and do that now if you haven't done that, are ready to do that. We're gonna go up to Windows and select Single Window mode. Now my image moved over here to the top left, so I can come down here to these scroll bars on the bottom and the right to recenter. Now for me personally, I do prefer to have all the different panels combined because it just makes it easier to navigate around the interface and find what I need. And sometimes you will find if you're not in this mode, some of the panels will become hidden from other stuff you may be working on. Alright, so we're gonna go ahead and rearrange some of these panels. And I also want to show you how to increase the size of these two icons. But let's go ahead and adjust some of these panels first. So you can make the left and the right panels wider or narrower by coming over to the side of the panels until you get these double arrows. So once you see that icon, click and then drag it to the right or to the left. Now if you go too far, your image canvas becomes smaller and you may not want to make it that wide, so it's entirely up to you. And the size of your monitor is also going to determine how wide you want to make those. We can do that for the right side as well. The other thing we may want to consider is moving our tabs from one side to the other or creating a free-floating tab. But first, let's go ahead and resize our icons for our tools right here. So this is known as the toolbar. And we can increase the size of these icons. If you're like me and your eyes are not as good, you may want to make these larger, so let's go ahead and do that right now. So to do that, we're going to go into Gimp preferences by going up to edit if you're on a Linux or Windows machine and selecting a preferences from here. Now if you're on a Mac, which I am, it's a little bit different. So we're gonna go to Mac real quick. We're gonna go up to camp and select Preferences from here. Now, I do want to mention that even though this tutorial and some of the other ones in this class. Are recorded in Linux and Windows. It doesn't really matter because everything in GIMP is exactly the same. The location and the tools, the type of tools, the menu options, everything is exactly the same regardless of your operating system, the only difference really is the location of the menu. So for Mac, it's up here. For Windows users, it's similar to Linux, is just the fonts that I have for my menu item right now for Windows is different versus Linux. I'm gonna go ahead and close windows and mac so we can get back to Linux. So you can see that the fonts for Linux or slightly different versus Windows and Mac of course. But again, everything is the same. It doesn't really matter. Alright? I just wanted to point that out in case you were wondering. Alright, so to change the size of our icons were gonna go into Icon Theme right here. So click on that. And by default we have this option. Guess icon size from resolution. So it's going to make your icons larger or smaller based on the resolution of your monitor. But we want to customize it for our own personal preference by clicking on this and then selecting custom icon size, right? So from here we can go medium, large, and huge. So I like to use huge. And what you're going to notice is, the larger the icons, the more it pushes these panels down. And now we have a Scroll button here for the Tool Options. And that's why I like to have my tool panels over here on the right so that I can make this particular panel not as wide, but still be able to access my tool options. So let's go ahead and take a look at those tabs and see how we can move them around. Go ahead and click OK to confirm that's the size you want. Real quick. The other thing I want to show you is when you select one of these tools here in the toolbar. The Tool Options from this panel here will update based on the options available for that tool. So right now I have the rectangle select tool, and these are the options for that particular tool. But if I select, let's say my free select tool, the options change. Alright, so let's go ahead and move this over to the right. So to do that, we're just going to click on this tab and drag it out. Now, I can release my mouse button right now and it becomes a free-floating panel. Now I can position this anywhere I want. And that's entirely up to you. If you prefer to have that kind of setup. For me personally, I prefer to have it attached to the right side versus free-floating. So let's go ahead and click and grab this tab again and drag it to the right side, right along the edge here. And you're going to notice there's a dark gray line. It's kinda hard to see. But once you see that line, show up, release your mouse button, and then it becomes another part of the right panel. So we have two main panels here. Okay, so that's another option. The option i prefers to have them attached or within. These other tabs here or down here, I'm gonna go ahead and move it down here. So click on the tab and drag down again, place it right next to one of these other icons. And then that panel itself will turn a light gray or the outline will be a light gray release, and then it's placed inside. Okay, so here's my tool options. Now, I do not want my Tool Options on the end. I wanted over here on the left side. So I'm going to click and drag this over here to the left side, release and then everything else moves over one spot. Now for me personally, I like to have my tool options down here and my Layers panel up here. So I'm gonna click and drag my Layers panel up here and place it right here. So it's the first one. Now the other thing you'll notice is up here at the top, we have individual tabs with icons. Down here we have tabs with the name of the panel. I'd like to see the name of the panel. So let me show you how to add that. We have a configure this tab icon option right here. So come over here, click on this. And then if you come down to tab style, you can see the different options, icon, text, icon and text. I'm going to select this one here, k, so that adds the name of that particular panel. Now I'm not going to do it for these other ones right now. You can do that on your own. But I do want to show you something else because maybe you do not use a specific panel and you want to remove it from the interface entirely. So we can click and drag this tab out and then click on this little icon. Or we can come back to this option here and select Close tab. Now inside of here, we do have other options as well. We can detach the tab from here versus doing it the way we did previously. We can also lock that tab so that we can't move it or remove it. You can also move your individual panels to another monitor. So if you have a to monitor setup, you may want to put your panels on the second monitor, which gives you more real estate for the document that you're working on. The other thing I want to point out real quick is the preview size of the thumbnails in our layers. So right here we have our thumbnail of this document, and it's very teeny tiny. Now just like we did with our icons and the Toolbar, we can make this preview much larger. So we're gonna go back here. We're going to select Preview size and then select the size that you want. Now real quick, just a couple more things before we move on. And that is the individual panels themselves. Now just like our toolbar, when we select a tool, the tool options change in the Tool Options panel. But if we take a look at our Layers panel here, down here at the bottom, we have some options to help us with organizing our content and creating things. Like new layers are duplicating them for this particular panel. But if we switch to our brushes panel, the options down here change. So each of the individual panels will have different options down here, similar to our tools, having different Tool Options. And then finally, underneath our middle canvas here, or our middle interface, we have some information down here. So we have an option to zoom in or zoom out based on this option here. We can also adjust our rulers. Your rulers may not be visible. I'll show you how to do that in a later lesson. But you can change the type of rulers from inches to pixels to points, pikas, centimetres, whatever you prefer from here. And we also have some other information as well right here. It's giving us the name of the file and the file size. And then when you're working with individual tools, this information down here is going to change based on the tool you're using. And right now I have this information, but when I move my mouse cursor up and over the interface here, we can see that information changes. And it's giving me some information about what I can do with that tool. And over here on the left, I have the positioning of my cursor in relation to the document. So all of this is going to help us better utilize the tools and Gimp and it's going to make more sense as we get deeper into the course because we're going to be looking at this information to help us with whatever it is we need to do. Alright, so that's it for configuring and setting up our interface. Next, we're going to learn how to create a new document and re-size that document and the canvas and much more in the next lesson. So if you're ready, let's do it. 10. GIMP Crash Course: How To Create New Docs: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so in this lesson and in the next few lessons, we're just gonna go over some basics of working with files and Gump. So when you start on a new project, the first thing you need to do, of course, is create a new document. Unless of course, you're opening up an image. So you would create a new document if you wanted to do maybe a graphic design type of projects. So let's take a look at how we can do that. So we can go up to file and select New from here. Or we can use the keyboard shortcut, which is Command or Control, and the letter n. So inside of our create a New Image window dialogue box. We have pre-made templates we can select for the size of our documents. So if you have a specific size that you need, you can select it from here, or you can type in the width and the height from here. You can also set the dimensions of that particular document in pixels, inches or centimeters, or whatever you want from here. And then under that we have some advanced options. Now we briefly talked about resolution in a previous lesson. So from here you're going to type in the resolution based on the project. And as you know, if it's going to be something that's going to be printed, you want a resolution of 300. Sometimes it may be 240 for the resolution depending on the output device. So if you're sending this to an in-home printer, you'll want to check out the documentation for that printer. But in most cases it's 300. And if the project is going to be posted online than you are going to type in a resolution of 72. So right below that we have some color management options. So this is a little bit more advanced and we're not gonna go into a lot of great detail about this information. So the two main options we really have for the color spaces, RGB color and black and white. So in most cases, we're just going to do RGB color. So I'm just gonna leave everything else set to the default for now. And then below that we have color profile, which again is part of the your color management system and its more advanced topics. We'll cover that later on. So by default, we have the built in RGB from glimpse, and we're just going to leave the default option for now. And then for fill with, that's going to be the color of your first layer or the Background layer. So you have some options here to choose a specific color. So let's go ahead and set this to white. Now as far as this tutorial, let's create a document that is 1920 pixels wide by 1080 for the height. And let's make sure we have this set to pixels. So go ahead and type that in. And let's also do a resolution of 72. And I'm gonna do white for the fill. Go ahead and click OK. And now we have our first New Document. All right, so let's say we're working on our project and at this point, you decide, you know, what? I made the wrong size for this particular document or this file. And I need to make it larger or smaller. So what we can do is we can go up to image and select scale image, and then you can resize it from here. Now, we did do this in a previous lesson. So let's type in a new width and a new height of 900 for the width and 600 for the height. We're gonna keep everything else the same. And then we're going to click on scale and the file size is now resized or the canvas of that document is resized to that new size. Now, here's a quick tip. You should keep in mind when you're working on projects. If you start off with a specific size and then you decide you need to make it larger. What you've already started on the project by adding images or graphics or text or whatever the case may be. And you decide to scale it up, that information that you created is going to become pixelated. So you always want to start off with the largest size possible for that project or the exact dimensions you don't want to rescale larger later on. Otherwise, you may have to redo a lot of the work you've done. Now another option is let's say you're working on a specific project in a document and you decide, you know what? This should have been one hundred, ten hundred pixels wide, not 900, because that's the size of my blog. Well, what you can do is you can resize the canvas without affecting the individual layers and causing them to be pixelated. So we can increase the overall canvas by going up to image and selecting Canvas size. Let's type in 100 for the width. Now the problem is we have an extra amount of nothing on this side of the document, so our background color stays the same size it was before. So now we need to fill in that area with the color of that particular layer. Or we're going to undo that by going up to Edit and selecting undo. Let's go back to image canvas size 11000 for the width again. And then down here under layers where it says resized layers. Let's select all layers. Go ahead and click re-size. And now it's automatically filled in. So you wanna make sure that you have the proper settings applied based on what you need to do for your particular project. You may need to resize all the layers to fit that new canvas. And it's going to fill in that extra space with whatever you choose down here. In this case, transparency is selected by default, but you can also choose a different color from here. Or pattern will talk about patterns later on. Alright, so here's another cool thing we can do. Let's go ahead and add another document to this particular document or hate. So we're going to go up to File, Select open. Let's navigate to our section four folder and locate my parkour photographic logo. Go ahead and open that up. And now we have two different documents open. We have our logo. And if we click on this white triangle right here, this tab, that takes us to our other document. Alright, so let's go back to our logo. And what I wanna do is I want to add this file to the new document. So we're gonna grab the layer, navigate to your Layers panel. If you don't see it, go up to Windows, packable and select layers. Alright? So this is a layer. We're going to click on it and drag it to the other tab K. Now place your mouse over the center of your document and release. All right, so that adds a new layer from that previous document with that content of that layer, how cool is that? All right. Let me show you a couple more things we can do with our documents and the canvas associated with it. So let's say we're working on this project and we add a new layer like we just did. And we want to resize the canvas to fit that new layer we just added. And we can do that by going up to image and scrolling down and selecting, crop, the content. Alright, so now our Canvas has been cropped to the size of the contents of that layer. Let's go up to image and select the canvas size to see our new document size. So as you can see, it's much smaller than it was before. All right, now let's say you realize that the size or the resolution of the document is incorrect. Maybe you did 300 and you need 72 or vice versa. So to change it, we can go up to image and select prints i's, and then you can type in your new resolution here. And when you do, the width and the height is going to change as well based on that resolution. And then click OK to reset or update the resolution. All right, so one last quick tip. If we go back to image and scroll down to transform, we can actually flip the document horizontally or vertically, or based on 90 degrees or a 180 degrees. So if you ever need to flip a specific layer, you can do that from here. Alright, so that's it for creating documents and working with the canvas to resize it as needed. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the different file types that we can use in GIMP. And as a bonus, I'm going to also include some different ways to open up your files in GIMP. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 11. GIMP Crash Course: How To Open File + the Different File Formats: Alright, so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the different file formats that we can use in GIMP, or at least the four most common types that we will use in GIMP. So if you navigate to your section four folder, you're gonna find a bunch of files in here. And we have four main file formats. So this one right here is known as a JPEG file based on the file extension right here, which is J P G rate above that you can see that the thumbnail for that file is exactly the same because it is the same image. I just saved it in a different file format, which is the GIMP native file format known as an x C file. Now here's another interesting thing to take note of. If we take a look at this JPEG file here, here's the size of that file. Now I didn't do anything different to it when I saved it in the GIMP format. But look at the file size. It's almost 20 times larger than a JPEG file. Alright, so another file format that we're going to use and gamma is known as a PNG file. And then we have a PSD file. So a PSD file is a file format that is native to photoshop. So if you're a graphic designer, you may come across this file type if you're working with an agency or if you have a team of designers that you work with, maybe they're using Photoshop. This is the file format that they're going to use in order to save all the different layers that are created for the graphic design piece. As a photographer, you're probably not going to use a PST file unless you've used Photoshop before and you have some of those files in that file format. You can actually still bring those into gamma. There are some limitations because there are certain types of layers in Photoshop that are not available in GIMP. So let's go ahead and open up our Parker photographic logo dot PNG file so I can show you what the PNG file format is all about. So let's go back into Gimp, go to File, select open, and then open up that file. So a PNG file is going to have a transparent background, which is represented by these checkers in the back of the logo. A JPEG file is going to take any layers that are created for that artwork. And it's going to merge them all into one layer. So if you have a solid color background for that file, then it's going to become the background color versus a transparent color. So a transparent file like this one, a PNG file, is useful in two ways. One, we talked about it previously when we exported the file as a PNG file to upload online to keep the quality of that image intact when we upload to Facebook or other social media sites. The other benefit of a PNG file. Is when you do want a transparent background because you're posting it online and you want the colors of that website, the background colors to show through. So here we have my website and my logo is set against a dark blue background. If I had a solid color or a JPEG file instead of a PNG file, then I would have a dark or a bright colored background going around the logo. I would rather have the logo setup so that the background is transparent so that blue color does show through. So as a graphic designer, you're going to be using PNG files more than, let's say, a photographer. Unless of course you want to upload them to social media. And you want to use that file format to keep the quality in TAC as much as possible. Now, right now, the transparent background, it's kinda hard to see the contents of the logo because it's pretty dark. And those checkers, they're fairly large and we could actually change the styling of that transparent background. So let's go ahead and do that real quick and set that up now so we don't have to do it later on. So we need to go into preferences to do that. And if you're on a Linux or a Windows machine, you can go up to Edit, hand select Preferences from here. If you're on a Mac, you're going to go up to Gimp and select Preferences from there. Alright, let's go down to display. We're going to come over here to the check style. Just gonna move this over so you can see it. And I'm going to change it to light. And I'm also going to change the size of those squares to small. So that just makes it easier to see that content. But it doesn't really affect the output of that file once it's saved or exported to a PNG file. Alright, let's go ahead and close this out because I want to show you a couple of different ways that you can open up your images before we've gone to file and selected open from here, which is fine because you can open up images this way, but you don't have to open up one file at a time. You're going to actually select the top file here and then hold down your shift key and click on the last one. And then you can open up all those files at one time. So GIMP is going to open these up into individual tabs and then we can close them as needed cam and go back up here again. And of course to keyboard shortcut right here for opening images or opening documents in general is Command or Control plus the letter o. So that's just going to open up this dialog window. Now let's say you want to open up the individual files versus opening all of them. This time what we're going to do is hold down our command or control key and then click on the files that we want to open. So now I have these three files that are going to open. The other two are not. Alright, let me share with you one more way to open up your files. This is my favorite way to do it because I do like to go into my folder of images that I'm working on and open them up from here. So here's how we do that. So if you have a certain image selected or you can also select multiple files, all we have to do is click and drag that over to our interface. Once we release that file will automatically be opened in GIMP. How cool is that? I love it. Alright, I just want to show you a couple more things before we move on. I'm gonna go back up here to file and open. And there's a couple of other things we can do in our open image dialog window. If we take a look down here, we can click on this option here to see all the different types of file formats that we can use in GIMP. So if you want to narrow down the type of files within a folder that you're looking at based on the file extension. You can come in here and select the appropriate extension. So right now I have an option selected with no files in that file format. But if I scroll down here to Gimp x c, f, then only that one file in that folder is shown. And this just makes it easier if you have tons and tons of different images in one folder. And you just want to find a specific file in a specific file format. And then to show all the files, all we have to do is come up here and click on show all files. All right, so that's it for file formats and opening up our images. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at how we can navigate around our document when we're zoomed in. And I'm gonna give you some additional tips as well. 12. GIMP Crash Course: How To Navigate Around Your Image: All right, so in this tutorial, I want to show you how to pan and zoom around your document because you may want to zoom into a specific image to retouched something specifically. And then maybe you need to navigate around the rest of the image to the left, right, top, bottom, whatever the case may be, to continue retouching that image. And we have some tools in Gambia that help us navigate around our file quickly and easily. So let's open up an image so we can practice. As we go through this particular tutorial, we're going to go up to File, select open, and let's open up our Gimp file too, JPEG file. So once you open up a file, regardless of fits, a graphic file or an image, that image fits inside of your interface and you can see the entire file. Now, we've talked about this previously, but you can use your zoom tool to click and zoom in every time you click. And you also know that if you hold down your command or control key, you can then zoom out. And that's based on the options we have in our tool options right here. And we can see the keyboard shortcut is right here, control. So we'll Command or Control on mana linux right now, controllers for Windows, command is four. Macintosh or Apple. I haven't said Macintosh in awhile, so I'm not sure I said that, but anyways, now, real quick, here is another quick tip I want to share with you. And that is, this class includes a gimp essentials guide. If you haven't checked that out yet, you may want to check it out and print out the pages that go along with a particular lesson because there's an area there where you can place notes about this particular tutorial or that tutorial that you're on. And you may want to write down these keyboard shortcuts because if you can use keyboard shortcuts that are going to save you a lot of time versus coming over here and selecting them from the Tool Options or even up here in the menu. If you take a look at your menu, there's keyboard shortcuts for a lot of different tools. And you may want to take notes on those as you watch in the class because there's a lot of information we're covering in this course and it's going to be hard to remember everything. So I encourage you to take that guide printed out and also lists some additional information in there as well. So you can use it as a reference when you're not online and you're working in GIMP and you don't want to log in to watch a specific tutorial again. So if you have that guide handy with your own notes and the notes I provide, then you should be able to continue on your project without rewatching the tutorial at that time, you can always go back at a later time. Alright, so let's get back to zooming and panning. So let's say we're zoomed in and we want to zoom all the way back out just like the file was when we first opened it. So what we can do is we can go up to view. Scroll down to zoom and select Fit, image and window. And here's the keyboard shortcut, Shift, plus Control or Command. If you're on a Mac plus the letter J. Or you can just come up to the menu and select it, and then it zooms out to fit inside of your interface. Now if we go back to view zoom, there's an option right below it called fill window. That's going to fill the document from the top to the bottom, left and right. So it's just going to fill it in all the way. Now let's say we need to navigate to another part of the image, left or right, top or bottom. We do have some scroll bars down here that will allow us to do that. But there's other ways we can do this as well. So I'm going to zoom in just a little bit more. So go ahead and zoom in. Hold down your space key. And you'll notice that your icon changes from the Zoom tool to a little hand. Now you can move your mouse cursor around to navigate to the section you need to. So once you release, you get your tool back and then you can press your space bar key again to continue navigating to another part of the image. That is a very handy keyboard shortcut that I use all the time. So make sure you write that down in your notes. Alright. There's also some other options in view. Zoom here. So you can navigate to one of these different options here to zoom in based on a specific ratio, four to 18 to 1161. So that's 1600%. Or you can come down here to the bottom of the interface and make a selection from here. So there's a lot of different ways to zoom in and out and navigate around your image. You just have to decide which one you prefer for your own personal workflow. So let me give you one more quick tip for zooming around your image. I'm gonna go ahead and click and zoom around this little island right here. Then I'm gonna go up to Windows, deductible guides, and select navigation. So this is going to add that panel over here, or possibly down here, but most likely appear at the top. So we have a little preview of the image and most of it is greyed out. The area that's not is the area that we are currently zoomed in. We do have a slider here that we can use to zoom in and out with. We can also use our plus and minus keys here. We have Zoom one-to-one, and then we have some other options here as well. Now the other thing you can do, let's say we are zoomed in a lot. I'm gonna go ahead and do this round. That's too much. So 372% doesn't really matter. But if you come up here to your preview, you're going to notice that the hand icon changes once you hover over that area. So once it does change to that specific icon right here, you can click and then move it to another part of the image. So those are a few different ways of zooming in and out and panning around your image. 13. GIMP Crash Course: How To Save + Export In Full Detail: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so we are now going to learn how to save our files for use, whether it's online or print. And we need to make sure that we're saving it to the proper file format based on what we're doing for that particular project. So I'm just gonna use the same image we used from the previous lesson just to show you the different ways we can save our files. So let's say you've edited your image and you're ready to save it. Well, if you go up to file and select Save, It's going to automatically apply the GIMP native file format, which is, you know, of course is x C, f. Now, if you want to place this particular file online, you can't within FCF IO, you have to use a JPEG file. And if you try and type in that file extension and click Save, you're gonna get a little error here that says the given file name cannot be used for saving. So if you're running into that situation, what you have to do instead is go up to file and select Export As automatically, it's going to apply the file extension that you had originally for that particular file. So in this case, a JPEG file. We can come down here and select on the Select File Type, my extension, and then we can navigate to the type of extension that we need. We have jpeg image here. If you need PNG, you can select it from here. Or of course you can just come up here and select that extension and type in the extension that you need. Now, real quick, here's another tip you should be aware of. Let's say we're editing this image and maybe we put some text on there, or we do something else, and we have more than one layer. I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this layer by clicking on this icon. So let's just assume that this particular layer is different from the one below. Actually, let's go ahead and do something real quick. Let's go up to colors, select hue and saturation. And what I wanna do is I want to reduce the saturation. So we're gonna come down here to this bar that says saturation. We're going to click and drag it to the left to lower the saturation. I just want to keep a little bit in there so we can see the before and after here. Okay, so let's go ahead and click OK. Alright, so let's say this is our edited image and we want to save it in a way that it retains both layers. So the original layer and our new edited layer. Because if you export this to a JPEG file, it's going to merge both of these layers together. And then if you don't keep the original file, you're left with this edit. And then at a later date, if you decide you know what, I don't like to add edit. Well, it's too late because you merged the layers together. So what you wanna do is you want to keep these layers are intact. And in the next section we're gonna go into more detail about layer so you better understand layers. But just for demonstration purposes, for now, we want to keep both of these layers and tack. So this time instead of going up to file and selecting export as we can actually go to Save. And we do want this file extension in this case, because Gimp, in this file format, we'll take your layers and save both of them in this file format. So let's go ahead and try it out. I'm just gonna go ahead and rename this Gimp layers. Go ahead and click Save. We're going to close this file by clicking on this icon right here. Let's go back up to File Open and then navigate to the folder that you saved it to, and select that particular file and open it up. And as you can see, we have both of those layers and tack. So that's how you want to save for a specific file format. And case, you want to save the layers or merged layers because you're going to put that particular file online. You want a JPEG or a PNG file. And if you're sharing it with somebody else that has Photoshop, then you will need to export it as a PSD file because photoshop cannot use x c, f files. So instead we're going to come down here and look for Photoshop image. And then it's going to add that extension and then you can share this with somebody else that has Photoshop and not Yep. Alright, so that's how you save and export your files. And now in the next section, we're going to learn more about layers. We've covered them briefly or talked about them briefly. But we're going to go into a lot of great detail about layers in the next section. And you wanna make sure you watch all those tutorials so you have a better understanding of what layers are and how to use them and Gimp, because layers are going to be vital for your creative vision. So if you're ready to learn all about layers on, let's do it. 14. GIMP Crash Course: Layers 101: Hello and welcome back our aid. So in this section we're gonna go over what layers are, how to use them and much more. Now in this first lesson, I want to share with you the basics of layers and what they are and how they work. So before we get into Gimp and actually working with our layers, I want to demonstrate layers in the real-world. And then we'll dive into gamma to look at layers a little bit more closely. But first, let's define what a layer is because you may be wondering what is a layer? Well, let me give you the official definition of a layer. So a layer, as a noun, is a sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several covering a surface or body. Alright, so in the real world, I have a photographic image here. I have some images behind me as well. And you can consider these sheets of paper in the canvas scaler reps that I have as a layer. So I have layer one might image here and let's say I want to add something to the image. I could draw on this image. And let's say I want to add a lizard for whatever reason. And then I decide, you know what? After drawing it, I don't like that lizard. I want a dog instead. Well, I can't go back and undo it because there is no delete key for or Backspace key for this piece of paper or this layer. So what I can do instead is I can draw out a lizard, another piece of paper. So this is a layer as well. So layer one, layer two. And then I can stack the two based on my creative vision. Now, in the real world, again, we can print on different types of paper or Canvas. So in this case I have an image here of a couple that I shot and I printed them on a canvas gallery wrap. So this is another type of layer. We can have all kinds of different layers in the real world, as well as the digital world which you're going to learn about in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the different types of layers that we can use in GIMP. Now, in addition to that, let's say you have a piece of glass. So the glass, you can see through it depending on if there's any film or anything on it. So there's some opacity to that layer. So you can technically adjust the layer in the real-world as well as the digital world. So we're also gonna take a look at how you can customize your layers in the digital world. So let's say in the real world, we have a piece of glass and we have three of them stacked together. And each one of them has some paint on them of different colors and different intensities of those colors. So when you put those three pieces of glass together or the three layers, you can then see through different parts of the layers and you can create your artwork that way. Alright, so those are a couple of different ways we can use layers in the real-world. Now one more quick demonstration about layers, and then we'll dive into Gimp. Now, when I started off as a graphic designer back in the late 19 eighties, yes, I'm that old. We didn't have GIMP or even Photoshop because photoshop didn't come out until 1990. So what I had to do was I had to draw out my design concepts on paper. If I made a mistake, I would have to start all over before I submitted it to my clients. So in this case, I misspelled the product in a header, redo this from scratch. As I began to do it more and more, I get a little bit smarter. And I realized that I could put different elements on different layers. So here I have some shading for my text in this area. And then I realized I could put my title on a different piece of paper and my other content on another piece of paper as well. And then I could stack all of those as individual layers. And then if I made a mistake on one or maybe the client changes their mind on the title. I can simply removed that layer and add in a new layer. Alright, so those are some ways to think about layers and the real world. But we can also apply these concepts in GIMP. Anything that you wanna do, you want to do on separate layers if possible. So content elements designs, other images. If you're doing a photo collage, you want to put all of those on individual layers. So now let's take a look at how we can use these layers in GIMP by diving right into camp. Now, I do have an image that's included in the section five folder called layers. So go ahead, find that image, opened it up, and then we'll go ahead and get started in gamma. Alright, and now that you have your layers file open, let's go ahead and take a look at how we can use layers in GIMP. So we have our image and the image is on its own layer that we can see right here. And we do have another layer above it. But it does have a transparent background. And we can't really see it and it's not because of the transparent background. It's because this layer is turned off. If you take a look right here to the left of the thumbnail of the layer. You can see this little I icon. If you click on that, you can turn the layer on or off. So right now this layer is turned off. So let's go ahead and click right here to turn it on. So if we turn it on and off, we can see that there is some paint on this layer. So think of this as a piece of glass where we applied paint to it. And part of that glass or that layer does not have paint on it. And therefore it's not applying any other graphic elements to the rest of the document because the paint is not applied everywhere and the paint itself, or in this case in the digital world, the pixels are not that intense. And that's because I lowered the opacity of the pixels. And I'm gonna show you how to do that in the next lesson. For now, let's just explore layers a little bit more. So we can rearrange and re stack the layers according to. What we need to do for our creative vision. So previously I showed you a lizard on a second layer that I stacked on top. So if we want to put the lizard, or in this case, this light, this beam of light coming down from the top behind the image. I can come down here and click on this arrow here to move it up or down. We can also come over here to our Layers panel, click on the layer and then drag it below the layer. So we can rearrange the layers as needed based on what we need to achieve for that particular project. Now I'm gonna go ahead and grab my paintbrush tool, which is this one right here. So go ahead and locate your paintbrush tool and select it. Now as far as the colors and the size of the brush and all that, it doesn't really matter because what I want to show you is what happens when we paint on a specific layer. Actually, I do need to make my brush size larger, which I can do from my Tool Options in I can resize from here. Go ahead and make that a little bit larger. And let's say I want to paint white on the image. Well, it's not really doing anything. And that's because I do not have the correct layer selected. So right now, my light layer is currently selected. So if I want to paint on the image itself, I need to come over to the Layers panel and click on that layer and then I can paint on that layer. Now, like I mentioned previously, if I were to draw on this image of a lizard, this doesn't look like a lizard, of course. And I made a mistake. Well, I can't do it. If I save it as is right now. Instead, what I wanna do is I wanna put this paint on a separate layer. So let's go up to Edit and select Undo paintbrush. So to create a new layer to paint on, we need to click on this icon right here. So from here we can give that layer a name. Let's call it paint layer. And then we have some attributes that we can apply to it. We'll talk about those in an upcoming lesson. For now, we're just going to keep everything set to the default. And we're going to click, okay. So now I have another transparent layer. But unlike the layer above it, it does not have any paint on it yet until I apply it with my brush. Okay. So I made a mistake. I want to undo it. I can go up to Edit and select Undo, or I can turn the layer off. Or I can adjust the opacity of the layer if I want to tone it down again, we'll go over that in an upcoming lesson. I just want to show you some different ways to work with layers. For now. We can come over here and duplicate the layer by clicking on this icon if we want to, i'm gonna go ahead and expand my Layers panel here so we can see those a little better. And now I have a duplicate of that layer. And if we want to, we can actually move the contents of this layer around with our moved tool. So let's come over here and grab our moved tool. Then we want to make sure in the two options we have, move the active layer selected. So we can click on this layer now and move it around the document as needed. Now, real quick, this yellow and black slashed outline around this particular layer is known as a layer boundary. And we're going to talk about the layer boundary in more detail in an upcoming lesson in the section. For now, let's go ahead and delete this layer by coming down here and clicking on this icon. And then we're gonna do the same for the other paint layer as well. So these two options right here are a little bit more advanced. We're gonna talk about those in a future lesson. I just don't want to overwhelm you with too much right now. I just want to give you the basics. So the last thing I want to show you before we move on is renaming our layers because it's important to rename our layers to keep everything organized. Because as you become more advanced, creating artwork and retouching in GIMP, you're gonna find yourself using multiple layers, dozens and dozens of layers. And it's nice to have them organized by a specific name explaining what that layer is. So it makes it easier to find and recognize a specific layer in case you need to go back to it and make adjustments. It's real simple to do. All we have to do is come over to aid layer and double-click on the name that it currently has. And then you can rename it someone who's going to call it sunlight. And let's go ahead and save this file by going up to file and selecting Save. Here's the keyboard shortcut for that Command or Control and the letter S. And we can use that because why do you think we can use Save? That's right because this is a x C f file, which is a gimp native file. And that's the file format that was attached to it originally when we opened it up. And we want to see all the layers in an XES file. Alright, so that's it for the basics of layers. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at the four different types of layers and the four different ways we can customize those layers. So if you're ready to learn more about layers, let's get started. 15. GIMP Crash Course: 4 Types of Layers + Customizations: Now that you're familiar with layers with the iron, how to use them, we're now going to learn the four different types of layers and the four different ways we can customize those layers for our creative vision. So let's start off by opening up this particular file. If you go into your section five folder, you will find this file right here called for earlier types. Go ahead and open that up. And we are going to start off with the four types of layers and then the four types of layer customizations. But first, I want to turn off this layer boundary that's going to show up around all of the layers that we select. And it's gonna get a little confusing what that turned on. So let's go ahead and turn that off by going up to view and select show layer boundary case so that hides the layer boundary. Now like I mentioned in the previous lesson, there are different types of layers in the real-world, like photo, paper, Canvas, glass, and just about everything else that you can draw or paint on. Again, we have four main types of layers, so let's check them out. So the first one is a group to lay her, which we're actually getting a little ahead of ourselves. But this layer, and this layer is a grouped layer. So we need to go inside of this grouped layer to see the rest of the content. So we can actually see the other types of layers. So to do that, we're going to click on this little plus icon, and then it lists all the other layers. Let's go ahead and remove this Layers panel from here so we can see it free floating. Then we won't have to scroll as much once it's released from the dock. So click and drag that out. And then you can resize by grabbing a corner and dragging it down. So I'm gonna bring it down to right about there, make it about that wide. Looks like I have a little bit more room, so I'm gonna go ahead and do that and just make it a little bit larger. All right, so we can see more of the layers. Now. Let's move this over just a little bit more. Okay, so we have layers inside of layers. We're gonna get to that a little bit more in just a second. But the first one I want to talk about is this one right here. So go ahead and turn on the background layer. So the Background layer is the layer that is created when you create a new document or when you open an image for the first time. So that first layer contains the image or a blank canvas. If it's a new document, that's your background layer. We don't want to necessarily work on the background layer directly. So what I'd like to do is I like to lock that layer so that I don't make adjustments or edits to it directly. Instead, I want to create. New layers above it so I can work on the content that I need to create or to reattach in those new layer. So in GIMP itself, we don't necessarily have a dedicated background layer like we do in Photoshop. And I only bring this up because I do have a lot of students that are coming from Photoshop and working in GIMP and they're familiar with the background layer? Yes. Yes. Ok. So in GIMP, its just that first layer that's created when you open or create a new document, that's the background layer. I'm gonna go ahead and grab this panel and make it smaller. Alright, so the next type of layer is a group layer. And I briefly explain that, are ready. And that's basically a layer that groups other layers together. So this is an individual layer right here by itself. But right below that, we have another grouped layer. And we know it's a group layer because it does have this plus icon. And when you expand it, it will show you the individual layers that are grouped within it. So the next type of layer we can use in GIMP is known as a pixel layers. Go ahead and turn that layer on. And a pixel layer is basically the pixels that layer or the paint of that layer that creates the image or the artwork that we're creating. So we can manipulate these individual pixels on that layer separate from other layers. So that's the third type of layers. The fourth type is a type layer. So let's expand that grouped layer. And right now we can't see the text that's part of this document and that's because why do you think that is? That's correct. That's because the text layer itself that contains the text is behind this image here, or this layer because it's below it. So the text layer in this document is this layer right here with the big letter a. So anytime you see a layer that looks like this, you know, it's the text layer. So let's click and grab this layer and bring it above the pixel layer to see the layer. Okay, so it says this is a type layer. So we can grab our text tool by coming over here and grabbing the letter a. And then we can click right here to begin adjusting an editing that type, changing the colors, the font size, et cetera. Now if we try and do that down here by clicking in this area because it does look like type. It doesn't allow us to edit that content. And that's because let's drill down into this layer here. We have the type and it doesn't have that icon of the letter a here. Even though it does look like type, it's actually what is it? That's right, it's a pixel layer. So I did type this out with the Text Tool and I converted it to a pixel layer. So we can edit this particular layer with the text tool because it's been converted. Alright, let's collapse this grouped layer by clicking on this icon. And then we're going to come up here and collapse that grouped layer and turn it off. Alright, so now let's take a look at the four different ways we can customize our layers. So in the real world, you can adjust your layers by drawing directly on them. Or if you're painting on glass, you can adjust the amount of paint in the opacity of that paint based on how much paint you put in a certain location. Now in the digital world, we can kind of do the same thing. But first, let's take a look at Layer Styles. So a Layer Style is something that you can apply to a specific layer that will create a special type of effect. So we could add a stroke or a drop shadow to a layer, and that's known as a layer effect. Now real quick, let me show you what a Layer Style effect looks like. Let's go inside our Layer Styles grouped layer, and turn on the drop shadow. And I'm gonna show you how to apply a layer effect in an upcoming lesson in this section. And that's because we have to adjust the layer boundaries of our layer in order to see the layer effects. So we're gonna do that in the layer boundaries lesson. So for now, let's go ahead and take a look at the next type of customization, which is known as a Layer Mask. A layer mask will allow you to precisely control where you apply your edits on the image or the document that you're working on. Alright, I want to show you how this works real quick because this is a pretty cool and awesome tool in GIMP for helping us precisely control our edits. So first let us go up to our Layer Styles, grouped layer, expand it. And we're going to turn off this pixel layer here because we have another one inside of here. So go ahead and expand this one. Select this layers, mask layer. We're going to duplicate it by clicking on this icon. Then double-click and call it black and white. Alright, we're going to do an edit on this layer. We're going to convert it to a black and white layer. So we're gonna go up two colors. We're going to select hue and saturation. Then we're going to grab this saturation slider, drag it all the way to the left. So it says minus 100, that converts it to black and white and click OK. Now we're going to add a Layer Mask to precisely controlled this specific edit. And then we're gonna come down here and click on this little icon here. Kinda looks like a little scary clown. Just go ahead and click on that. Leave everything set to the default, so make sure White is selected. We're gonna go into more detail about this later on, and then just click Add. Now take a look at the layer itself. So we have a thumbnail image of that pixel layer. And then we have a Layer Mask to the right of it, which is a white rectangle, which is the same size and shape as our pixel layer. So we're gonna paint on our Layer Mask to remove the black and white. Edit, adjustment in specific locations. So we're gonna grab our paintbrush tool. So go ahead and click on that icon. Make sure you have black set to the foreground. If not, just click here and select black and click OK, or just click on these little icons right here. Alright, now we're gonna come over here and just click and drag around the image and you will see the color coming back through. How cool is that? So layer masks allow you to precisely control your edits exactly based on your creative vision. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and turn that layer off and close that layer group. Our next form of customizing layers is blending modes. So blending modes allow you to take one layer and blended in with the layer below. So let's expand this grouped layer. And I'm going to scroll down here so we can see we have a image or a pixel layer here. Actually, we need to go back up here and turn off this pixel layer as well. So we have our black and white pixel layer, and we have a layer above it that is turned off. It's a solid orange color. When we turn it on, the layer below, it disappears, of course, because it's above that specific layer and it's a solid color. But when we apply a blending mode, it will blend in with that layer below. So let's take a look at how this works. Make sure you have your blending mode layer selected. Come up here where it says mode, click on it, scroll down and select soft light. Now watch what happens. Boom, it's blending in with the layer below, creating a sepia tone effect. So the blending modes, I like to refer to them as creative modes. There's tons and tons of options. When it comes to blending Modes and fulfilling our creative vision, we're going to go over blending modes in great detail. In the blending mode section. I just wanted to give you a little taste of that right now. Alright, let's go ahead and turn off this orange layer. And I want to bring the colour back. I like the color better than the black and white. Alright? So the last type of customization we can do is opacity. So opacity adjust the transparency of that layer. So the lower the opacity, the more transparent that layer becomes. If you take a look right here at these two icons, it's the exact same icon, except this icon is set to 100 opacity, and this one is set at ten for the opacity. Let's go inside of this grouped layer and click on the Blending Mode icon. And then come up here to the top where it says opacity and you'll see that it's set to ten. So you can click on this and drag it to the right or left to increase or decrease the opacity or the transparency of that layer. And that will allow you to customize that layer differently from the other three options that we've gone over thus far. And I like to use this a lot when I'm retouching because when I apply some retouching and our remove a blemish or something, it may look a little unnatural and I may take that layer that I read touched on and lower the opacity. Just a kinda make it look a little bit more natural and blended in a little bit more. As well as when I'm applying other types of facts or edits to a specific layer, like reducing the saturation of a layer, I can drop the opacity to tone it down a little bit more, or maybe I added more saturation, but I added too much. I can lower that opacity to tone it down a little bit. So those are some quick tips on customizing our layers and the four different types of layers that we can use in gamma. Alright, so now that we've gone over the four types and the customizations, in the next lesson, I want to share with you some more information about my favorite type of layer customization and that is layer masks. So I just want to share some more information about how we can use layer masks to precisely control our edit so you have a better feel for how to use them. So you can start using them in your artwork right now versus waiting later on in the course when we go into more detail and more projects where we're going to do more editing. So if you're ready to learn about layer masks and precisely controlling your edits. Let's go ahead and get started in the next lesson. 16. Project 4: Discover the Beauty of Layer Masks: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we are now going to edit another image in this lesson. And we're going to use our Layer Mask to precisely control that edit. Now we have used the layer masks previously in another lesson, but I do want to give you some additional information and how to use the Layer Mask to precisely control your edit. So this image is in your section five folder. It's called Landscape. So go ahead and find that image, open it up and we'll go ahead and get started. So what we're going to do is we're going to dark in just the sky and the water. So this Little Rock Island right here is not going to be affected. So when we're done, it's going to look like this. Alright, so let's go ahead and get started. I'm gonna go ahead and delete this grouped layer so we can start from scratch. And the first thing we need to do is we need to duplicate this layer. So we're gonna come down here and click on this icon. Now you may notice that this right panel is little different from previous lessons. And that's because I got rid of the tabs that we're up at the top and I condensed everything into one main panel so I can see more of my layers and so you can see more of my layers as well. So the reason why we are duplicating the layer is because we want to work non-destructively. Once we edit this image, we're going to save it as That's right. And x c, f file. So we can keep all the layers and tack. Now, if we come back tomorrow, next week, next month and we decide, you know what? That was a horrible edit. I made a mistake. Well, you now have the original layer available to start over from scratch. Or you can take the layers that you apply, the edits too, because there may be more than one. And then you can adjust them accordingly by reducing the opacity if maybe the edit was too intense or maybe something else by changing the way that the Layer Mask is set up and adjusting it to fix the edit based on where you applied that layer, math or hate. So now what we wanna do is we want to apply our edit to this layer. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to colors and we're going to select levels again, we've talked about levels previously in another lesson, but what we did was we adjusted the endpoints to make the image pop. So we are going to do that first. We're gonna make our image popped by fixing this little gap on the left side, we have data on the right side, so we don't have to fix that endpoints. I'm just going to drag this into around plus 12, plus 13, somewhere in that range. I don't wanna go too far because we're gonna darken it up now with our midpoint right here, this little triangle we're going to slide to the right. If you go to the left, you make your image brighter. To the right, we make it darker. So you can make it as dark as you want. I'm just going to go right there. Alright, let's go ahead and click OK to apply that edit to that layer. And as you can see, the edit has been applied globally to the entire image. So the islands, the water, and the sky are now darker. But as you know, we want this area of the image to be exactly the same as before. So let's do that by adding a layer mask. There's two ways we can do it. We can click on this funny little clown right here, or we can come over to our layer, right-click and select Add Layer Mask from here. Alright, so we have a lot of options in here. And the one we want most of the time is white. So white will remove the edit, black, we'll add the edit. So sometimes you may want to apply the edit and work backwards. Most of the time we will work with white first. Now we're gonna go over these in future lessons. So for now let's go ahead and click add. So we have our Layer Mask and it looks exactly the same because white ads, black removes. So what does that mean? Well, we have to grab our paint brush and paint with black and the areas where we want to remove the edit. So let's grab our paintbrush. Let's make sure we have black set to the foreground color. And then we can adjust our tool options based on what we need. In this case, we may need a larger brush size just to cover more area faster, so you can do that right here. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my zoom tool because I do want to zoom in first. Actually, let's come down here and click on this little drop-down menu here. And let's increase it to 50%. Alright, let's go ahead and center this. And then we can click and start painting in the area where we want to remove that edit. Now remember you can hold down your Space-bar key to get your little hand here to navigate to another part of the image. So that just makes it a little bit easier versus some of the other options that we have. K. So nothing new yet. You know exactly how to do this because we did cover this in a previous lesson. But what I want to show you next is how to add the edit back. So I'm just going to bring my breast size down a little bit more just so I can get this part of the island as well. Alright, so you probably already know what to do because I already gave away the secret. And that is white and black removes. So if you want to add back and edit, because maybe you went too far and you went outside of the area where you wanted to remove it. You can just switch to white for your foreground color just by clicking on these double arrows right here. Okay, so now we can paint with white and add that edit back. Alright, now, here's another quick tip. Before we move on. You don't necessarily have to paint with white or black. You can actually paint with gray. Or you can adjust the opacity of your brush to paint with grey Even though you have white or black selected. So let's add some of the Edit back into the rocks, but not at the same intensity of the rest of the edit. I'm gonna bring my brush size back up because I just want to bring back some darkness in the front or the area that is closest to me. Because this area should be darker than this area or here because the sun is over here. So what we're going to do is we're going to take our opacity for that tool option, which is our brush. And we're going to drop it down. I'm just going to click right here in the center. So now I'm at 47 for the opacity doesn't have to be perfect when to increase my breast size again. And then I can just click and paint in this area where I want to apply some of that edit back. So let's see. Our sun is over here on this side. So this side should probably be darker than this side. Okay, so now I've applied some of that edit back at a lower opacity. So it's not as intense as it was before. But if I go back over this area again, it's going to add that brush and that edit even more than at 47 opacity. So basically you're stacking the opacity to increase the intensity of that edit versus applying it all at once. When you have a passive, the set to 100. Let's go back to our layer panel now and take a close look at your Layer Mask thumbnail. And you can see we have white, black and different shades of gray. Alright, let's go ahead and zoom all the way out. We're gonna go to our navigation panel, and we're going to click on this first icon right here. Okay, so here's the before and the after. And that's how you precisely control your edits, exactly where you want them. Alright, so in the next lesson we're going to take a closer look at the layers panel itself and take a look at some of the attributes that we can use to help us organize our layers. And much more. 17. GIMP Crash Course: Discover the Layer Attributes: Hello and welcome back our aid. So we are now going to take a look at some layer attributes that can help us manage or organize our layers. Because as you work more and more with Gimp, you're gonna find yourself adding more and more layers. And it's going to become very chaotic in your Layers panel. When he have dozens of layers and you're not quite sure where that exact layer is. You need to edit because something is looking off. So we want to organize our layers and do some preventive maintenance as well. And we can do that based on the layer attributes we have within the layer panel. So we've already gone over some of those down here at the bottom of the layers panel. We have sum up here at the top. And when we right-click on a layer, we get a list of additional attributes, as well as some of the other ones located up here and down here. And when you create a new layer, some of these attributes are included in this layer panel here. So you can apply those attributes before you create a new layer. So let's go over some of these and we're going to take this document that we worked on in the previous lesson. Hopefully you still have that open and we're going to work on it just a little bit to learn about the different attributes that we have. So let's grab our Move tool, which is located right here. And I do have my landscape edit layer selected. So make sure you have this selected and make sure you have your image thumbnail selected by clicking on it versus the layer mask. And you know, it's selected because it will show a white outline around that thumbnail. We wanna make sure we have that selected before we try and move the layer. So now we can move the layer by clicking on it and just moving it as needed. Now, I'm not going to do that permanently. So let's go ahead and go up to Edit and select, Undo, move, Lear. All right, so let me show you a cool trick. Let's say you have multiple layers that you want to move at the same time. So what we wanna do is we want to come over to this little icon and right next to it we have a little box. It's kinda hard to see, but if you click in that area, it adds a little link icon. So now you can add another link to the next layer or all layers that you want to move. And now when you go to move that layer, it actually moves both of them together. Okay? So that just makes it easier to keep everything locked together so you don't have to try hand manually placed them directly behind each other. Alright, back to edit and undo move layer. Actually, I think I did that twice, so I'm gonna do it again. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and unlinked thes by clicking on those icons. Now we do have other options to lock our layers in place or to prevent from moving them or adding paint. So if we take a look at our lock options are first one is called Lock pixels. So go ahead, click and turn that one on. Grab your paint brush. And now paint on that layer. You can't because it's been locked from adding pixels to it. Which is pretty cool because sometimes you may have the wrong layer selected and you may start editing that layer by mistake. And then it's too late because maybe you save that file and didn't realize you painted on the wrong layer. So you can prevent these types of accidents by locking the pixels of that layer or layers. I'm gonna go ahead and unlock that. We also have a lock position and size. So let's go ahead and click on this icon. Let's go back to our Move tool and now try and move your layer. You can't because it's locked into position. This next one is called Lock Alpha channel. So this works when you have a layer that has transparency on it. So maybe you have a logo and you want to prevent yourself from accidentally adding more content to the areas of that layer that has transparency. You can lock that right here with Locke Alpha channel. Alright, let's go ahead and unlock that. Alright, now let's say you want to organize your layers. You have tons and tons of layers. And sometimes it's nice to organize them into grouped layers. So maybe you have five different layers of edits and you want to group all the edits together to keep it separate from other types of layers. While you can come down here and click on create a new layer group. And it's going to apply that group layer above the layer selected, but it's not inside of that group yet. So what we have to do is we have to click on the layer and layers one at a time and drag it up to this layer group release. And then it's added to that layer group. So we can actually add this one as well by clicking and dragging up until you see that little white line. And then those two layers are grouped together. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and undo that a couple times here so we can get rid of that. Now we can delete our layers by coming down here and clicking on this icon, or right-clicking and selecting Delete Layer. The other thing we can do is we can disable our Layer Mask because maybe we want to see the original until we can figure out what we need to do next, we can right-click and select Disable layer mask. It keeps that layer mask and tat and it adds a red outline to let you know that that layer mask has been turned off or disabled. Just right-click and click on it again to add it back. Or if you just want to start over, you can right-click and select Delete layer mask. The other thing I like to do when I have a lot of different layers is to add a color tab to the layers. So if we right-click, scroll up to color tag, you're gonna see a bunch of different color tags you can apply. So if I want to apply blue color tags to all my layers that have the Layer Mask. Then that designates or makes it easier to recognize among dozens and dozens What type of edit it is. So I can tag other layers, a different colored tag based on that type of edit. Alright, so those are some quick tips about layer attributes and how to manage your layers. There are others, but those are the most common. Now, another one that you may use often is adjusting your layer boundaries, especially if you're a graphic designer. And you want to apply layer effects to your layers. Or if you want to align your layers, you may need to adjust the layer boundary attribute accordingly. So we're going to cover that in the next lesson. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 18. GIMP Crash Course: Layer Boundaries Explained: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we are now going to take a look at how Lear boundaries of fact. Some of the things we wanted to do for our creative artwork, especially if you're a graphic designer. Because it's going to limit how you apply layer effects to layers and how you align layers together. So if you're a photographer and you don't plan on applying layer effects or aligning layers and you've just more interested in editing images. This particular lesson may not be for you, so you can go ahead and skip it. Alright, so for everybody else that wants to continue, let's go ahead and take a look at our layer boundary, which is applied automatically to every new layer that we create. So right now I have my pixel based layer. And real quick, this particular file is available in your section five folder. So go ahead, located, open it up so you can go ahead and try out what we're going to learn in this lesson. Alright, so my pixel based layer is selected, and I have this yellow dashed line around the image. So that is the layer boundaries. So the layer boundary is placed around the content or the pixels of that particular layer. So everything is confined within it. And if you want to add something outside of that particular layer boundary, let's say a drop shadow. And you want to place that drop shadow in a position where it's down here. It's not going to work because the layer boundary is confining the pixels of that layer to within it and you can't put anything on the outside. So if we take a look at our text layer, go ahead and select that. I'm also going to grab my zoom tool and zoom in. So we can see the layer boundary is being placed around that text layer. So if we want a drop shadow will only be visible within the confines of that layer boundary. And outside of it, it's not going to show it at all. It's going to restrict it to just the area inside. So let's try it out. Let's go up to filters. Select lightened shadow, select drop shadow. So right now we can see that drop shadow inside of there. I've already adjusted some of these, so yours may look a little different. Go ahead and increase the x and y to around 40. Let's also increase the opacity so we can see it a little better. And now we can see where it's being cut off, which is on the other side of this layer boundary. So if you've ever applied a layer effect like this and you couldn't figure out how to fix it. Well, let me show you how to do it. It's real easy. We're going to cancel this. We're gonna come over to our text layer. We're going to right-click and locate one of our layer attributes, which is layer to image size. Once you do that, the layer boundary disappears or does it? Well, let's go back to our navigation panel and zoom all the way back out to the original image. Let's go back to our Layers panel and check that out. Our layer boundary is now the same size as our pixel based layer. So if I select that layer, layer boundary doesn't change. So this means we can go back up to our filters linked shadow, drop shadow. And then we can apply that drop shadow to show up properly without being cut off. So I'm gonna go ahead and increase this to plus 40 again. Let's make it a little darker. Click OK. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in. It's not a great drop shadow. But just to show that we can now apply our layer effects to this layer because we increased the size of the layer boundary. So even when you apply other types of layer effects like strokes and some others as well, you're going to want to increase that size of that layer boundary. Now, you may want to actually do the opposite when you want to align two or more layers. And you want to crop that layer boundary to the content of that layer or the pixels of that layer. So you can properly align them. And we can do that by going up to layer and selecting, crop, the content. And then that layer boundary is resized to the content or the pixels of that layer. So it's actually a little bit larger than it was before, because technically there are some pixels down here from our drop shadow. Now you may have also noticed in our Layers panel here that our text layer, which is one of the four types of layers, changed from a text layer to a pixel based layer. So when you change or transform text with a Lira effect, drop shadow, that's going to convert it to a pixel based, but you can still edit that text by grabbing your text tool, clicking on that text. And then you're gonna get this message here that says confirm text editing. So you can either created on a new layer or you can edit the original content. Now after we've edited that text, two things happen. One, we lose our drop shadow into, it's converted back to a text layer. Alright, so that's how you adjust the layer boundary for layer effects and for aligning your layers. 19. GIMP Crash Course: Adjustment Layers In GIMP?: Hello and welcome to another exciting and fun-filled section of learning. Alright, so in this section, we're going to learn about adjustment layers and how to properly and professionally edit your images. In fact, you're going to take some images and you're going to edit them along with me to help reinforce your learning so you can begin applying what you learn to your images immediately. Now, in this lesson, we're gonna go over what adjustment layers are, whether or not we can use them in GIMP and much more buffers. I just want to clarify that this particular section may be a little bit too advanced for some beginners. If you've edited your images in Photoshop before, then you may already be familiar with adjustment layers, how to use them and why. But you don't know how to use them and Gimp yet. Or if you've never edited your images in Photoshop or GIMP, then you have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to adjustment layers, at least right now. And either way, you will, once you're done with this lesson and all the editing projects that follow. And I just want to point out as well that we're not gonna go into great detail about all the editing tools we're going to use in this section. No worries though, we're gonna go into more depth on each of them later in the class. I just want to give everyone an opportunity to learn how to edit in GIMP properly. Now versus waiting hours and hours from now as you progress through the class. Alright? Now that we have that out of the way, let's find out what an Adjustment Layer is and why we want to use them. Alright, so an adjustment layer is a type of layer, but it's a very special type of layer. And adjustment layer is used to contain a specific type of editing tool. We take our editing tool and we put it inside of a layer. For example, when you edit an image, you can access a tool to, I don't know, let's say make the image brighter. That tool when selected, is available in an individual window or it's separated from all the other tools. However, we can turn that editing tool into a layer that resides inside of the layers panel with all your other layers, which is how it got its name and just malaria. Alright, so the advantage of an adjustment layer versus having that editing tool outside and separate is that it gives you more control and flexibility over that editing tool. And this is going to make more sense in just a second when we edit a couple of images. But first, I have some good news and I have some bad news. The bad news is Gimp does not have this type of a layer and adjustment layer built into it like Photoshop. But the good news is, I have a work-around that will allow you to mimic adjustment layers in GIMP. That you have that flexibility of using the editing tools for your creative vision. Alright, so let's go ahead and dive right back into camp and learn why we want to use adjustment layers and how we can use them in games. Let's go ahead and go up to File and open and select our first image, which is 01, located in your section six folder. Alright, go ahead and open it up and we'll get started. So just for demonstration purposes, we're going to increase the exposure of this image. So let's go up to colors levels, and then we're going to adjust the levels midpoint or the midtone section by clicking on this little triangle here and moving it to the left. So the image is now over exposed. It's not a tape of edit that I would recommend. But again, just for demonstration purposes, let's go ahead and click OK. Now we're going to go ahead and save this edit by going up to File select Export As we're gonna keep the same filename and click export. It's going to ask, do you want to replace the original file? And this case we do so we'll click replace. Go ahead and click export on this next window. Let's go ahead and close this file. Go ahead and select discard changes. And then what we're going to go back up to File, open up that same image as before. And let's say we do this tomorrow, next week, next year. After we edit the image, we save it, we close it, we come back, we realize we over edited the image and it's overexposed. Now what? Well, you could go back up to colors, levels and try and adjusted. But the only problem is you're going to begin degrading the quality of the image and it's not going to be the same as the original. So what you have done is you've done what is known as destructive editing. You have applied an edit directly to the pixels and you alter them in a way that you cannot get them back because you saved over the original file unless you have a duplicate of that particular file or a backup of that file, you've essentially ruin the image forever. You're out of luck. Alright, so now let's take a look at how we should be editing our images. So go ahead and close out that file. We're gonna go back to File and open, and we're going to open up image 02, which is the same image. Now what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this layer by coming down here and clicking on this Duplicate Layer icon. Okay, let's go ahead and double-click right here so we can rename this Lear and let's just call it exposure edit. Now we're gonna go back up to colors and select levels. Again. And again, we're going to adjust the exposure to make it over exposed. So go ahead and do that. Click OK. And now this layer is different from this layer. So we have our original and are edited layer. So in essence, this edited layer is our adjustment layer. So let's see how this works. We're going to go up to File select, Save As. And now GIMP is going to amend the file type x c, f to the file name so that we can save the layers and keep everything and tag. Go ahead and click Save. Close that file, go back in and re-open the O2 dot FCF file. We have both layers still attack. We have our adjustment layer. And now we realize that the image is overexposed and we over edited the image. So we can come up to our opacity slider up here. And then we can click and drag it to the left to tone it down. And then it will blend in with the layer below it. So we still have the flexibility and control of reediting our image because we can adjust the opacity. But if at some point we decide we're not getting the results we want, we can either turn this layer off or we can come down here and delete the layer and then start our editing over with the original layer. So we've in essence worked what is known as non-destructively. So we can use an adjustment layer in this manner to work non-destructively. Give us the flexibility and controlled to edit our images again in the future. Now I will admit if you have ever used adjustment layers in Photoshop, it's not 100% exactly the same, but this is the best workaround at this point in time. And I will add that the developers add GIMP are in the process of updating Gimp to include adjustment layers that are going to be much more robust and professional and more like the Photoshop option in a future release, however, we do not have a specific timeline for when that will happen. Until then, this is the best workaround. If you want it to stay up-to-date on when these adjustments or these new tools and features will be introduced into camp checkout, the GIMP essentials guide for a link that will show you what tools and features are currently being worked on and the progression of each one of those tools. So now that you know how to properly edit your images like a pro and GIP. It's now time to learn how to edit our images for different types of adjustments. So if you're ready to get started on that, laws, do it. 20. Project 5: Fix the Exposure: All right, so all the images that we're going to edit in this section are included in your section six folder. Let's go ahead and open up our first image, which we actually used previously, and that is O2. So go ahead and open up that file. So this image is slightly underexposed, so we're going to increase the exposure to make it brighter and correct that under exposure, the first thing we wanna do is that's right. We want to work non-destructively by duplicating the layer. So we're gonna come down here and click on this icon here. And let's call it exposure edit. So just double-click on the name here to rename it. So we have a few different options for adjusting the exposure with Gim. If we take a look under colours here we have five different options. From here, we're going to use exposure for this particular image. So go ahead and open up exposure. And you're gonna see two options, black level and exposure. So it's a real simple fix. All we have to do is slide the exposure to the right to increase the exposure. And that helps balance the overall exposure. And let's go ahead and turn the preview on an off to see the difference. Now sometimes when you use the exposure tool, it sometimes makes the shadows are the black points flatter. So you may need to add some contrast back by increasing the black level or the black points. So I'm gonna move this to the right just a little bit. And that just adds a little bit of contrast back into the image now fits too much contrast. You can always go the opposite direction to make the black points and the shadows flatter. Now if you're finding that this particular tool isn't working for the image that you're working on it. Let's go ahead and click OK. You may want to come in and try brightness and contrast because it does work differently than exposure. And we're going to cover this more in detail later in the class. I just want to get you up and running on editing your images now versus hours from now. All right, so that's how you edit the exposure for your images. Go ahead and practice with this image and then apply that knowledge to your own images. And then in the next lesson, we're going to learn how to remove color casts from our images. 21. Project 6: Remove Color Casts: Hello and welcome back. Alright, let's open up our next image and our section six folder. We're going to open up image 03. Alright, so you may find sometimes that you have a color cast that is affecting the skin tones of your portraits. So it can be to yellow to green to blue or a combination of the three. And maybe that color casts as making the skin tones look unnatural or unhealthy. In this image, in particular, I find that the skin tones are too yellow or too warm. So we're going to tone down that yellow color cast to make the skin look much more natural and healthier because right now she looks like she's not healthy because it's too intense and it does have a little bit of a green tinge to it as well. And if you're having a hard time trying to figure out where that color cast is or the color of that color cast. Where you can do is you can zoom in real tight and take a look at the neutral tones, like in the background here. This is supposed to be white to gray. So you can kinda see a little bit of a yellow color cast and there. But if you're not seeing that there, take a look at the whites of the eyes. And you can definitely see that there's more yellow in here than white. Now there's a balancing act because he don't want to make this pure white. Because then that's going to make that person look more alien then human. So you want to balance it out and kind of keep a little bit of that color casts so it's not pure white. At least that's my personal preference. So let's go ahead and zoom back out. If we go up to View, Zoom and select Fit image into window, that'll crop that image back into the interface. So we have a couple of different options for adjusting the color cast in our image. Actually, there's more than a couple, there's quite a few different options. I'm just going to share a couple of quick ones with you now and we'll explore more later on in the course. So let's go up to colors and select Color balance. So from here we can adjust the different color levels. We have cyan, magenta, yellow, blue, green, and red. So we want to remove yellow from the image or the yellow color cast. So we want to increase blue and that will tone down the yellow. So now the image is, it's still warm but it's more red then yellow. If we take a look at the preview on and off, I definitely like this warmer red color versus this yellowish, greenish color. And that's usually associated with someone that is unhealthy. So I find this to be much more natural and healthier versus the original. Okay, so that's one option. I'm gonna go ahead and click cancel. And, and of course we want to work. That's right, non-destructively. So we always wanna make sure that we're duplicating the layer that we want to fix. So let's go ahead and duplicate and rename this color balance. Now let's go up to colors and take a look at color, temperature. Now if you're not familiar with what the color temperature is, it's basically the color of light. So the colour of light is going to change based on the light source. If it's artificial, that color can be anywhere from green to blue to yellow to orange. Natural light coming from the sun can also be a different color depending on the time of day and whether or not it's sunny, cloudy or partly cloudy, or even if you're in shade and the intensity of that shade. So we're not gonna go into great detail about color temperature right now because it is a very large subject that can cover a lot of different variables. So for now we're just going to focus on the basics. So we have our original temperature, which is 6500, and that's the Kelvin temperature. Again, these are terms that you may want to explore and learn about, especially if you do a lot of your own photography. So the Intended temperature is the color it should have been when we captured the image. So if you take a look at your camera, it probably has an option to capture the color of light based on the shootings situation, whether it's sunny and cloudy or other scenarios. So if you capture the wrong color temperature at the time you took the photo, you can come in here and adjust it with the color temperature. So I want to tone it down, and I can do that by adjusting it to the left. And this removes that strong yellow color overcast. And then the ads more blue the further to the left you go. So now if we take a look at the before and after, we can definitely see that there is less yellow, but now it's more blue. So it's just a matter of fine tuning it to your own personal preference. I'm just going to warm it up a little bit more and take a look at it once again. And I think this edit is better than the original. Again, it all depends on your own personal preference and your personal style and what you like versus what I like. But we also want to at the same time try and make our skin tones look as natural as possible. That way the person looks natural and healthy and not alien. Alright, so those are some quick tips on adjusting the color Cass in your images. Go ahead and play around with both the color balance and the color temperature with this image. And then try it out on some of your own images. And then in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how would it change colors in your image. Because maybe you wanted her to wear a orange jacket instead of a red jacket. And you can actually adjust that color and Gimp. And I'm going to show you how in the next lesson. 22. Project 7: How To Change Colors: All right, let's go ahead and learn how to change colors in our images. Let's open up our next image, which is 0 for. All right, so we have a red fox in 101 to do is change the color of his FOR, let's first duplicate our layer by right-clicking and selecting duplicate layer. So we can work non-destructively. I'm just gonna call it color change. Alright, let's go up to colors and select hue saturation. So up here at the top we have our different color channels that we can target. And then down here we have three different ways to adjust the selected colors. And by default we have master selected, which will adjust all the color channels at the same time. Now when it comes to saturation, you can either increase the saturation of the colors or decrease the saturation of the colors. Lightness will allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the colors. And then hue will be used to change the colors in your images so we can adjust it to anything we want. And now I have a green Fox. How cool is that? Now I'm going to come back down here again to purple. And we can see that all the colors in the image are being affected. So some colors over here on the right and the background over here and in front. So let's go ahead and reset this and target just the for. So we have yellows, oranges, and reds. But I think primarily we have read in his first, so I'm gonna go ahead and select red. And then I'm going to adjust the hue to change the colors. And now I have a blue Fox. How cool is that? All right, so that's how you can change colors in your images. And of course, as you know, you can use a Layer Mask to precisely control your edits. Because if you take a look right here in the foreground, we have some items down here on the ground that have turned blue as well. So we can click OK and come down here and click on our scary clown to add a Layer Mask. We're gonna do white click Add. Let's make sure that the foreground color is set to black. Grab your brush and then you can paint away that edit where it shouldn't be applied. And there you go. You now have a new color, Fox. Our hey, now that you know how to change colors, go ahead and practice with this image and your own images. And then in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to convert your color images to black and white. 23. Project 8: Color to B&W Conversion: Hello and welcome back. Ra. We're now going to learn how to convert our color images to block and wait, let's go ahead and open up our image. And we're going to open up image 05. So we have a very colorful image that we're going to convert to black and white. And I'm going to share two quick ways to convert it to black and white with different results and some creative options along the way. So let's go ahead and duplicate this layer twice so we can work non-destructively and to see both black and white conversions on different layers so we can compare them to each other. Alright, let's come down here and click on this icon twice to duplicate. And I'm going to rename them black and white. Option 12. Let's go ahead and turn off option two for now. And select option one. We're gonna go up two colors and select our saturation tool. So from here, you can increase the color saturation or decrease the color saturation. To get black and white, we're going to adjust this all the way to the left until it says 0 over here. Once you do that, a removes the colors altogether and you end up with a black and white image. Quick and easy. So go ahead and click OK. Let's turn on option two and make sure you have it selected. All right, let's go back up to colors and select hue saturation. Now we do have an option here to increase or decrease the saturation and remove it altogether by sliding it all the way to the left and we end up with a black and white image, but it is slightly different. Versus the saturation tool, we used an option one. And we can see that by turning off option two layer. And when you do, you will notice that the black and white is more contrasty versus option two. So you do get a slightly different effect. Okay, let's go ahead and reset the color back to 0. Because what I wanna do is I want to target individual color channels. And we can do that up here at the top, right. Now by default we have master selected, which is adjusting all the color channels at one time. So let's go ahead and turn off the Preview, select the red channel and adjust saturation to minus 100. We're going to do that for each one of these different color channels. Alright, so once you have that done, go ahead and turn on preview, and we're back to a black and white image again. But this is what I like about the hue saturation versus just the saturation tool. We do have our lightness slider here, which will allow us to increase or decrease the brightness of our colors. And if we select individual color channels, we can do that based on the color channel we have selected, right? Okay, so let's go ahead and select red. And go ahead and increase and decrease according to your own personal preference. I'm gonna go ahead and do that for each one of the different color channels until I end up with something that I like. So again, this is just going to give us a different creative option versus just targeting all the color channels at one time. So that's one option. Now let's take a look at a more creative option when it comes to black and white. Because maybe we want to keep a specific color in TAC and make all the other color channels black and white. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on reset to reset all the colors. And now I'm going to adjust the red channel, remove the color of just that channel, and then all the other colors are left and place. So maybe we want to remove blue or maybe magenta, and then we're left with three colors, yellow, green, and scion. So this would give you a more creative option because maybe you want to keep just blew and nothing else. And this is known as spot coloring. So this will give you another creative option for your black and white images. All right, so that's it for converting to black and white and some creative options. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at another creative edit because maybe we don't want to remove color but add color. So I'm going to show you how to add a creative color tint to your images in the next lesson. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 24. Project 9: Creative Color Tint: So far, you've learned how to adjust your colors, change colors, and remove colors. Now, I want to show you how to add colors for creative affects. So let's go ahead and open up our image. And we're going to choose 06. Now, since we're not going to be editing this layer directly, we're not changing the pixels of the layer. We don't need to duplicate this layer toward non-destructively. Because what we're going to do is we're going to create a new layer of color to work on. And then we're going to adjust that layer to blend in with this layer so we don't need to duplicate this layer. The first thing we need to do though, is we need to decide on the color tint we want to apply to the image. So for this edit, what I want to do is I want to apply a red color and I want to choose a color from our hat. So let me show you how you can do that. We're gonna come down here and click on the foreground color. And then in our change foreground color window, we can choose a color from our image by selecting our eyedropper tool, which is right here. So click on this and then where you click on the image, it's going to select that colour for you. Now, I just clicked and my eyedropper tool disappeared. So I need to come back over here and reselect it so I can select a color from our hat. So I'm going to click right here. Okay, so go ahead and choose a color. Click OK. Then come down here and click on this icon to create a new layer. Let's call it tint layer. And because we want to use the color that we chose and it's in the foreground. We wanna choose foreground color to fill with. Once you click OK, that color, we'll fill in in a new layer. Now we just need to take this layer and adjusted to blended in with the layer below. So we have a couple of different options. The first and quickest is to adjust the opacity so we can lower the transparency of that layer and then it reveals the layer below it. So we still have our red tent even though we adjusted the opacity lower. Okay, so that's one option. I'm going to put this back to 100 because we do have another option in our Layers panel here. And if you take a look right here, it says Mode and normal. So mode is also known as a blending mode, or some people refer to them as a color mode. Me personally, I like to refer to them as a creative mode because it gives us a lot of creative options for helping us achieve our creative vision. Once you click on this, you're gonna see a lot of different modes to choose from. Way too many to go over at this point in time. Later on in the class, we're going to have a whole section on modes, so you can learn more about them. For now, we're just going to quickly look at a couple to see how we can apply them creatively for our artwork. Alright, so I'm going to come up here and select screen. And it kind of works like opacity in that it's going to lower the transparency of that layer and reveal the layer below it. And it's basically blending in with the layer below. Alright, so that's one option you may want to try out. Another one is lighten only. So this one is going to reduce the amount of The Red Tent and it's going to add it more in the shadows than anywhere else. So if we take a look at the before and after, we can definitely see it's more in the shadows than in the highlights and the mid tones. And this creates a more vintage type, old school type effect. So that's another option. Let's take a look at one more. Let's try addition. So this one adds the color tint, but it kinda plans out the image a little bit as well. So it all depends on your own personal preference. So go ahead and play around with the different modes to see how they affect your color tense. And then you can apply them to your own images and maybe take some notes on which ones you like and which ones you don't. And of course you can do that in the GIMP essentials guide that's included with this class. Alright, so we have one more edit we're going to do. And that's going to be adjusting the color temperature of an image precisely where we want it. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 25. Project 10: Natural Looking Skin Tones: Hello and welcome back our AI. Let's go ahead and open up our image for our last edit of this section, which is going to be zeros seven. Alright, let's go up to view, zoom and fit image in window. Alright, so we have a nice portrait shot at sunset. And that's sunset is emitting a color that is very warm or very yellow. However, like we've talked about any previous lesson, that color cast is making her skin look a little too yellow or unnatural or even unhealthy. So what I wanna do for this edit is I want to target my edit so that I apply it directly on her face and her hands only. And as you know, we can use a Layer Mask to precisely control our edits. But I want to show you something different versus what we've done in the past. So let's start off by duplicating the layer. We're going to right-click and select Duplicate Layer. And this way we can work non-destructively, I'm gonna call it color adjustment. So let's change the color temperature of the image. Let's go up to colors and select color temperature. So I want to cool the image down and thereby remove that yellow color cast. So I'm going to drag this to the left to around 5200 for the color temperature. So go ahead and set it to what you think it looks best. And I'm gonna go with this here because it does make her skin look a little bit more natural and healthier. Go ahead and click OK. So the next step is to add that color cast from the sun back into the rest of the image, except for her face and her hands. So we're going to start off by right-clicking and adding a layer mask. Now, in a previous lesson or previous lessons, we've applied a white layer mask. So as you know, white adds, black removes. So what I wanna do is I want to start off with a completely black Layer Mask. And when you do and you add that, it removes the edit that we applied. So basically we have the exact same image as before. So what I wanna do now is I want to add that edit to just her face and just her hands. So in order to edit back, What do I need to use? White or black? That's correct. We need White to add it back. So we're gonna select white for our foreground by double-clicking these arrows here. And then we're going to grab our paintbrush and adjust the size as needed. So I'm just gonna go about the size of her face and then I'm going to paint over her face. And that's going to apply that edit directly on her face. How cool is that? Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and adjust the opacity of my brush now. So I can paint with gray instead of white. So I can add that edits in her hands as well. But it's going to reduce it at a smaller amount. Since we're painting with grey versus weight, which we can see in our thumbnail right here of our layer mass. We have white up here on our face and then grade down here on her hands. Alright, so this is a little bit different than what we've done before, so it may be a little confusing. So just remember, white adds, black removes. Now there may be times like this when you want to use a black Layer Mask to start with versus white. And the reason why I would in this situation is instead of painting the entire image except for her face and her hands, we did just the opposite. We painted on her face and hands, which is a smaller amount of area to cover versus everything else. So just keep that in mind when you're editing. Think about what color mask you want to apply, white or black, and choose based on the amount of edits that you need to add or remove. So I want you to take this image and I want you to practice applying an edit and a Layer Mask. First, do one in white, then do another one and black. And remember, white adds, black, removes, and then adjust your foreground and background colors accordingly. And then take that knowledge and apply it to your own images. And again, the more you do it, the easier it's going to become. 26. Part 1: Intro To GIMPs Color Tools: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we are now ready to learn more about our color tools. Now a lot of these tools that we're going to cover in this section we've talked about in previous lessons, but I want to go over more information about the tools and go into more detail about them, as well as provide additional pro tips for using these colored tools. Now the other thing is, there are a lot of color tools to go over. And if you take a look inside of gamma under the menu, under Color tools, you're going to notice that they are divided up into four different sections. So we have this little black line here and here and here. And we're going to separate each one of these into different sections. So first we're gonna go over everything from color balance down to curves. And then in the next section we'll do the invert options followed by this section. And then these items down here will be part four. Now, even though we've gone over some of these colour tools are ready. We're not necessarily going to do full type of edits. Instead, we're going to learn how to do different types of edits with those colored tools. And then you can still practice what you learned with the images provided, as well as doing the homework with your own images. So make sure you check out the GIMP essentials guide for your homework for each one of these color tools. So if you're ready to get started on learning more about our color tools to do it. 27. Project 11: How To Balance the Color: Hello and welcome back our eye. We are now going to start with our color Tools. And the first one is color balance. And we did cover this particular tool in a previous lesson. But in this lesson, I'm going to provide a lot more information and pro tips for using this particular tool. So let's go ahead and get started by opening up our images for this lesson, we have three that we're going to cover. They're located in your section eight folder. So go ahead and grab image one, hold down your shift key and then click on 03. And then when you click open, it's going to open up all three images 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 casts, its 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 and 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 wanna 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 in 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. 28. Project 12: How To Adjust the White Balance: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so next up is our color temperature tool. And we did use this particular tool in a previous lesson from another section. And we just went over it briefly. So now I want to go into more detail about this particular tool and how to use it for adjusting the color temperature of our images. Now, real quick, before we get started with this lesson, I just want to make sure that you watched the last section on the color of light. And that's because in this lesson, we're gonna talk about a lot of terms that we covered and that last section, like the color, temperature, white balance, Kelvin, and more. So if you're not familiar with those terms and you don't understand the colour of light, then you may end up finding yourself lost in this lesson. So if you haven't gone through that section yet, now would be a great time to do that before continuing with this lesson. Alright, so let's go ahead and take a closer look at our color temperature tool. So go ahead and open up this image from your section eight folder, and it's image number 04. Then come back up here to colors and select color temperature. All right, so in that previous lesson, when we adjusted the color temperature, we did so by adjusting the intended temperature slider here. And if we move this to the left than the image becomes more blue or cooler. And then if we move it to the right, the image becomes warmer or more yellow. Now, there may be a little confusing to you because if you did go through that last section, we talked about the color temperature of light, which is measured in Kelvin. And we learned that the lower the Kelvin number, the warmer the image, and the higher the Kelvin number, the cooler the image. But as you just saw, it's actually the opposite with the intended temperature. So let's go ahead and reset this. Alright, now let's go ahead and take look at the original temperature slider. And if we adjust this to the left, the image becomes warmer. And to the right, the image becomes cooler, which is what we would expect based on what we learned about the Kelvin scale or the Kelvin temperature of light. Let's go ahead and reset this. And you may be wondering why do we have an original temperature and an intended temperature slider? Well, let's take a closer look at these two sliders to find out what they're meant to be used for. So if you hover your mouse over original temperature, you're gonna get this little pop-up message right here that says estimated temperature of the light source in Kelvin. The image was taken with. And then intended temperature says, Corrected estimation of the temperature of the light source and Kelvin. So what does this really mean? What are we supposed to do with these particular sliders? Well, my interpretation of those messages is we need to tell Gimp first the estimated temperature of that light source in Kelvin when that image was taken. And then we need to tell Gump What was our creative vision for that particular image. So what was the Kelvin temperature we should have used based on our creative vision or the intended temperature. So first we adjust the original to the light source, and then we adjust it based on our creative vision. So let's go ahead and try that out. So the next question you may have is, well, how do I estimate the color of that light for that light source at the time I took the photo? Well, if you have the experience seeing the color of light, then you may know that at this time of day, the Kelvin temperature can range from, let's say 1500 to 3 thousand kelvin. Well, in that case, you can then go ahead and double-click here and type in a number. However, if you don't have that experience, then it's going to be harder for you to figure out an estimation for that color temperature. But we do have a built in list to help us determine the estimate for that color temperature. And it's right here next to each slider. So this icon and this icon here will allow you to choose from a list of common color temperatures based on the light source or the lighting situation. So once you click on that, you can see we have an ocean right here for sunset and sunrise, which is what we would use for this particular image. But let's say it was shot during the middle of the day, on a sunny day. Well then you would come down here and choose this option here, which is 5 thousand Kelvin, which is a more white or neutral color. And then let's say we're shooting on a cloudy, overcast day. While then he would come down here and select this option here. So you're just going to come in here and select the option based on the light source and, or the lighting situation. So let's go ahead and select sunset and sunrise. And now our image is much more warmer than it was before. Now, at this point, either you agree with that as summation or you don't. If you don't, then you can come over here and click right here and adjust it to what you think the color temperature was at the time he took the photo? For now, I'm just gonna go ahead and leave it at 1850 degrees Kelvin. All right, so now we need to tell GIMP the intended temperature for that particular image based on our creative vision. Unless of course, you're going after that space alien Mars type lighting effect, which we have going on right now. The only problem though with this particular edit is we have an open body of running water. Which as you may or may not know scientifically, it has now been proven that Mars has running water, at least not at the time of this recording area. I'm getting off pace here, so let's go ahead and get back to editing our image. All right, so what we need to do is we need to cool the image down because it is too warm right now. So what we need to do is we need to adjust the intended temperature slider to the left, because remember intended is opposite of what it should be in Kelvin. So as we go to the left, the image becomes less warm. But as you continue going through, we're not really getting that nice natural white or light blue color. It's just becoming more and more green. All right. So I'm not really seeing anything in here that I like because based on my creative vision, I prefer a more natural, neutral type of color versus the colors than I'm getting as I adjust the intended temperature. So instead of manually adjusting the slider or typing in a number, we can come over here and choose from this list. And again, we want sunset or sunrise. Now watch what happens once you select that. Well, we get a much more natural type of edit. The only problem is if you turn off preview, it's exactly the same as the original image. So in essence, the original temperature and the intended temperature cancel each other out when the Kelvin temperature is exactly the same. So there's a lot of confusing things going on here. And you may be wondering why are we adjusting the original temperature and the intended temperature, and why do we have to choose from this list to estimate in order to get the color temperature that we want? Well, that's a great question. And the answer is, I have Honestly, I have no idea. There's really no reason that I can think of why we should be adjusting both sliders. In fact, I would just ignore the intended temperature altogether. And now I know we did use that in a previous lesson. But that's because we didn't cover the color of light at that point. And now that you understand the colour of light and you're familiar with the Kelvin scale. We can then just adjust the original temperature slider to either make the image a warmer or cooler based on our creative vision for that particular image. So let's go ahead and reset this. And for this particular image, I find that it's too warm. Unless of course, that's your creative vision for it, or the mood that you want set for that particular image. I just find it to be a little unnatural. And that's because this image was shot in the winter. And the color of light in the winter tends to be cooler at that time of year versus summer. So because the colors are very warm in this image, it tends to look a little unnatural elitist based on my personal preference. These yellows and oranges, I associate with summer more so than winter. But then again, maybe I'm over analyzing this image too much. Maybe at the time this image was captured. These were the actual colors that we could see and we captured them perfectly in camera. And in that case, we don't need to fix them in GIMP. So just remember everything that you're learning about editing in this class is so that you can better understand the tools you have available for editing your images. And more importantly, you want to learn these tools and all the details about them. So you know how to fulfill your creative vision. Not my vision, but your vision. So for my creative vision, I would prefer a cooler image. So let's say we did want to make this image cooler because we didn't get the colors and camera. Well, what would we have to do in order to make this color cooler? That's right. We need to adjust the original temperature. The Kelvin number higher, because the higher the Kelvin number, the more blue the image will become. Now, of course, you know, we need to work non-destructively. So what I would do before it edit this image is I would come over and duplicate this layer and apply that edit to that new layer. But for now, let's just go ahead and move the original temperature to the right, and I'm going to place it right around here. You can set it to whatever you like. Or if you prefer a warmer image, you can adjust it accordingly. And that's how you use the color temperature tool to adjust the color temperature or the white balance of your image. 29. Project 13: Creative Color Adjustments 1: Hello and welcome back our eight. So next up we're going to take a look at our hue and chroma and lightness color tool. So let's go ahead and grab image number five from your section eight folder and go ahead and open it up. Now real quick, before we begin using this new editing color tool, I want to quickly refresh your memory about hue, saturation and lightness. And then we'll compare it to our Hugh chroma tool. So as you may remember, hugh will allow you to change the colors. Saturation will allow you to adjust the intensity of the colors. And if we move the slider all the way to the left, a removes the colors and we end up with a black and white image. And then lateness will allow you to increase or decrease the brightness of the image. And as you probably remember from a previous lesson, we can adjust the individual color channels. And as the default, it's set to master, which affects all the color channels at once. All right, now let's like our Hugh chromite tool, which will allow you to adjust the hue, lightness, and the chroma. Now, unlike the previous color tool, we do not have an option to adjust the colors via an individual color channel or channels. It's all or nothing, basically high-rate. So Hugh enlightened S work exactly the same as the previous color tool. This time, we do not have a saturation option. Instead, we have chroma, which is slightly similar to saturation, sort of. So let's take a look at what happens to our colors with this slider. But first, let's go ahead and duplicate our image layer so we can compare saturation to chroma. Alright, so let's click on this icon to duplicate it. And then we're gonna come back up here and double-click on the name. And let's rename it chroma. Alright, now let's double-click on our original layer and rename it saturation. Alright, so we need to go back and reselect our color tool. So let's go back up to colors and select the hue saturation color tool first so we can adjust the saturation. And let's adjust the saturation too. Plus 100. And click OK. Now let's go ahead and select our chromium layer so we can edit that layer. And we're gonna go back to colors and select our Hugh chroma color tool. Alright, so if we adjust the chroma slider to the left, the colors tend to become less intense and they will disappear altogether, just like saturation. However, UPI move it to the right, you're going to notice a big difference between a chroma and saturation. Now, although the colors are becoming more intense as I move it to the right, which is similar to saturation, the colors are actually becoming more pure. So what do I actually mean by more pure? Well, our image is being displayed in RGB or red, green, and blue. So when you increase the chroma, it's making those colors more read, more green and more blue, or a more pure color. So let's check out the thumbnails of our two layers. And you can see the hair is more blue in the chroma layer versus the Saturation Layer. So chroma gives you the ability to come up with some creative type of edits. For this particular image. Adjusting the chroma gives it a 19 eighties via. Alright, now it's your turn to play with the chroma slider with your own images. When you're done exploring with chroma, I'll see you in the next lesson to expand on your editing knowledge in GIMP. 30. Project 14: Creative Color Adjustments 2: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at our hue saturation tool once again, because there's one more thing we need to go over. And we're going to use this image again, which is image number five. So go ahead and open up that image again and then go up to colors, hue, saturation. So we're gonna take a look at this option here which is overlap. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab our red channel to adjust the colors in that channel. And let's adjust hue to the right until we get this nice, bright, yellowish, greenish color. And you're going to notice that the transition from this color to the other side is very jagged and very rough. Well, we can use the overlap to smooth that out to make that transition much smoother. So let's just go ahead and click right in the middle. And just like that, it begins smoothing out that transition from one color to another. And it looks a little bit more natural, as natural as it can be with the color of the Hulk right now. So let's continue going to the right even more. And the transition begins to smooth out even more. But this time the color begins to turn from green to yellow. So if you do want that green color and you do need to smooth that out more, and it ends up changing the color. Then just come back to your hue slider here and move it to the right and you're gonna get some of that Greenback, but you still have that nice smooth transition from one color to another. Alright, so that's it for hue and saturation. I just wanted to point out what overlap was used for in case you were wondering what that was for. Now it's your turn to go ahead and apply the hue and saturation options to some your images to come up with some creative edits, try the overlap in case the edges are too rough for you. And then in the next lesson we're gonna take a look at the saturation tool. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 31. Project 15: Amplify Saturation: All right, so we're gonna take a look at one more saturation tool. So we're going to compare the saturation tool with the hue and saturation tool. So let's go ahead and duplicate this layer, and let's rename this one hue saturation. And then we're going to rename this one saturation. Let's select our hue saturation layer first. And we're gonna go up two colors and select hue saturation. So the saturation here we can adjust from minus 100 to 0 to plus 100. So let's go ahead and set it to plus 100. And now the colors are much more intense or more saturated than they were before. Let's go ahead and turn this layer off for now. And we're gonna go ahead and grab our saturation layer. And we're going to go up two colors and select saturation from here. So this tool does not go from minus 100 to 0 to plus 100. Instead, it's a scale that goes from 0 to four plus we can actually double-click here and type in the number four. And then you're going to notice that the colors are much more intense and much more saturated, but they're much more so than the previous tool. So let's check it out. Let's go ahead and click OK. Let's turn this layer back and off to compare the two so we can see that the saturation tool makes those colors much more intense versus the saturation and hue and saturation. So it's just a different algorithm that's applying a certain amount of saturation differently from the previous tool. The other thing about the saturation tool is you're going to notice that the higher you go on the scale, the colors begin to become more pure, just like with the chromite tool that we talked about previously. So if we take a look at her hair right here, we can see that there is some shades of blue at the 4 scale setting. But it's not as blue as what we had with the chromite tool. So it's kind of a mix between hue saturation and chroma. So that's the differences between all the different saturation tools. Now that we've covered all the saturation tools, we're gonna go ahead and cover the next option, which is our exposure color tool. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 32. Project 16: Advanced Exposure Adjustments: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so once again, we're gonna take a look at our exposure tool. So we did use this tool in a previous lesson. I just want to give you some additional pro tips on using this tool. So we're going to use this image here for this lesson. It's number 0-6, which is located in your section eight folder. So go ahead and open that up and we'll go ahead and get started. So the first thing we wanna do is that's right, we want to work none destructively. So let's come down here to duplicate the layer and then we're going to double-click and rename it exposure. Alright, let's grab our exposure tool under colours and exposure. So in case you didn't know, exposure refers to how bright or how dark your image is. If you didn't get the exposure Correct in camera, then you need to fix it in GIMP. If the image is underexposed, we're going to move exposure to the right to make it brighter. If the image is overexposed, we're going to move it to the left to make it darker. Now the one thing you're going to notice is when you adjust the exposure, the overall image becomes flatter or it has less contrast. So we're going to use our black level slider here to increase the contrast. So the black level adjusts the black point of your image. So the black point is the point of the image that is pure black. So we have some darks and her hair here and in the background and in the water down here. So as we adjust the black level to make those areas darker, they're going to become pure black. So you wanna make sure that you don't go too far with the black level. Otherwise, you're going to start losing details in the shadows. We just wanna make a slight adjustment with the black level until we add back enough contrast based on our creative vision. So I'm gonna go to 0.008. And just like that, we now have a properly exposed image and it also has more contrast than it did before. How cool is that her height? So again, we want to make sure that we're not over editing our images. If you're not getting the exposure right in camera, then you're going to have to spend more time fixing it and games. So try and get it right in camera as much as possible. And if it's extremely over or underexposed, you're gonna find that the image itself is going to become degraded and is going to be harder to fix. All right, so that's it for the exposure color tool. Now it's your turn to apply your new knowledge on editing with the exposure, with your own images. And then in the next lesson we're going to take a look at another color tool we haven't talked about yet, which is shadows and highlights. So if you're ready for that, love to do it. 33. Project 17: Increase the Tonal Range: All right, so we're going to take a look at a new color tool to help us edit our images. And this one is called shadows and highlights. And it will allow us to better control adjusting the exposure of our image by targeting the highlights and shadows. So let's go ahead and open up this image and we'll check out the tool of this as image number seven. It's located in your section eight folder. So go ahead and open that up and we'll go ahead and get started. So first we want to work non-destructively by duplicating the layer, I'm going to rename this shadows and highlights. Let's grab our new shadowing unhighlight tool by going up to colors and selecting shadows and highlights. So as you can see, we have a couple of sliders here we can use to target edits directly in the shadows. And then from here we can target the highlights. And down here we have some other options for targeting the mid tones, as well as adjusting the white point of the image, which is similar to the black point, except it's going to set an area as pure white versus pure black. So just like with the black points, we can increase or decrease the white point. And at the same time it's going to add or remove contrast based on how you adjust this edit. And just like with the black point, we don't want to over edit with this particular edits because if you go too far, you begin clipping detail in the image and degrading the overall image. So let's say our shadows are too dark and we want to brighten them up. All we have to do is take our shadows and move it to the right and the shadows become brighter, or the exposure of the shadows begins to increase. If there are too bright, you can go to the left and make them darker. I'm gonna go ahead and keep them rate around 33 for increasing the brightness or the exposure of the shadows. And then we can do the same thing with the highlights. We can make them brighter or darker. So for the highlights, I'm going to bring this down to around 30. Now we have two options here for adjusting the color of the shadows and the highlights. And this is in reference to the saturation of the highlights or the shadows. Now when you adjust these, you may or may not see any adjustments for this particular image. I am not seeing any edits being applied for the color saturation of the shadows or the highlight. So it's something you are going to have to experiment with with your own images to see if the edits for these two are more apparent and your images. Alright, so if we want to increase the white point, we want to move to the right and to the left, will decrease the white points and make the image flatter. For now, I'm just gonna keep this back to the default at 0. And then we can increase or decrease the radius of that white point if we make an adjustment with it from this. And then this will compress the shadow and highlight effects that we applied. And it's going to preserve the midpoints. So you can use this to fine tune your edit in case you want to add back some additional contrast which we're getting. When we adjust to the left, to the right, it's going to plan out the image a little bit versus what we have at the default, which is 15. For me, I like this particular edit set at right around 30. And here is my before and after. So you can play around with this image to find out what you like based on your own personal preference. And then you can experiment some more with your own images. All right, so that's it for the shadow and highlights color tool. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at brightness and contrast. 34. Project 18: Boost the Brightness + Contrast: Alright, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at brightness and contrast. Once again, I believe we covered this in a previous lesson. I just want to point out a couple other things about this particular tool and how it's similar to exposure. So we're gonna go ahead and reuse this image again. So hopefully you have that open still. If not, you can open it up by going up to File, selecting open recent, and then selecting that file from here. Alright, let's go ahead and duplicate our layer so we can work none destructively. And when I've renamed it, rightness and contrast. Alright, let's go up to colors. Select brightness and contrast. So brightness and contrast is very similar to the exposure color tool in that it allows us to adjust the exposure of our image. It's just going to apply the edit slightly differently than exposure. So if you want to increase the brightness, we go to the right, to the left and becomes darker. And you're also going to notice that just like with exposure, when you make your adjustment one way or the other, it becomes less flat or it has less contrast. Well, we can use our Contrast slider here to increase or decrease the contrast based on our creative vision for that image, which is very similar to the black level in the exposure color tool. So the question is, should we be using brightness and contrast to adjust our exposure? Or should we be using exposure to edit our images, or should we be using both? Well, my answer to that is neither. And that's because we have better, more advanced tools for editing the exposure in GIMP. And that's through either levels or curves. So once you go through the lessons on these two, you will have a better understanding of why I prefer these tools and how we can adjust the exposure for our images directly from either one of these particular colour tools versus using exposure or brightness and contrast. We can also adjust the white point and the black points from both of these tools as well versus just one or the other. Because in the shadow and highlights, we can adjust the white point but not the black points. So then we had to go up to exposure to adjust the black level or the black point. Well, we can cover all of these different options that are in separate tools, in one tool, whether it's levels or curves. So that's what we're going to cover in the next lesson, which is levels. And then we'll talk about curves after that. So if you're ready to learn all about levels, let's do it. 35. Levels Tool 101: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're now going to take a look at how to use the levels tool for editing our images. Now, the thing about levels is there's a lot of stuff going on here and there's a lot of stuff to cover. So instead of sitting here for the next 30 to 40 minutes, what I've done is I've divided up this lesson on levels into two different lessons. First, we're going to learn why and how to use the histogram and what the histogram is in general. So we have a better understanding of how we can use the histogram to edit our images. Then after that, in the next lesson, we're gonna take this image here which we use any previous lesson. And we're going to learn how to edit it properly with levels. So this is image number six. So go ahead and find that image, open it up and we'll go ahead and get started. Now, real quick, I just want to mention the thing that I love about levels is it combines several different tools that we used previously and puts them all into one tool. So for example, in levels we can adjust the black and the white points directly in levels. Whereas before we had to use two different tools in order to adjust the white and the black points. We can also increase or decrease the exposure or the brightness of the image directly and levels. We can increase or decrease the contrast directly in levels. We can even target the shadows, the highlights, and the mid tones of our image as well, directly in levels. And if that wasn't enough, we can actually do much more than that. Some things we haven't really talked about yet. So there's a lot of things we can do and levels versus doing them and all of these different tools that we used previously. So basically levels combines all of these different tools into one and makes these pretty much obsolete. Alright, so let's go ahead and increase the size of our levels panel here. And we can do that simply by navigating to a side or a corner, and then we can increase it larger. And I'm gonna make it about yea big so we can all see it a little bit better. So our histogram is made up of different tonal ranges in our image, as well as the colors that make image. So right now this histogram is displaying the red, green, and blue channels of our image, along with the tonality of our image. So the shadows, the highlights, and the mid tones. So I bring up RG and B because we can actually change the histogram to show the tonal ranges of the different color channels. So for example, we can come up here to a value and click on red. And now our histogram changes based on the tonality of the red colors in that channel. If we come up here and choose green, it's going to change again, the same with blue. So the thing that we can do with this is when we select a specific color channel, we can actually use it to remove color casts. So again, we can use this tool versus another one that we used previously for removing color casts. Let's go back to our value channel here, which is all three channels combined. Alright, so let's take a closer look at our histogram. So the histogram is made up of 256 levels of tonality in our image. So it ranges from 0 on the left side, 255 on the right. So that gives us 256 levels of the tonal range of our image. Now the other thing real quick is you probably noticed that the histogram is divided up into five different sections or five different columns. So each one of these columns represents a different tonal range in your image. So on the left side we have our first column, and this represents the black point of our image. So anything set at 0 will be pure black. Then we have, next to that, we have another set of tonal ranges in our image, and this represents the shadows. In the middle, we have the mid tones, and then to the right we have our highlights. And then finally we have our white points over here on the right side. So anything set at 255 is pure white. Alright, so in addition to the 256 levels of tonality in the histogram, the histogram itself is made up of peaks and valleys inside of it. So these peaks and valleys gives us information about the image. And what we need to do to fix the image based on that histogram. So all histograms are going to be different based on the exposure for that image and the colors in that image. Alright, so let's take a look at our peaks and valleys a little closer to learn how to read this information so we know how to properly edit our images. So one of the first things you're going to notice is the peaks are taller versus others. So this is basically just telling us that different parts of the image and that tonal range has more or less detail. And this is going to let us know if the image is overexposed or underexposed or whether or not data is being clipped or the detail is missing and that part of the image. And then we know based on that, what we need to fix an edit for that particular image. So for example, in this image, in this histogram, we have a very large peak on the right side that covers the highlights and the white points. So this is just telling us there's a lot of information and this part of the image. But if we compare that to the left side, there's really no peaks and valleys. It's fairly flat. So overall the image is probably plant and could use a boost in contrast. Now the other thing we want to be aware of with peaks is whether or not they touch the top of the histogram or they exceeded. If they exceeded, then you're going to see a flat top to that peak. Now you could say there's a little flat part right here, but it's not as noticeable as some other histograms you may find with your images. Because that flat top could be much wider. In that case, that's telling you that data or the detail in that part of the image is being clipped. There's no information there. It's been completely changed to pure white. And that case, that part of the image is overexposed. But if he see that large flat top for that peak on the left side, then that tells you that the image is underexposed and you also clipped data in the shadows or the black points or both. Now the other thing, the opposite of peaks are gaps. So right here on this side of our histogram, we see a gap from this point to here. And there's also a gap from here to here. So this is letting us know that we did not capture the full tonality of that image at the time we took it. And there's no detail in this area. So overall, our image is probably flat and again needs a boost in contrast. So ideally, in most cases you want a tonal range for your images that goes from the far left to the far right. So if you see any gaps, you want to fill that in by adjusting your white and black points accordingly. Now I said in most cases, because some images may not require an adjustment in the white and the black points based on how that image was lit, whether it's Heikki or loci, and whether or not it's based off of your creative vision. Maybe you want that part of the image does not have a lot of contrast. And you want the white point set based on how it was captured and camera. So a lot of this information is subjective. I'm just giving you ideally what you want for most images. And then with this information, you can decide how you want to edit your images. Are eight. Now that we've covered the basics of our histogram, let's go ahead and begin editing our image in the next lesson. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 36. Project 19: How To Edit Properly with Levels: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we are now ready to begin editing our image with the levels tool. But before we do real quick, there's one thing I forgot to mention in the last lesson. Take a look over here and the top right of the histogram here. And you're gonna see some different options for our histogram. And these are basically going to change how the peaks and valleys are displayed in the histogram. And you may want to choose one over another based on what you're seeing when you open up the levels tool. So for example, if you have a histogram that is very flat from left to right, and you're not really seeing any peaks are valleys, then it's going to be hard to determine if parts of the image are over or underexposed or whether or not you have gaps or not. So in that case, what you wanna do is come over here and select the logarithmic histogram, which is basically just another algorithm to display the peaks and valleys. And when you do, it expands that histogram and makes it taller. So you can see those peaks and the valleys, but it actually fills in the gaps as well. So I do prefer this particular algorithm over the other one. But you may run into a situation where that histogram is very flat and that tends to happen with images that are strongly backlit. Or maybe it's a brightly lit image or maybe it's a different situation. But anytime you come across a histogram that is very flat, you may want to check out this particular algorithm just to see if it improves the visualization of the peaks and valleys. All right, so let's go ahead and resize our window here so we can see our image and we'll go ahead and edit the image. Alright, so based on what we learned on reading the histogram in the last lesson, what we need to do first is we need to fill in the gaps so we can increase the tonal range of the image and add some contrast to the image at the same time. So we're going to do that by adjusting the black and the white points so that we can stretch out that histogram to reach from the far left to the far right. There's a few different ways to do that. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you all the different ways you can do it. And then you can decide which method you prefer for your own editing workflow. So if you take a look right here, we have a box with a number in it, and we have another box with the number over here as well. You can come in here, double-click and type in a number. And then the white point will be set accordingly. I clicked my Tab key to get out of there and to set the point, I'm gonna go ahead and click in here and type in 25, and then click my Tab key to set the black point. So just like that, that fills in the gap because we can see right here there's a little marker here. This is the black point marker. This is the white point marker. So when we close this out and come back, we will see a new histogram. And that histogram will be from the far left to the far right. And I'll show you that in just a moment. But first let's look at other ways we can adjust. The white and the black points. Let's come down here and click Reset. And then we can come up here and choose this eyedropper tool here to set the black point. So go ahead and click on this icon here. And then what we need to do is we need to come over to our image and tell Gimp, okay, when I click on this area, I want that to be the black point and then it will adjust that black point accordingly and make that area pure black. So just find an area in the image that should be pure black and click on it. And then the black point will be set for that particular point. So we can see that the black point marker has been moved over to the right and it's been set at level 32. Now we can do the same thing with our white point eye dropper tool as well. We just need to come over and click on an area that should be pure white. Once we click on it, the image is edited accordingly, and then that white point marker is adjusted to the left. In this case, Level two 23, yours might be different based on where you clicked. All right, let's go ahead and reset that. And I want to show you my favorite method of editing the white and black points because it's much quicker and simpler. And that's simply by clicking on the black point marker or the white point marker and moving it to the right or to the left. So this is so much easier than trying to figure out where to click on the image with the eyedropper tool or to type in a number. So for me personally, I'd like to set the white and the black points on either end of the histogram where it begins and ends. So in this case for the black point marker, I'm going to set it right here at 18 or 19, right in that range. And then for the white point, I'm going to set it at 235. So for me, that's my personal preference. That gives me just the right amount of contrast for my personal style and what I like. So technically you could increase or decrease this based on your own personal preference. But again, you wanna make sure you're not going too far. Because if you do, you'd begin clipping too much detail and you begin to degrade the image as well. So I'm just going to leave mine right here at 19. So the next step is to decide if we want to fix the exposure. If it needs to be fixed, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. So if you do want to adjust the exposure, all you have to do is come over here and select our midtone marker, which is right here in the middle. And if you drag it to the right, the image will become darker to the left, it will become brighter. Now for this particular image, I think the exposure is fine right at the default, which is one. So I'm gonna go ahead and leave my exposure right there. And because once we adjusted the black and the white point, it did adjust the exposure as well by making it brighter and darker in some areas. And overall, it became much brighter. So I think that looks good right there. Now real quick, let's go up to colors and scroll down to info and select histogram. This is going to give us another histogram to show us what the histogram looks like. Now that we've made our edit adjustments for. White and the black points. I'm gonna go ahead and click this tab and drag it out so I can get a free-floating histogram panel. So let's compare these two histograms side-by-side. So the peaks and valleys are pretty much the same. The difference now is because we filled in that white and the black point. The histogram is now stretching from the far left to the far right. But you're also going to notice black lines in the histogram. These are actually gaps in between the different tonal range is now because what we actually did is when we stretched out the histogram, we took data from parts of one part of the tonal range, stretched it out to fill in those gaps. So when you do that, you tend to lose information or detail in those parts of the tonal range, and overall, you begin to degrade your image. So the one thing I always like to tell my photography students is to capture the exposure and camera. So in other words, now the exposure and camera as much as possible. And then you will have to edit less in GIMP or whatever editing software you choose. And then your overall image will be of a higher quality because you're not trying to fix something that you didn't get and camera. So the other thing that can happen, especially when you have an image that is extremely over underexposed. When you go to fix it, the gaps will be bigger. And you'll begin adding digital artifacts and digital noise to that image, which degrades the overall image. And you will also see color shifts, sometimes in the highlights and the shadows. And then you're going to have an even harder time trying to edit the image and making it look natural because you're trying to fix all these different things that were introduced after you adjusted the exposure and the waypoints and the black points. So that's why it's important to nail that exposure in camera and not trying to fix it and gamma. Alright, let's go ahead and close this out. And I just want to show you a few more things before we move on. All right, so real quick, before we began working on these other options down here, I want to show you how to remove a color cast in your image. So let's say, or images too blue or too red. While all we have to do is come up to channel and choose the appropriate channel that needs to be corrected. So if the image is showing a red colour cast, then we want to select read to remove or reduce red, and that will remove the color cast. So if we slide our midpoint slider here to the right, it will begin removing red and adding green and blue, which will begin removing that red color cast. Now if I move this to the left, it's going to add red in the image. And we can definitely see there's a red colour cast now. So the more I go to the right, the more I remove that red color cast. So that's just a quick tip on fixing color casts in your images. Let's go back to value. And let's talk about these other options down here. Alright, let's go ahead and click Reset. Now, right here we have an option that says output levels. So the output level is a more advanced type of edit. And in most cases, you're not even going to touch the output levels. You're only going to adjust it based on your output device. So let's say you have an in-home printer that is not capable of outputting the extreme white and black points of the tonal range for a particular image. And instead, it can only output 0 to 245 levels. Some basically, with the output levels, you can adjust the tonal range to be smaller to match that output device. So in that case, you would take your white point marker here and adjust it so you now have a range of 0 to 240. And then you can make your adjustments to your white and you're black points accordingly. But the overall range is now limited to 2420. So if you take a look at the image now and slide this back to 255, you can definitely see that the image is brighter and that's because we have a wider tonal range from 240 to 255 that increases the waypoints and the dynamic range of the image. So overall, I would say this is probably something that you're never going to really work with unless you know, you're in home printer or your output device isn't capable of outputting all of those different levels. And then just below that, we have some additional algebra tools that will allow us to set the black point, the great point or the mid tones and the white point. And this is for all channels. So up here, you can do the same thing, all channels, or if you choose individual color channels, you can then choose those individual color channels with these eyedropper tools. But if you want to select all of them than you would use these icons down here. In most cases you're probably not going to use these. Either. It's just easier to use these or to adjust the white and the black point by adjusting the marker itself. And then over here to the left we have a button that says auto input levels. So this is going to automatically adjust the levels for all channels automatically. So let's try it out. Go ahead and click on it and boom, our image is edited. So sometimes it's going to give you great results, like we have right here. Sometimes it's not. So if you don't mind giving creative control to GIMP, you may want to try this out, but personally, I prefer to have creative control over my edits. Now if you take a look at this, it pretty much did what we did before. It increased the contrast and it made it warmer. And how did they do that? Well, let's go ahead and click Reset and adjust our black point to the right here, and then our white point over here. And I think this auto option, Ashley made it warmer. So I'm gonna go ahead and increase the red channel here. So I add more red to the overall image to warm it up. So that pretty much looks like what we got an auto and actually has more contrast. So the black point of the value channel here was probably a lot more intense than what I did. So either way, you now know all the different ways of editing your image with levels. Now there's one more thing down here at the bottom. It says, edit these settings as curves. So what does that mean? Well, we can actually take our edits inside of here and add them to another tool, which is our occurs tool. So we're gonna go ahead and take a look at that tool next. So if you're ready, let's do it. 37. Project 20: How To Boost Contrast with Curves Tool: Alright, we have one more color tool to cover in this section, which is curves. We're gonna go ahead and reuse this image again. So go ahead and find that image and open it up, and then go ahead and select curves from here. So our curves tool is very similar to our levels tool in terms of the type of edits that we can do. So just like levels, we can target our white and black points. We can target individual color channels, the red, green, and blue channels. And we can also target different tonal ranges of our image. The shadows, highlights, and mid tones, and there's some other things we can do as well. Now you may be wondering why are we going to use curves instead of levels of they do the same thing. Well, curves is actually much more powerful because it gives you much more precision and control versus levels. And I'll explain how in just a minute. But first let's go over our window here and take a look at all the different things that make up our curves tool. So just like levels, we have a histogram. We also have a grid that divides up the histogram into different sections, but the tonal ranges are the same. We have blacks over here, shadows, mid tones, highlights, and white points. We also have a diagonal line here that intersects the grid in the histogram that goes from the bottom left to the top right. And I'll explain what that's for in just a second. So up here we can select our different color channels. We can change how the histogram looks. And then down here we have a curve type which is smooth by default. And then here we have our inputs and our outputs for our white and black points. Now you may remember with levels we had three different markers along a horizontal line. We had our black point marker, midtone, and our white point marker. So with curves, it's a little different. We're going to make those adjustments along this linear line here. And we're going to bend the line in order to make our adjustments. Now, in order to make our adjustments for the white and black points, we're not actually going to bend it. Instead, we're going to move this point or this point in a direction of either left, down, right, or up. So down here we have our black point. So if we want to adjust the black point, just come over to this point and until you see this hand icon and then you can click and drag it in the direction they want based on what you're trying to achieve. I'm going to drag this over to the right until it reaches that point where the histogram begins. And we have an input of 15 and we can also adjust it this way as well. I'm going to actually make it 18. And then for the white point, same thing. Just click on this dot here or that anchor point and adjust it to whatever it is you need to do to adjust that edit. So we want to close the gap again. So I'm going to target this point here where the histogram ends and my input is 236. I'm gonna adjust this to make it 235. The output here is either going to be 255 or 0, depending on whether or not you want to adjust. The tonal range by making it smaller. So far everything is pretty much the same as levels in terms of how we edit and adjust things. We're just adjusting markers slightly differently. And now the fun begins because we're gonna come in here and we're going to bend this linear line in order to adjust our exposure. So if the image is too great or overexposed, we're going to click right here in the center of this linear line. So we're gonna click and drag down to make the image darker. And if we want to make it brighter, we're just going to drag it up. So this is where the curves tool gets its name because we're applying a curve along this linear line in order to make our edit adjustment. Again, not too much different from levels. But this is where it gets interesting and how you can control precisely where you want to apply your edits. We have an anchor point right here in the center, and we can add as many anchor points as we want along this linear line in order to manipulate that line, in order to get the edit that we want for our creative vision. So if we come up here and click right here, we get another anchor point. We can come down here and click another anchor point right there. And then we can click on these anchor points and move them in the direction that we want. So I'm gonna click and drag this one up. And I'm going to click and drag this one down. So by doing that, I can apply more contrast exactly where I want it, whether it's the highlights or the shadows in this case, down here is the Shadows appear, is the highlights. So if I don't want to add contrast and the highlights, I can actually bring this back down and level it out to remove contrast in the highlights. So I can come in here and add a couple more anchor points if I want to. And manipulate this part of the tonal range to add more contrast in this area or make it darker, or make it brighter and that area. So I can adjust the shadows and highlights by applying anchor points along this linear line where I need them in order to get the edit that a one based on my creative vision. Let's go ahead and reset this because I want to show you one of my favorite types, curve edits. And that is known as an S curve. So we're going to click right here and drag up on the highlights. And then down here in the shadows, we're going to click and drag down. And this creates what is known as an S curve because it kinda looks like an S. So this adds an equal amount of contrast and the highlights and the shadows and makes our images pop. How cool is that? Again, you may want to adjust your white and black points according to your own creative vision. I'm gonna go ahead and adjust these and maybe make my S curve a little bit bigger. The bigger the S curve, the more contrast you're going to add to your image. Just like with levels, we can target our individual color channels. So if we want to remove a color cast, we can select whichever color we need to remove. Let's select green. And now we get a green linear line and we have a white as curved behind it still. And that's that S curve that we just created. So to add green, we just drag up. To remove green, we drag down and then adds more red. So you can use this to remove your color cast, very similar to what we did and levels. But again, we can target just the shadows because maybe there's no green and the highlights, it's all in the shadows or, and vice versa. So what I would do in that case is I would leave an anchor point in the middle right here. And then I would begin removing green just from the highlights. How cool is that? So now the shadows are not being affected, only the highlights. So this is a great way to target color cast that may be in only one part of the tonal range. Let's go back to value and you're going to see three lines now. So this purple one is the original RGB channel that you had before you've created your S curve. And then the green one of course, is the green channel. Alright, let's go ahead and reset this. I'm gonna go ahead and show you one more thing. And we're gonna come up here to colors and select levels. Because there's one thing that I briefly mentioned before and that's applying edits to the settings as curves. So we're gonna come in here and adjust our black and white points. And then we're going to click on edit these settings as curves. And then do your curves tool will pop up and then you'll notice that your linear line is adjusted based on the black and the white points that you set and levels. But the question is, why would you go to levels when you can definitely do that in curves? So I would skip levels altogether and just use Curves. So the lesson of this section is we have a lot of different tools to make edits. For our images. You just have to decide on which one is best for you. And for me, personally, curves is the best of the best because we have the precision and control to create exactly what we want for our creative vision. And pretty much all the different tools are all combined into curves. So personally, I would just recommend using curves, but that's entirely up to you. Just use whatever you think will work best for you. Alright, we are almost done with part one of our color tools. There's one more thing I want to cover before we move on. And you may have noticed that we didn't cover something or maybe you saw something in every tool that we learned about in this section that we didn't really talk about. And that's up here, it says preset. So in the next lesson, I want to explain what the presets are used for and how you can use them to improve your post-production workflow. So if you're ready to learn all about that, let's do it. 38. How To Create Presets For Your Color Tools: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're going to cover one more thing in this section before we move on. And if he had noticed every single one of these tools that we learned about in this section have something in common, and it's right here at the top of every single tool. It's called presets. So I'm gonna go to my curves tool here so I can show you how this works. So what is a preset? While a preset is a configuration of editing settings that you apply to a tool that you can then save and reuse for future edits. So a preset is basically saving all the edits that you apply to an image so you can apply it again to another image in the future. So why would you want to do that? Well, you create an edit and it's perfect. It's awesome. And you say, You know what? I could reuse these settings again on future images because they plan on shooting under the same type of conditions. And that case, instead of coming in here and readjusting these manually from scratch, you can save this setting and reapply it to other images. So let me show you how this works. In fact, GIMP is automatically saving any settings that you use while you edit. We come up here and click on presets. We can see I have saved settings going back to June 25th. If I click on it, it will update those Edit Settings according to what I last used on that date. How cool is that? This is going to greatly improve your post-production workflow by streamlining your workflows so you don't have to do everything from scratch. Now the other thing is instead of just relying on Gimp to save those last used settings, you can actually save your settings manually. So I have my S curve here, I have my black and white point set. So I want to save this for another image. So I have to do is come up here and click on this icon and give it a name. I'm gonna call it S curve. Click OK. Let's go ahead and reset. And then we just come back up here to presets. Scroll down and select the one that you want already have 2S curves. So I'm gonna go ahead and select this one that I just created and then it's applied to that image. Pretty awesome if you ask me. So you wanna make sure that you're utilizing all the tools and Gimp to help you streamline your workflow and increase your productivity when editing. And by applying those same settings to future images that are shot under the same conditions. You're also editing consistently, so you're getting the same style and the same look for every photo. And you don't have to worry about trying to match your previous edits. Alright, so that's it for part one of our color tools. In part two, we're gonna take a look at our color invert tools. So if you're ready to learn all about that residue. 39. Project 21: Creative Edits: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so this is part two of our color tools. And in this section we're going to cover three tools to invert the colors of your images. So these types of edits, I would consider a creative type of edit and you're either going to love them or not. Personally, I don't have much use for them for my artwork. However, you may find a use for them based on your creative vision. So let's check them out. Alright, so the first option is called invert. So invert is going to, well, it's going to invert all the pixel colors and brightness values in the current layer as if the image were converted into a negative. So you're dark areas are going to become bright, and then the bright areas are going to become dark. Then the hues are going to be replaced with their complimentary colors. So this is the original, and then this is the invert edit. All right, so next we have the linear inverts. So linear invert is very similar to the first option invert. However, the color saturation is more muted in the overall image, is more washed out or brighter versus the first at it. So here's the linear invert. Alright, so our third type of invert is called value invert. Again, this option is similar to invert in how it alters the brightness. However, the colors are not being changed like the first edit. So here is value invert. Alright, so there you have it. Three different ways to change or invert your colors and the brightness of your images. Now it's your turn. That's a little homework time. Grab a couple of images and apply these different inverts on your images and see if it's something that you can use in your own artwork. Alright, so that's pretty much it for part two. It was quick and easy. Next up in part three, we have six more colored tools to cover, along with multiple options in each. So if you're ready to learn all about more color tools, love to do it. 40. Part 3: Intro To GIMPs Color Tools: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so this is part three of her color tools, and there's a lot of them to go over. In fact, there's 34 different color tools that we have to cover in this section. Now, the good thing is they are grouped together into six common types of colour tools. Now, a couple of those groups we can cover in one lesson, the others, we're going to cover the color tools for that group into individual lessons. So if you're ready to learn more about our color tools, loved to do it. 41. Let GIMP Auto Edit For You?: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so the first color group that we're going to cover in this section is auto. So for this particular group, we can cover this all in one lesson. And that's because the options here are pretty much self-explanatory. The options are going to automatically edit your images. So basically, you're handing over creative control of your edits to Gimp. So if you prefer to have creative control and do your own type of edits than he may want to skip this particular lesson. But let's go ahead and cover all six different Auto options right now so you can grab any image you want. Doesn't really matter because if we're not going to do any real editing, we're just going to learn about how these tools effect or images and the type of edits that they're applying. So here are first one is equalized and it's going to automatically adjust the contrast of your image. So once you select that, you're going to notice a big change on your image. In this case, the contrast levels have been equalized in the highlights and the shadows and the image becomes brighter and flatter. So again, that's not something that I would really do myself. I would prefer to do my own contrast adjustments. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that with Command or Control and the letter Z, or just come up here to Edit and select Undo from here. Our next one will adjust the white balance automatically for us. Again, the computer is going to try and figure out the color balance that you want as a photographer, as an artist. So it may or may not choose the correct white balance based on your creative vision. Let's go ahead and undo that again with Command or Control and the letter Z. Next we have stretch contrast and stretch contrast, H, S, V. So these two edges can be used on images that are very over or underexposed or have little amounts of contrast. So it's going to again, try and improve the contrast in your image. And then the one below it, HSV, is going to affect the contrast again. But it's not going to affect the colors in your image as much as the other one is going to preserve the colors much better than we have. Color enhance and color enhance legacy. So basically they're going to do the same thing, except the legacy is based on an algorithm from an older version of gimp. So if you've used these in the past and you like the option you had in an older version, you can choose the legacy option. So basically it's going to stretch the color saturation or the chroma to cover the maximum possible range and keeping the hue and the lightness untouched with this option, this one is just mostly focusing on stretching the color saturation in your images. So again, these are automatic settings that you're going to let GIMP make decisions for you creatively. Alright, so those are the six different colour tools we have in the auto group. It's something you're going to have to explore on your own with your own images to see if he liked the edits that Gimp gives you. But as you become more experienced with editing and amp, I would recommend taking that creative control back and applying at its tier images manually based on the knowledge that you're gaining in this course. Alright, so next step we have another color tool group called components. And this one is also made up of six different types of color tools. So we're going to cover these probably in individual lessons. So let's go ahead and get started on the first one, which is channel mixer. 42. Project 22: Develop Your Own Creative Editing Style: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we now have the components of our colored tools. And there's a total of six colored tools in this group. Now, these tools are primarily used for converting your images from color to black and white. However, the channel mixer can be used for some creative color effects as well. So we're gonna go ahead and start with this 1 first and then we'll cover the other ones in the next lesson. So we're going to use this image here, which is 01, and it can be found in your section ten folders. So go ahead and open up that image and we'll go ahead and get started. Now before we access the channel mixer in edit with it, I first want to make this image POP because they find overall, it's pretty flat. So I'm going to come up here to colors, scroll down to curves, and we're going to select my preset. If you made a preset, then you can go ahead and select yours. I'm going to select this first one here, S curve. And Boehm, I now have an image with a lot more contrast. So if you didn't create that preset from that section when we went over creating presets, you may want to go over that lesson now and go ahead and create an S-curve, adjust your black and white points accordingly, and then go ahead and click here to save you are preset. Either way, I'm gonna go ahead and go with that. And now we're going to go up two colors, components and select channel mixer. So from here we can target each of the different color channels, red, green, and blue. We can then target those color channels within that specific red channel. So right now the red in the red channel is set to one. So phi set these other two, 2-0 and let's go ahead and do that. It's going to remove the blue and the green in that image and your left with read only. And I'll go ahead and reset that because that's not what I wanna do. What I wanna do is I want to give it kind of a washed out Instagram type of effect. So what we're going to do for that is we're going to increase the redness a little bit. Then we're gonna come down here and increase the blue and increase the green and the blue here as well. And that kind of gives it a pink overtone or a pink overlay. So we can continue adjusting this to our liking. Maybe we want it brighter so we can increase the blue and the green channel. Or maybe we want to add more pink will just add more green and the blue channel. Or we can increase the red. So you can basically adjust this based on your own creative vision. But this gives you another option to come up with a creative type of edit that we haven't really talked about in previous lessons. Now this is only one type of creative edit we can do. There's unlimited possibilities when you adjust the different color channels. Alright, so now it's your turn to practice with the channel mixer on your own images. Go ahead and play around with all the different color channels in different combinations. And try and come up with your own signature creative style. Once you're done with that, in the next lesson, we're going to cover all of the other components in one lesson. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 43. Project 23: Create a Unique B&W Conversion 1: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're going to go ahead and finish up our components group by covering the other five color tools in this group. And these first four right here, extract through decompose, are going to convert your image into a black and white image with different variations and different ways to customize your black and white edit. So we're going to use this image here, which is number two, and it can be found in your section ten folder. So go ahead and find that and open it up. And we're gonna go ahead and take a look at this first one here, extract component. So this tool is going to extract the color based on the components. So in other words, the Color channel or these other different color modes here. So RGB, red is displaying. The red color is more prominently than the other colours because the red channel is only going to have colors that are in the red color range. If we turn off our preview, we can see that the image has more blue than red or green, even though we do see a lot of red here in her face here, it's mostly blue. So if we change this to RGB blue, then the black and white will be much more brighter and show a lot more detail in the face because it's displaying those colors, those blue colors in a shade of gray. So green is going to be darker. And then read, of course, is mostly just going to show the red colors. So we can go through here and pick one of these other options as well to get different results. So this is something you're going to have to play with with your own images and experiment to see if there's something in here that you can use for your own artwork. Alright, let's go ahead and cancel out of that. And let's check out the next component, which is mono mixer again is going to convert it to black and white. But we do have an option for tweaking the black and white edit with the individual red, green, and blue channels. But these are going to be applied at slightly different reverses the last tool. So if we increase the red channel here, it's going to make those colors much brighter. We can make them darker by going to the left. Then with our green channel, same thing, brighter or darker, blue, brighter or darker. So he can get some pretty cool effects with this. Again, you're going to have to experiment with this and try and come up with your own formula for your own creative vision. Alright, let's cancel out of that one. Next we have compose. Now compose is grayed out by default. And in order to use this one, you need to convert the color mode to grayscale. So right now if we go up to image mode, we can see it's set to RGB. If we select greyscale, Well, our image converts to a grayscale image. And then under the components we have Compose is now available to use. So from here, what we need to do is we need to select each one of these color channels that we want to work on and select mask value. Then you would come over here to this slider here to make adjustments or to type in a number here. And this is going to affect the black and white color channel based on the tonal range that you set for it. So right now, instead of 0 to 255, it's now 0 to 157 for that tonal range. The only problem with this tool is we don't have a preview button, so we have no idea what we're going to get until we click. Okay, so it's kinda hit and miss type of tool and it's going to take awhile to try and figure out how to use this particular tool for your creative vision. You can also change the color model as well. So right now we have RGB by default, and we can choose one of these other colour models to try and come up with something unique. But like I mentioned, we have no idea what we're going to get until we click. Okay. So that's what we end up with, just what that one minor adjustment. So you can play around with it and try and come up with something on your own. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that with Command or Control and the letter Z. Unfortunately, it's not working. And that's because once you apply that specific color tool, it actually applies it in a new document. So up here we have two tabs now, so we can actually close this out and we end up with our original document. So let's go ahead and undo that now with Command or Control and the letter Z. Alright, let's go back up to image mode and make sure we have RGB selected. We do so and now we can go back to components and select decompose. So decompose is going to take your individual color channels and extract them into three different layers are red layer, a green layer, and a blue layer. We also have some other options here as well, just like the previous tool. And then it will convert these colour models into three or more layers based on the one you choose. So if we click okay, camp will do its magic. That will open up the edit and a new document. And then you have access to your red, green, and blue channels. From here you can rearrange the layers if you want, and adjust the opacity to come up with different creative options. All right, so before we close this one out, let's go ahead and take a look at the next one, which is recomposed. So recomposes supposed to take these three layers and convert them back into color. The only problem is I can't get it to work. So even if I put these back in the proper order, if I go back and select recompose, It's not really doing anything, but I'm not quite sure why we would need that when all we have to do is go back to our original document since we still have it. And we can always save this as a separate file so that we don't lose our original. Alright, so that's it for our components color tools. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at our D saturate colored tools. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 44. Project 24: Create a Unique B&W Conversion 2: All right, so next up we have our desaturate group of color tools. And we have four different color tools here. And each of them is going to give us different variations of black and white images. So we're going to cover all of these in this lesson. I think what we'll do is we'll create a section just for black and white edits where we can go in and cover these black and white tools in the saturate and components in more detail with some different creative type of edits. For now we're just going to cover the basics. So let's go ahead and continue using this image here and we're going to select Color to gray. So this particular color tool is going to take a long time to process and preview. So it all depends on the speed of your computer. And my computer in fact, really isn't that old, it's only about five years old, and I have 32 gigabytes of RAM. But as you can see, it's processing this edit very, very slowly. So I'm gonna go ahead and pause and speed up this part of the tutorial. So overall, this black and white edit isn't really all that bad. It's kind of creative and has an artsy field to it. Kinda looks like maybe a charcoal drawing or actually a pencil drawing. So if you ever need that type of effect, you may want to take a note of this and your Gimp essentials guide on which tool you can use to convert your images into a pencil drawing. Now the outer edges here aren't that great. It's pixelated, so it's not really converting pure black into the pencil drawing. But overall, if you have enough tonal range in your image, you should be able to get something like this. And of course you're going to adjust and tweak the edit with these different options here the only problem is it's going to restart the process of applying these new edits. And you're going to have to wait again for it. So you're going to have to have some patients with this particular tool to find a setup that you like. But as you know, once you find something that you like, you can create a preset for it and then you don't have to worry about previewing it later on. So I just turned it off and now it's going to have to go through that entire process again to show the preview. Alright, so let's not do that. Let's go ahead and cancel out or that. So go ahead and try that out on your own images. All right, so next up we have the saturated, which is basically going to remove the saturation from the image and all three color channels. Then we can adjust the mode based on these different options here. So these are basically going to increase or decrease the brightness of your black and white conversion. So let's cancel out of that and check out the next one. So we have model mixer next. Now you may be wondering why we have a motto mixer in D saturate because we just went over that in the components mode. And if you take a look at the mono mixer under the saturate, it's pretty much exactly the same as components. So I'm not sure if this is just a duplicate that the developers didn't realize they were doing by placing it into two different groups. Or maybe there is a slight variation of this Mano mixer versus the one under components. I'm not really seeing much of a difference, so we'll go ahead and skip that. Now let's take a look at CPM. So Cp is going to apply an old-school brown tint or a sepia tent to your overall image. Now by default we have extra strength set to the strongest. And if we dropped a Stan, we can kinda tone that CPO effect and mix it in with the colors beneath it. Now, for this particular image, I'm not liking the sepia tone, so let's go up to File and open up a previous image that we use. I'm going to try this one here. And let's go back to our CPI option here. And again we have full strength. Again, that's classic, that's pretty much old school. Kinda boring. But check this out. If we drop this down to around half, kinda gives it a little bit of a cream undertone or a cream overlay. And it has a nice soft effect to it. And again, it's still old school and retro, but I prefer the strength setting here versus set at full strength. So you may want to play around with this at different strength levels based on the images that you have and try and find out what works for your images. Alright, so that is it for D saturate. In the next lesson, we're going to start working on our map color tools. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 45. Project 25: Rearange Your Colors: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so the next few lessons we're going to cover the map color tools. Now this first color tool we're going to use in the map color tool group isn't really working for me at the time of this recording, but I still want to go through and show you how it works. And if you find that it's working for you at the time that you watch it, then please message me, send me a Q and a message and let me know that it's working for you. So I can go ahead and rerecord this video. So let me show you how this works real quick. So we're gonna go up to colors, map, and select, rearrange, but we can't because it's grayed out. So what we need to do is we need to convert the image to a different color mode. So let's go up to image mode and select indexed. We get this big message here asks IS what to do next? Just keep everything set to the default. Because what we wanna do is we want to change or convert from RGB to indexed color, which is just a different color mode and provides a different color range as well. So we're going to ahead and click convert. And then we can go back up to colors and map once it's done. So let's do that. Colors map, and now we can select rearrange Colormap. So with this tool, what we're going to do is we're going to grab one of the 256 different colors in the color range, and we're going to rearrange them. So we're basically taking these colors and the pixels associated with them. We're going to move them throughout the photo. And we're just basically you're rearranging pixel colors into different parts of the image. So I'm just gonna do a couple more here and then we'll take a look at what we get after rearranging. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and click OK. And nothing, so nothing happens on my end at this time. So might be a bug. Hopefully by the time you are watching this, it's working for you. But if you take a look right here at my thumbnail, we can actually see what happened to the actual image and we can see that the pixels were rearranged within the image. So just another creative option for you, for your editing of your images. If you're looking for something different, you may want to check this out and try it out for yourself. And again, please let me know if it's working for you so I can go ahead and update this video. 46. Project 26: Color Transformation: Alright, so I have a gimp up and running again, and we're going to use the same image for our nice color tool, which is in the map group and its called Alien map. Now, alien map is going to heavily changed the colors and our image. Alright, so let's check it out. Go ahead and click on alien map and boom. All right, so that's pretty funky. I'm not really sure what you would call it. Maybe it's contemporary arts are a contemporary image, whatever you wanna call it, definitely different. So we have red, green, and blue here that we can adjust. We can also shift the colors with these options here, you can also select to keep the red, green, and blue components as well. So this is going to tone it down a little bit. So you may want to try that out if it's a little bit too intense for you. So the only thing I can suggest is to grab some of your own images and to play around with the different settings here to see if you can come up with something creative for your own personal preference. And of course, we want to create a preset of any settings that we create here because it's going to be hard to duplicate it in the future if you find something you like and you don't remember all of these different settings that you applied. I would love to see your finished artwork. So go ahead and post these in the Q and a section if you would care to share, and if you don't mind sharing your editing settings as well, so we can all learn from each other. That would be pretty awesome. Alright, so that's it for alien map. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how we can change colors with our color exchange color tool. All right, so if you're ready for that, let's do it. 47. Project 27: Color Exchange: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we have another fun-filled editing project to work on. So we're gonna take this image here, which is image number for located in your section tenfold, or go ahead and find it, opened it up. And what we're going to do is we're going to take her blue eyes and change them to purple or any color that you want. So now that you have that image open, let's go ahead and get started by working non-destructively by, that's right, duplicating the layer. Alright, let's go up to colors map and we're going to use the color exchange color tool. So go ahead and open that up. And the first thing we need to do is we need to target a specific color, in this case blue. And then we need to tell gap which color we want to change it to. And then we're going to use these red, green, and blue thresholds to fine tune our edit. Alright, so let's go ahead and get started. We can choose a color from our color palette here, or we can use our eyedropper tool to pick a color from our image, which I'm going to do. And I'm going to click right about here to get this light blue color. So this color right here, if you want to use the exact same color, here is the HTML number you need to type in. Go ahead and click OK, and you'll have the same color. Alright, so now we're going to choose the color we want to change it to. And I'm going to use this nice little purple color right here. Alright, so nothing has happened yet. And that's because we need to adjust how much of that color range is going to be affected by our new color. So we're just going to click in here to get us started. And boom, we now have purple eyes. How cool is that? So you may need to adjust or tweak your edits based on your image and the colors in the image and the colors you're changing too, in order to get better results. So I'm just gonna go ahead and play around with these sliders here until I come up with some settings here that I'd like. So you can see now that I've increased the red threshold, it's picking more colors from the image and increasing the red colors in that area. And that's why we duplicated are layer so we can remove the edit from this area with our Layer Mask, which we'll do in just a second. I'm gonna go ahead and bring the red down just a little bit. So I think I'm liking these settings here. Go ahead and adjust according to your own personal taste, and then go ahead and click OK. All right, so let's go ahead and remove the edit from the entire image by adding a layer mask in black. So you may remember that black removes and white ands gland click and, and our colors are now gone. So as you know, we need to paint with white now. So set your foreground color to white and select a brush. Go ahead and resize your brush about the same size as the I. I'm actually gonna go into my Tool Options here and just make it a little bit smaller. So right around 290. And now I can go ahead and click in here and begin painting that purple into her eyes. How cool is that? Love it. Alright, so once upon a time she had blue eyes and now she has Purple, her headset. And now it's your turn to practice with this image. And then go ahead and grab some of your own images and play around with some different colors, post them on social media and see what kind of response he, it should be pretty fun. Alright, now that we are done with color change, we are now going to work on a new lesson for changing colors. And it's pretty awesome as well. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 48. Project 28: Multiple Colors For 1 Product: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we have another fun-filled editing project. Again, we're going to take some colors and change them to something else. So this time we're gonna take this image which we've used previously, its image number three, go ahead and find it and open it up. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the yellow hoodie and change it to a different color. In fact, I'm gonna show you how to quickly change the color to multiple different colors. For example, let's say you have a product that you want to sell, a hoodie and you want to sell it in different colors, but you don't necessarily want to create that product until you make some sales. Or maybe you're a graphic designer and you're working on a project for a client that wants their product, their hoodies or their t-shirts or whatever, change to different colors. Or maybe you just took a photo in a alphabet that you didn't like the color of. You can quickly change that color with this next tool. So let's go ahead and open up this image. And as you know, we need to work non-destructively. So we're gonna go ahead and create a duplicate layer. Let's call it blue. Alright, now let's go up to colors, map and select rotate colors. Now, just like color exchange in the last lesson, we need to tell GIMP which color we want to change, and then we need to tell gamma which color we want to change it to. But unlike color exchange, where we picked one color in Rotate colors, we're going to select a range of colors. So we can either use the sliders here or we can use the color wheels over here. And this is what we're going to use because it's a lot easier and it's a lot more fun. The other thing we have is an option down here to change some of our colors to gray scale. And you can actually increase the gray threshold to plus one here, and that will pretty much remove all the colors. We're not really going to use this option here in this lesson. We may explore it later on. Alright, so the first thing we need to do is tell GIMP the colors in the hoodie that we want to target. So we have lots of yellows and oranges and maybe a little bit of red. So what we're going to do is we're going to click on this arrow and drag it to the yellow color and the color wheel. And then we have a nice range of colors here, from yellow to orange to red. So that's our target. Now, our destination or the color we want is going to be blue. So let's drag this arrow this way and this arrow this way. And now we have a selection or a range of blue between these two arrows. I have preview turned off, so that's why we're not seeing anything yet. So let's go ahead and turn it on and see if we end up with a blue hoodie. That's not exactly blue. So what happened? Well, if we take a look at this color wheel up here, we have this range of colors which we're targeting. And we can see a little arch on the inside. Here, the arches on the outside. So instead of targeting and between these two arrows, we're targeting the outer arrows. So all these colors and here are being added to the hoodie, her height. So we need to click and drag this arrow around, and then this one over here. And then our hoodie should update and turn blue. And their ego, we now have a blue hoodie. The only problem is our subject is now blue as well, but that's why we created a duplicate layer. So we can add a Layer Mask and work non-destructively. So let's go ahead and do that. Go ahead and click OK and your Layer Mask. And we want to add a black layer mask so we can remove the edit entirely. Now with our brush, we're going to paint with white over the hoodie to bring that color back. And now we're just going to trace around the image here inside of the hoodie so that we can apply that edit directly where we want it. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time doing this and making it perfect. I recommend just spending a little bit more time than I am to resize your brush as needed to get along the edges and only select the items that need to be changed. So I'm doing a pretty bad job here, but you get the idea. All right, so we're now going to quickly change this to another color. Let's come down here and duplicate the layer. Make sure you click on the image thumbnail. Otherwise it's not going to work. Now we're gonna go back to colors, map, and rotate colors. And we're going to target the blue colors as the source. And boom, we are now back to a yellow hoodie. But we want to go ahead and change this to whatever color we want. Maybe we want pink, Maybe we want purple or something in between blue and purple. Maybe we want teal and go ahead and bring this up. Actually, I have that outer circle on the outside now, so I need to bring this arrow around. And there we go. I now have a nice teal color. Let's come up here and change it to pink. So there you go. That's how you create multiple colors very quickly. How cool is that? All right, so go ahead and practice changing colors on this image and then go ahead and apply this technique to your own photos. 49. Project 29: Gradient Map: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so next up is the gradient map. Let's go ahead and grab image number five from our section ten folder. And let's go ahead and try it out. So under colors map, you'll find gradient map here. So go ahead and select that. And boom, the Gradient Map has replaced the colors and our image based on the gradient type we selected and the color is for that particular gradients. So your gradient map probably applied different colors versus what I'm showing right now because of the gradient that was selected. So if we take a look at our gradient tool option here, which is under Windows, double guides and gradients right here. So go ahead and select that. And you'll see a bunch of pre-made gradients provided by GIMP, or maybe you made some of your own. So anytime we come in here and select one of these and apply the gradient map, it's going to apply those colors based on that particular gradient. I'm gonna go ahead and undo this because if we want to replace it with a different type of gradient, we have to undo it and start over, or better yet to create a duplicate layer to work on that versus the original. I'm just going to go up here and select a different one. I'm gonna select blue this time. Colors map. And it's going to replace the colors again based on those colors and that gradient. So a completely different effect. Again, we need to go through some different gradients and experiment with their own images to get a better idea of the type of effects we can use. This is kinda the modern type of edit and it could probably used for a graphic design project. Not sure if it would be something I would use as a photographic print. Maybe that's something that you want to create on your own. Maybe you can do three different colors side-by-side and do a print of something like that. It's entirely up to you and again, based on your creative vision. So go ahead and grab some of your own images and play around with some different ingredients and check out the Gradient Map in more detail. 50. Project 30: Palette Map: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're going to go ahead and reuse this image again. And we do have another type of map color tool called palette map. So palate map is going to be very similar to gradient map in that it's going to change the colors in your image based on the palette you select. So let's go up to Windows, double dialogues, and select pellets from here to get a list of all the different palettes that we have available. And just like the gradients, we do have a bunch pre-made by gamma by default. So a preset is a set of colors saved into a palette that can then be accessed later on depending on the project that you're working on. Maybe you need specific colors for a specific project. And you can select all those different colors or create your own palette. And then for this particular project, what we're going to do is apply a set of colors to replace the colors and our image. I'm gonna go ahead and select gold. And then when we go up two colors, map and select palate map, just like the Gradient Map, it's going to replace those colors with the colors in the palette. So once again, something that you're going to need to experiment on your own. A different palettes that come available with Gimp and try them out on your own images. Alright, so that's it for pilot map. We have one more map color tool and that is sample colorized. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 51. Project 31: Sample Colorize: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we're gonna go ahead and use this image one more time for our last color tool in our map group, which is sample colorize. So sampled colorize is going to take a black and white image and converted to color, not like this, but more of a color overlay or color tint. So if you start off with a color image like we are here, and it's going to automatically turn it into a black and white image. So if you want a custom black and white edit, I would go ahead and do that before you begin using this particular tool. Then you need to choose from gradient or reverse gradient. So this is going to apply the gradient that you have selected in your Gradient tool options here. If you want to use a different gradient, you need to close out, select that gradient and then come back in. If you try and reset and choose something else, it doesn't seem to work that way, so you have to close it, re-select and then reopen. So right now what I need to do is I need to apply this edit to my image by clicking on apply. And then when I click Close, I have my final, It's based on that gradient that I had selected. I believe I had Brown's selected previously. So once again, we're going to have to experiment with different gradients and our own images in black and white to come up with different types of creative artwork. And to better learn how this particular colour tool works on our images and our creative vision. 52. Part 4: Intro To GIMPs Color Tools: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so part four of our color tools, this is the last section on this topic. So we have a few more colored tools to learn about. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 53. Project 32: Photographic Cutout: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so for this section we are going to use this image. It's image number four and it's located in your section 11 folder. So go ahead and find it, opened it up, and we'll go ahead and get started on our next color tool, which is threshold. So a threshold is going to convert your image into a black and white image, but it's not going to be a true black and white photographic image. Instead, it's going to convert it to two main colors, black and white. So let's check it out. Go ahead and click on threshold and boom. You now have a piece of art if you want, call it art, converted to two main colors. So this particular tool has a couple of purposes. One, and in this case, if you want to create a piece of art that looks like a cutout from a photographic image, then this is one option. The other option is a more advanced option and we're going to talk about that in a future section. In fact, it's going to be in the selecting section. So check that out later on in the course. So for now, let's go ahead and tweak our edit here a little bit because maybe we wanna get rid of some of this detail up here or down here. Now it does look like gray. It's just the way the pixels are arranged within the image at this point. So we can adjust or edit our tweak by adjusting this middle marker. And if we go to the right, it's going to add more black and it gets rid of that detail or that shading that was there previously. Now down here we have more shading. So we can go to the left in order to remove it, but we end up adding it back appears. So you just need to find a balance between the top and the bottom, at least for this image, until you're happy with the results. But you could create another layer, which we should have done. So we can work non-destructively and create a layer mask on it and then make adjustments to that layer mask. Or you could actually go in with your eraser tool and erase this area here if you want it to be pure white and to look more like a cut out, instead of having all this shading or detail in this area. All right, so let's go ahead and cancel out of that, and that's it for our threshold. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at the colorize color tool. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 54. Project 33: Colorize Your Photo: Hello and welcome back. Alright, we are now going to take a look at our colorize color tool. But first let's go ahead and duplicate our layer. Let's go up to colors and select colorize. Now what this is going to do is it's going to colorize our image and add an overlay or a color tint to the entire image. It's pretty cool actually, and we can do some cool creative things with it as well. So let's go ahead and check it out. And boom, we now have a colorized image. So we can adjust this edit with these three sliders here. We can change the color as you know with Hugh, we can increase or decrease the color saturation and I'm going to bring it down. And then we can make it lighter or darker as well. I'm going to make mine lighter. And then you can come over here and select another color. If you don't get the color you want from the hue adjustment. Or you can grab your eyedropper tool here to select a color from the image. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on here, and I'm gonna change this to a green color. Actually I'm gonna do, let's do blue right there. And I'm going to make it brighter. And that kinda has a newsprint type of feel to it. So that's one creative type of edit that you can do with colorized. Now it's your turn to experiment and come up with your own unique artwork using colorize. 55. Project 34: Posterize Your Colors: Alright, we're now going to work on our next color tool, which is pasteurize. Now I still have my duplicate layer from the last lesson. So if you don't go ahead and duplicate the layer, so pasteurize is going to reduce the number of colors in your image. So as you know from previous lessons, we have a range of 256 colors. So we can use this particular tool to reduce that color range down to however many levels we want, we could create a colour image with five levels versus 256 or 100 levels, whatever you wanna do. So let's go ahead and click on it and boom, we now have an image converted to just three levels of color, which is the default option. So we can make this even lower if we want to, is the minimum. And then you can go hire based on your creative vision. So I'll go ahead and grab somebody, your images and play around with this and see if this is something that you can add to your tool kit for creating your own unique artwork. Alright, so that's it for pasteurize if you're ready to get started in the next lesson, let's do it. 56. Project 35: Old-School Retro Effect: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so for this edit we're gonna do something a little different. We're going to create an old-school greenie type of effect. Now, back in the day when you printed images on paper based on the film that you used, would determine how much grain was actually seen and that photographic print, the faster the film speed, the more grain there was in the image. And we're gonna kinda recreate that type of effect with this particular edit. So we're gonna use this image again. We're going to duplicate the layer. Then we're going to go up two colors and select dither to create that grain. Once it loads up, nothing happens. So what we need to do is we need to adjust our red, green, and blue levels, as well as our alpha levels to increase or decrease the amount of dithering. So the color channels here are the levels of colors are going to increase or decrease that particular color and the image to change the grain within it or the overall tenor of the image. So you can fine tune your edit based on your creative vision. So right now the reason why we're not seeing anything is because of these settings and the dithering method selected. So we have Floyd Steinberg selected by default. If we click right here, you're going to notice a bunch of different options, each of which is going to give you a different creative results based on your settings up here. So if we select None, we actually see something that's kinda funky. Not sure if it's a very useful. So let's go ahead and select random instead. And that's going to create that grainy type of effect. Kinda hard to see right now. You may have to zoom in to see it. But let's go ahead and increase the alpha levels a little bit higher here. And then let's introduce some red to the image as well. And now we have a nice red color cast to the image, which kinda completes this old school greenie type of effect. Because you may have noticed if you've ever gone to your grandparents and you've looked through their photo albums. Sometimes those images may fade over time depending on the chemicals used and the quality of the paper that the image was printed on. So they may fade to red to orange or some other color. And you can kinda recreate that with these different color levels. So if you want to introduce a little green or a little blue, you can do that as well. Now I have a purple tint versus red. Alright, now it's your turn to grab a couple of your own images and come up with your own unique creative style based on the different settings here that you want to apply based on your creative vision. All right, so once you're done with that, I'll see you in the next lesson. 57. Paint Tools Intro: Hello and welcome to the paint tool section. And this section we're going to cover the paint tools for editing our photos. In total, there are 14 different kinds of paint tools, however, only six of those are used for retouching. A couple of them we've used earlier in the course, but we're going to cover them again to learn different types of retouching challenges and how to use them. Now as far as the other eight paint tools, they're used mainly for graphic design, drawing and painting. So we're going to cover those later on in the course. For now, let's go ahead and get started on retouching with our paint tools by taking another look at our he'll tool and our Clone tool in the next lesson. So if you're ready, let's do it. 58. Project 36: Remove Objects + People: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so we've covered these next two tools briefly in a previous lesson. We're gonna cover them both in this lesson again, and we're going to expand on what we learned. So for this project, let's say you're on vacation, you take this awesome photo of, let's say, a landscape and you decide there's something in the photo like people that you don't know and you want to get rid of them because maybe you want to print out an enlargement for your home. Well, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily removed them with both the clone and healing tool. So if you're ready, let's go ahead and get started. All right, so this is the image we're going to use for this retouching the lesson. And it is image number one and it's located in our section 12 folder. So what we're going to do is we're going to read, touch this image by removing these two people, devote their reflection and the water ripple that they're creating what their boat right here. We're going to use to painting tools to do that. And when we're done, it's going to look like this. So boom, everything is now gone. Pretty cool. So let me show you how we do this. So the to paint tools, we're going to use our clone and hill and both of these tools are over here on our toolbar as well. So we have our column tool and our healing tool. Now the healing tool we did use any previous lesson, but I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to use them in conjunction with each other to remove anything and amp. So let's go over both tools so we can see how both of them apply edits to our images. Because even though there are going to take information from one part of our image to cover up another two, retouching it or remove it or whatever the case may be. They do apply the edit slightly differently. And sometimes we need to use both of them together in order to get the results that we wanted to, especially for an image like this. So let's take a look at our Clone tool first. So the clone tool is going to clone a source that you set, and it's going to copy those pixels to another part of the image based on where you paint. So it's a cloning tool. So the first thing we need to do is set a source for again, to use as the place where the pixels are going to come from and then it's going to copy those exact pixels. So a whole day on your command or control key and click on the area that you want to use as the source. Let's go ahead and duplicate this little hut right here and just click on it. So once you set your source, you're left with this little circle right here. And everything inside of it is going to be cloned. All the pixels of the colors, the texture, everything from those pixels is going to be copied. And then you can begin painting and another part of your image, and it's going to apply those pixels exactly in that location. The other thing is, as you begin adding brushstrokes, this little circle is going to mimic or mirror your brush strokes so that you can continue adding additional pixels from that area. So let's try it. I'm just going to come over here and click right about here and then begin painting around. And that HUD will begin being added as I apply brush strokes in this area. Now the only problem is it's not doing a very good job of blending it in with the water around it or the background itself. And that's because it's copying the pixels exactly. So we can see the background here is different from this background. And that's because it's an exact duplicate of this background over here. Same with the water here. So we have kind of a hard edge. Let's try our healing tool. So the same thing we need to set a source to use, to clone from or to cover up something. So we necessarily wouldn't use this as a cloning tools. It's just for demonstration purposes so we can see how this tool works. So hold down your command or control key and click and the center of the hot again and then begin painting over here and this area. So this time it's beginning to add that HUD again, but it's beginning to blend in everything around it a little bit better than it did before. So even though it's taking those pixels and the colors and the textures and the details still trying to blended in with the areas around it. And that's why it's not as dark as this one. And we can see that the background is blending in a lot better than it did over here, especially in the water. It's lot more natural-looking and blending in with the surrounding water. So sometimes one tool will work better than the other depending on what you're trying to read touch. Sometimes it's better to use both of them together, which we're going to do in this retouching lesson. So let's undo that with Command or Control and the letter Z. And what we wanna do first before we touch anything is, I'm pretty sure you remember this. That's right. We need to work non-destructively. So we're going to come over here and duplicate this layer. Let's begin with our Clone tool. And what we wanna do is set a source right here. So these pixels, the colors, and the texture, should be the same. And this area that we replace the boat with. So this is going to be our clone source. So click right here, hold down your command or control key before clicking. Once you click, you then set your source to be right there. Now we're just going to paint a couple times in this area. I'm just clicking and moving my brush, releasing and continue clicking in that area. So that didn't do that bad of a job. But if we zoom in here, I'm gonna go ahead and read my zoom tool with the letter z. If I zoom in here, we can see that there's a little bit of an edge right here and right here. And that's because the colors of the water up here and the texture are not blending in with this area here. And it's a little bit of a different color as well. Let's go back to our clung tool here. And I'm gonna go ahead and adjust my brush size, smaller so I can work with the brush tool in this area to remove both of the people on the boat. So I'm gonna set my source right here with command or control. Click. That's my source. And then I'm just going to click and paint this way. So you can see he's been duplicated down here and that's because my brushstroke went over the area that he was before. So I can go ahead and continue removing him by painting over him again. So again, we're seeing these little hard edges in different color variations from one side or the other. And that's because this tool is copying the pixels exactly and not trying to blend them in. So in this case, this is why we want to use bold tools. Because if we can then come in with our healing tool to try and blend in the water from both sides of the color variations here. So real quick, I just want to show you, I'm gonna grab my Healing Brush Tool. I'm going to click right here and I'm going to try and remove this part of the boat. It's really dark hair, so let's see what kind of results we get. So as you can see, it's not really doing a very good job either. And again, that's why we want to use different tools to get the job done. So now that this is all blended in, it's going to blend in much better once we go over those edges. But let's go ahead and continue removing everything with our Clone tool first. So I'm going to set a clone source right here and remove this part. And again, we want to try and match pixels around the area that we're covering up. The help bring in the details and the colors from that area to match the area that we are trying to cover up. So I'm gonna come back down here, set of source here, and just begin removing some of the boat down here or the reflection down here. I'm going to set another source here, move up here, another source here. So I'm just kinda going in half of the boat. So I'm gonna set a source here so I can begin removing this part of the water. So that looks pretty good. Alright, now we're gonna go in with our Healing Brush Tool, a set of source. Let's start over here on the left side and just begin painting up and down where this hard line is right here. I'm just going to paint up and down. And that's just kind of help blend the pixels with each other and create the same amount of texture and color and that area. And you can see it's already beginning to blend in with each other. Much better versus the clone tool by itself. Now we do have some texture in the waves here, so we want to grab some of that and maybe add some of that backup in here. Just to bring a little bit more detail backup in this area and a set of known or source down there. And I'm just going to continue going across until I'm happy with the result. And I'll go ahead and lower. 59. Project 37: How To Sharpen Your Photos: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so we're gonna take a look at three more editing tools. We have a blurred tools, sharpened tool and a smudge tool. And we're going to use those tools on this particular image here, which is image number two, which is located in your section 12 folder. So go ahead and open that up and we'll go ahead and take a look at these three paint tools there right here, blur, sharpen, and smudge. So on our toolbar, This is the blur and sharpened tool, and this is this much tool. So let's go ahead and select the blur and sharpened tool. And real quick, I just want to mention that there's a lot of stuff going on and the Tool Options here for this particular tool, as well as the smudge tool, the healing tool, and the clone tool, which we talked about in the previous lesson. And we didn't go over all the different options here because there are a lot of different options. And I didn't want to overwhelm you with too much information and just wanted to focus on those two tools in the previous lesson. And these tools, and this lesson versus all the different options, we're going to cover all these different options in more detail in the section on brushes. So for now we're just going to use the default settings and learn how and why we would use these particular tools for editing our images, blur and sharpen as well as smudge. So if we take a look at our options down here, we do have the blur and the sharpen tools. In one tool, there's not a separate tool. If you want to use one or the other, you just need to come in here and make sure you have the one that you want to use selected. So let's go ahead and work with the blur tool. First, I'm gonna go ahead and grab my zoom tool with the letter Z. And I'm going to zoom into her lips here. And then I'm just gonna go back here and select my blurred tool again. So what we wanna do is maybe we want to blur a specific part of an image to make it less visible or to change the depth of field, possibly. So what we could do with the blur tool is we can see she has some braces in here. So maybe this is a client of ours and she really doesn't want to braces as visible as they are now. So we can come in here. We need to get a small brush and when to use for, for the size. And then with our blurred tool we can come in here and the blur her braces so it's not as visible as it is right now. So that's one way to use the blur tool. Then what are sharpened tool? What I would use the sharpened tool for it is to definitely like to use it to sharpen eyelashes, eyebrows, eyes, things like that as well as lips, and possibly the hair as well. We want those to be more prominent, so I would make those sharper and it wouldn't necessarily use it on her face because that would then bring out additional details and blemishes and pores and things like that. So we don't want to make those as visible, say wouldn't really use it on the face, just in the eyes, lips, and hair. If I'm doing a portrait, if I'm doing a landscape, then I would apply the sharpened tool on parts of the image that I want to emphasize and have that part of the image stand out a little bit more versus the other. And then the blur tool, I would de emphasize different parts of the image in that regard. So that's how I would use blur and sharpen. So for her lips, I would just come in with a larger size that's a little bit too big. And then I would just come around and sharpen it. But what I would do is depending on the image and how sharp the images from the get-go are straight out of camera. I would come in and I would adjust the hardness and the force to tone down how much is actually being sharpened. And then you can build it up, make it sharper with additional passes with your brushstroke versus applying it all at once. Because in this instance it's actually too much. So this image is pretty sharp, straight out of cameras. So I really wouldn't use too much sharpening, if any, on this particular image. I would come in and apply it to the eyebrows and her eyelashes here and here. And that would be pretty much it. So that's how I would use the blur and sharpened tool. Now when it comes to the smudge tool, let's go ahead and grab that. This much tool is going to work very similar to the blur tool. And that is going to blur, but it's going to apply that particular edit a little bit different. What is going to do is it's going to take the pixels and basically it's going to smudge them or mixed them together. So like if you had a canvas of paint on it, you would smudge the paint together with your paintbrush. You kinda get the same effect with your smudge tool and it's going to smudge and make things look runny and okay, so this will create more of a smudge versus making a blurry. So the, the tools themselves are pretty self-explanatory based on how they're named. But until you actually start using them, you really don't get a feel for how they actually affect the pixels until you start applying them. So really no use for the smudge tool for retouching. You could use it for possibly reducing wrinkles or even wrinkles and clothing. You could use the smudge tool for something like that. But I really don't have any examples for you at this time. We may explore this particular tool in the future, but it's not a tool that I use a lot, but you may be able to find a use for it on your own just by experimenting with your own photos. So until we get into more advanced types of retouching, there's not a whole lot we can do with the smudge tool for this particular image. A really wouldn't use it at all. So I would just use the blur and the sharpened tool for this particular image. So what I would recommend now is to grab some of your own images and begin using the sharpening tool to sharpen and emphasize different parts of an image to help it stand out. And then the blur tool to de-emphasize and make it stand out less. That way you can create a little bit of separation between what you want to blur and what you want to have sharper. Alright, so that's it for blur sharpen and the smudge tool. In the next lesson, we're gonna take a look at the Dodge and Burn tool. So it's a pretty awesome tool. I like to use that one a lot, so I'll explain what it is and how to use it to reattach your images. So if you're ready for that, let's do it. 60. Project 38: Custom Edit: Hello and welcome back. Alright, so these next two editing tools in the paint tool section is Dodge and Burn. Now these two tools are tools that we used to use back in the day when we processed our film and wanted to print in a dark room. So we would Dodge and Burn. So what does that exactly mean? Well, you would dodge If you wanted part of that print to be brighter, you would burn. If you wanted to make part of that print darker. So Dodge and Burn is something that you can do to make your images darker or brighter in specific locations of your image. We can still use these particular tools in the digital world and just basically works the same way. It's just in digital form. So if you want to make a part of your image brighter, you're going to use the Dodge tool. If you want to make part of your image darker, you're going to use the Burn tool. So we're going to do this. So we can emphasize part of the image so that other parts are de-emphasized. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we can use this particular Dodge and Burn tool in damp. So let's go ahead and get started. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and reuse this image again to learn our Dodge and Burn tool, which is one of our paint tools. And it's located right here. It's also on our toolbar right here. And just like our Blur and sharpened tool, the Dodge and Burn tool is to tools and one. So we need to go to our Tool Options and select the one we want to use. And like I mentioned previously, the Dodge Tool will make your image brighter. The Burn tool will make it darker. We can also target different tonal ranges in our image. So we can target the shadows, mid tones, and the highlight, which will give us more precision and control over our edit. So let's say we want to darken up the outfit because it's too bright. We would use the Burn tool and then I would switch between highlights and mid tones to make it darker. So let's go ahead and do that. First. Let's go ahead and duplicate our layer here. And then I would just begin applying the brush on our alphabet. And you will notice that the highlights are getting darker. Okay? And then I would switch to the mid tones and began applying the tool for the mid tones. So it continues getting darker the more I apply to the highlights and the mid tones, maybe a comeback to the highlights again, and apply another adjustment to that part of the tonal range. Okay, so let's go back to our original image here and turn off this layer. And you can definitely see it's now much darker than it was before. Let's go ahead and grab our zoom tool with the letter Z and zoom into her eye because maybe her eye is too dark and we wanna make it brighter. In that case, I would then switch to the Dodge Tool. And I would probably start with the mid tones. To make her eye brighter, we definitely need a smaller brush, so let's go ahead and do that. Little bit smaller. So right there and then it can begin painting and here. So that's a little bit too much. So I'm going to undo that with Command or Control and the letter Z. And then the other thing I would do, which I forgot to do is I would take this layer here, let's call it burn. And I would duplicate this layer to apply the Dodge too. So I would apply these separately in case I need to go back to either one and redo them. So let's go ahead and apply the Dodge edit to the mid tones. But what I wanna do is I want to drop the hardness and the force down. So it's not as intense. I'm gonna go ahead and undo that because we can also drop the opacity of the brush. And that's going to lower how much is being applied as well. So now if we go back and take a look at the before and after, her eyes are now much brighter. So those are two different ways of using the Dodge and Burn tool. The other thing I would probably do personally is I would probably come in and darken up the background because it is a little bit bright for my taste. So you can go back and practice with your Dodge and Burn tool with this particular image and select the burn, the mid tones. I would also bring the opacity back and then darken up the background. Of course we would do that on a different layer as well. And then I would just come in and burn the outer part of the background here and outline her so she's not getting darker, just the background itself. So you want to be careful with, I'd like to refer to as the halo effect. So if you'd begin burning in her hair a little bit too much, you may end up getting a halo effect. It's going to be more noticeable. If you were to, let's say, brighten up the hair. Go ahead and do this. And you kinda get this halo effect because I did go outside of the hair. So one thing you can do is go in with a smaller brush, take a little bit more time going along the edges. And you could also use a Layer Mask to paint back any areas that were over edited. So take some time with dodging and burning with this particular image and then grab some of your own images to practice dodging and burning. And dodging and burning is mostly for deemphasizing and emphasizing different parts of your image so that different parts stand out more than others, just kinda like we did with the blur and the sharpened tool. All right, so that's it for Dodge and Burn for now. And like I mentioned, go ahead and practice on your own images, and I'll see you in the next section.