GIMP Essentials - Everything You Need to Get Started

1. Introduction - Gimp Essentials: Hi there, and welcome to this GIFs essential course. My name is Jonathan. I work as a graphic designer and animator. I'm also the founder of NxStok creative Studios over on YouTube, where I upload tutorials and animated shorts. Now, this is a beginner for ne glass that covers everything you need to know in order to get started with Gif. We won't be going over all the tools and features, not today. Instead, this class is designed to make you feel confident using Gif and to empower you with tools and techniques that you can use in your own project. This class, you'll learn how to manipulate colors, create and transform texts, how to make selections, create clipping mask. We'll even learn how to work with a graphic tablet inside of GI. We'll make animations and export them as gi and so much more. This course will help you go from an absolute beginner to an intermediate level, as each lesson does a deep dive into a specific topic. I'm here to answer any questions on the subject matter or clarify any doubts. Again, my name is Joadan. Welcome to this GIP essentials course. Let's get started. 2. Before we start - GIMP Essentials: Hi. Before we get started, let's first make sure we're all on the same page, starting with the version of GIMP that we'll be using. Anything inside of the 2.10 series will do the trick, although earlier versions should work just fine, for the most part. I do recommend using the latest stable release, which you can download for free. Head on over to gm.org. Click on Download, select your operating system, and download the file. Installing GM is simple enough. Then we have the class resources which can download below this video. These include all the images that we'll be using throughout the course, along with a few extra assets, such as plugins, scripts, brushes, and much more. The images that we'll be using are from free pick and pixels. I've included a read me file inside of the exercise folder, which include the names and links to all of these images in case you want to get the higher resolution for yourself. As for the fonts that I'll be using, you can download these by going over to Google Fonts and download the fonts yourself. Keep in mind that you can always accelerate or slow down the playback speed for these lessons to your convenience. This class is project based. I encourage you to follow along with each exercise. Now, without any further ado, let's get right into it. 3. Discover the User Interface - GIMP Essentials: Hi, and welcome to lesson one of this GIMP essentials course. For this first lesson, what we'll be doing is familiarizing ourselves a little bit with the user interface. Now, what I have here in front of me is not what you will see by default when you first open up GIP. I'll start by resetting my layout. Le go the preferences. Window management, and I'll reset my saved window position, the default value, press. Let's close out of GIMP, and let's go ahead and start up GIMP again. By default, this is what you'll be greeted with. So go ahead and maximize this here on my screen. All right. What we have in front of us here is the default layout for GIMP 2.10, and if you haven't made any changes to your user interface or if this is your first time opening up GIP, this is what you'll see. The first thing I'll bring your attention to are these three dots here at the extremities, where we have our panels. We have a panel over here on the left and a panel over here on the right. We can scale these panels to make them bigger or smaller. Simply by left clicking on these three dots or anywhere that aligns with these three dots. We can see that the mouse cursor is changing. So left click hold and drag, and this is how we can expand this area. Same goes for the left side over here. You can also segment these panels horizontally, and this is what these three dots over here on the right are indicating that there are two segments inside of this right panel. Next, we have our menu bar. The menu bar gives us access to just about everything we could need inside of GIP when it comes to working with our images. So we have our filters. We have additional scripts that we can install ourselves. We have options for the windows and opening up more of the Dkable dialogues, which we'll be diving into in just a moment. We have our tools. So the same tools that we have access to over here in what's known as the toolbox, we can access them in the menu bar. The menu bar really holds everything we could need. And if we had nothing on the user interface besides the menu bar, we could get all of this back onto the user interface. This is also where we go to open our images or import them and create new project files. Now, when it comes to the user interface itself, in the middle here, this big gray area with the gimp logo down here, well, this is known as the image window. So if I were to go up to windows and unchecked single window mode, What we're seeing here are the different components that make up GIMS user interface. So we have the image area, or image window here in the middle. We have our panel to the left and our panel to the right. So let's go ahead and fuse this back, single window mode, and this is what we have in front of us. Now, over on the left here, we have our toolbox. And starting from the 2.10 series of Gim, the tools in the toolbox tend to be grouped together. And you can tell the tools that are grouped together by this little white arrow at the bottom, right corner, indicating that these tools are grouped. If you hover the cursor over any one of these tools, you will get a little pop up window, such as this one, showing you the name of the tools. You can see their icons here. You get a short description for the active tool or rather the tool that is in the foreground. Over on the right of this little pop up window, we get the keyboard shortcuts or hot keys associated with that tool. To access the tools within those groups, in your case by default, if this is your first time opening up Git, simply by hovering, these tools might show up. Otherwise, you might have to right click on it and you'll get a little drop down menu. And from there, you can choose the tools within this group. Under the toolbox, we have what is known as the foreground in the background color. These are the colors that we'll be working with when we use things like our paint brush, gradient tools, et cetera, and we'll be diving deeper into this later on. Right under that, we start getting into our doable dialogues. Now, you don't have to memorize any of these names. Just know that they're there, and let's see how they work. Now, Dkable dialogues gives us access to either resources, settings, or parameters in relation to GIP or external devices, or even the resources that we might install ourselves on our system, like additional add ons, et cetera. The dockable dialogues are similar to tabs in your web browser. Meaning you can move them around simply by left clicking and dragging them left or right. We can also detach them, so now they are undocked, if you will, even when detached, you'll see it remains as a tab. Throughout the course, I'll be referring to these dockable dialogues as tabs, most of the time. Each one of these tabs is accompanied by this little button over here on the right with a white triangle inside of it. This is essentially a configuration button, if you will. You can see here it says, Configure this tab. When we click on it, we get a small menu, which gives us a few options related to this tab, as well as the option to add more tabs or Dkable dialogues. Alternatively, if you would like to add Dkable dialogues, you can also go up to your menu bar, go to windows, and here you have Dkable dialogues. You can also add the toolbox this over here on the left, which holds your tools. If ever by any chance or by accident, you had closed it, you can always add it back. All right. You can also dock back the Dkable dialogues or tabs, simply by left clicking, holding and dragging them back into the stack. Same thing goes over here on the right. We can move them around by left clicking, holding and dragging, we can detach them, and we can reattach them by dragging them onto the other tabs. Now, you might notice when I left click hold and I drag, I'm getting these blue outlines around our panels, and these are areas where we can dock the tabs. If I were to hover my mouse cursor over one of these blue lines, you'll see that it gets highlighted, and if I release my mouse click, The tab now gets docked into a new segment of our panel, and you see we have these three dots here letting us resize the different segments of our panel. Now, inside of the configuration menu, we have quite a few options. Some options are only available for certain tabs, if you will. You notice most of the tabs have these little icons, these extra buttons down here. And these are simply the button bar, if you will. And you can toggle the visibility of this button bar per tab by unchecking the show button bar. You can also close out of some of these tabs, either by going into the configuration menu and choosing closed tab, and it will close the tab. To add the tab back, simply go into either the configuration menu or the menu bar to add a Dkable dialogs. And the one we just close was brushes. A we'd have to do is find the brushes. Click on it, and it will add the brushes back into our stack. Now, another thing you might notice is when I compress our panel, we no longer see the name of our tabs and when I expand our panel. We can now see the names of our tabs, and this is a setting that is also available inside of this configuration menu inside of the tab style. So either we see the icon or we see the text. We also have status, which refers to a visual representation of in the case of the brushes here, of the active brush. So if I were to pick the star brush over here, you can see we now have a small star thumbnail up here next to the name brushes. So this right here is using the current status or rather the status and text, since we also have the text here. By default, they are all set to automatic. Now, don't worry if this is feeling a bit overwhelming. This is not something you need to memorize, but it is good to know that you have these options if you really want to customize the look and feel of your user interface. All right. So so far we've seen the image window or image area, which is in the center. We have our panels left and right. We have the toolbox, which holds our different tools that we'll be using throughout the course. And we have our dokable dialogues or tabs, which gives us access to parameters, to resources, and configurations in regards to either the active tools or external devices, et cetera. And Not all tabs or Dkable dialogues are created equal. Some of them are a bit more essential than others. They're all useful, but some of them are essential to having a smooth workflow, if you will. One of these essential tabs is the tool options. By hovering the cursor over the icon here, you can see we have two options. The two options reflect the settings available for the active tool. Meaning, if I were to choose a different tool such as the smudge tool over here, so I'll simply left click ones, and I switch over to the Smudge tool. We can see that the options inside of our two options have now changed and we even get the name up here which says smudge. If we switch, for example, to our color picker tool, the options in the two options, change to reflect the active tool. The two options is one of these essential tabs. The other essential tab would be the layers, and we'll be learning more about layers in the following lesson. But for now, we'll be focusing on the user interface. Now, there are quite a few elements missing on the user interface right now because we don't have an image open. So let's go ahead and change that. We'll go up to file and press new. And we can simply click on, Okay. We don't have to worry about the settings for now. Now we can see our Canvas area, and the Canvas really represents your piece of paper, if you will. If you were to import an image, it would be on your Canvas. So if I grab the brush tool over here and left click and drag, and see if we can draw on our Canvas. We cannot draw outside of our Canvas unless we were to expand our layer, but we'll get into that later. So our canvas is you can think of it as a piece of paper, and this is what we have in front of us here, or a frame, if you will. Now, at the bottom here, all the way at the bottom, this is known as the status bar. If you're not seeing it, go to view and make sure that show status bar is checked on. Next, we have the rulers, which I've disabled for myself, but I'll go ahead and turn on everything that you're supposed to be seeing in front of you right now. So we have the rulers. We have one at the top and one over here at the left. And they're basically rulers. They give you the measurements of your Canvas. And we also have the scroll bars, which we'll be looking at in the next lesson. But you might be familiar with scroll bars already if you've used a web browser or even your file manager or a word document, right? And essentially, that is what makes up the user interface. We also have this over here that just showed up, and this is a project tab, if you will. A quick example. I'll go ahead and open a new project again. Now you see we have two project tabs. So I'll close out of this and close out of this one and I will discard the changes. Now, in other aspect of the user interface or rather other aspects of the user interface or controlled inside of your preference menu. If you're on Windows or Linux, simply go up to edit in your menu bar and go down to preferences. If you're on MacOS, you should have the name GIP in your menu bar right next to file. Click on that and you'll see preferences in there. Let's go inside of preferences. We're going to get a pop up window. Let's scale this up. All right. Now, there's quite a bit of information in this pop up window, but we're going to focus on those related to the user interface. Specifically, over here and interface, we have the theme, so we can change the color theme of our interface. So by default, I think it starts on the dark theme. It might depend on the general theme of your system as well. But you have options. Then we have the icon theme, which you see we have quite a few options here if you want something more colorful or vibrant. So you have the option for color legacy, which is the original icon set for git, and a few more options. Next, we have the toolbox. If you remember, the toolbox is this over here in our left panel, and we have a few options for the toolbox. One of them being the used tool groups. As I've mentioned, starting from the 2.10 series, G groups similar tools into categories and to little folders, which we can see how they're grouped down here in the tool configurations. If you do not want the tools to be grouped, simply uncheck this checkbox, and you will have all the tools visible all at once. So they're no longer grouped. If you do have the tools group, you can also choose how they show. Mine is set to show on click. I have to right click on one of these tools so I can see which other tools are grouped with it or rather to access the other tools that are grouped with it. You can change this option. You can make it show on hover or show on hover and single column. Finally, what we'll be looking at is the window management. Over here in the window management, we're going to focus on the window positions. The window positions, by default, you'll have save window positions on exit. This means at the moment of closing out of GIMP. When you quit the software gimp, GIMP will remember where you placed your tabs, what size are your panels. All of this visual information on the user interface, GP will memorize it and it will save it. And next time you open up GIMP, it will open up with all of these changes applied. And if you do not want that, you can always uncheck this checkbox. You can also save the changes manually. So if you were to uncheck this checkbox, you could still change the user interface and then save the changes, and that would now be your new default layout for GIMP user interface. You also have this checkbox down here, and this is if you're working with multiple monitors. Finally, we have the reset save window positions to default values, which is what I clicked on in the beginning of this lesson to reset the layout back to the default. All right. Press Okay. Maybe one last thing. This little configuration button here works per tab. Right now, the active tab is device status. For example, if I go into the menu, and I were to choose lock tab to Dock, click on it. You can see it is now checked. It only affects this tab over here. The two options, for example, is not locked to the dock. And what this option does over here is I can no longer left click hold and drag this tab. It is locked to the dock. And this is a nice way of preventing any accidental click and drags. So once you have a layout that you're satisfied with, you can always lock some of these in. So I'll go ahead and unlock this. In my case, I'll be using a custom layout throughout the course. So I'll simply start by dragging everything that I know that I'll be using. I'm going to collapse the left panel over here. I'll put my two options up here next to my brushes, maybe the undo history as well, and there we have it. This will be my layout for the course. All right. That is it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we'll be taking a look at layers. See you there. 4. How to use Layers - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we will be learning about layers. We're going to learn how to move our layers around, how to toggle on and off the visibility of our layers, how to delete layers, duplicate them, et cetera. All right, so let's go ahead and jump right into it. So the first thing we'll do is go up to file. Click on Open. Navigate to the resource folder that we've downloaded for the course, and let's go inside of GIMP Exercise files. And we're going to go inside of the 01 layers. In here, you can open either one of these three images. I will open up 01 Cosmo flower field. O left click on at once. You can press enter or return or double click on the image you want to open, or simply left click and then click on Open. A we'll import our image and add it to the layer stack. If you do not have the layer stack, you can go up to the menu bar, go to windows, Dkable dialogues, and in here, simply left click on layers. You also have the keyboard shortcut Control plus L on a PC or Command plus L on a Mac. All right. So the first thing I'll do is rename our layer. Simply double click on the name. So left click twice on the name, and now we can type in the name that we want. Once we're done, press enter or return to confirm, and we rename our layer. Now, we're going to apply some automatic filters on our image here. Before we do so, we're going to make a copy of our layer here. Instead of applying the automatic filters directly to this current layer that we have, we're going to make a copy. That way we can compare the two and keep a copy of the original image for later use. To duplicate our layer, there are several ways we could do this. One of them would be to right click on the layer and go up to duplicate layer. Alternatively, we can go up to the menu bar layer, go down to duplicate layer, Left click, and that's The quickest way, however, or one of the quickest way to duplicate your layer is right here in the layers tack. Simply go down at the bottom here. We have this little menu bar. If you do not see it, go to the configuration menu, and make sure that show button bar is checked on. So to the right of the down arrow, we have these two overlapping rectangles. If we cover the cursor over them, you see it says, create a duplicate of the layer and add it to the image. So we'll simply left click on it once, and there we have it, we have created a duplicate of our original layer. Now, when it comes to applying a filter or modifier or whichever, it will only apply to the active layer. And to identify the active layer, You'll notice that the original copy here has a darker backdrop, which the original image down here had previously. If I left click on original, you see it now has the dark backdrop. And this is how you can identify the active layer. So I'll go ahead and left click on original copy again. And I'll rename this. So I'll double click on the name, and I'll call this equalize. Then press enter or return to confirm. Now, we're going to apply some automatic filters, and that means we won't have to input any settings or parameters for these filters. Let's go up to a menu bar, we'll go to colors, go down to auto. And we can choose Equalize. Left click once, and there you have it. You've applied the automatic filter to the copy that we made of our original image. Now, if we want to see the original image, all we have to do is left click once on the icon that is to the left of the equalized layer, and this will toggle off the visibility of that layer. If you want to see the layer again, simply left click on the same spot where the i was, and it will toggle back on the visibility of that layer. In between the i and the layer itself or the thumbnail of the layer. We also have another box here, and this could be a chain, which we'll be taking a look at in the next lesson. So if you've ever clicked on it by accident, simply left click once again, and we'll toggle it off. Now we're going to toggle off the visibility of Equalize by left clicking on the icon. We're going to left click on original to make sure it is the active layer, and we're going to make another duplicate. So we'll go down again to our two overlapping rectangles. Left click once, and we have made a new copy. We'll go ahead and rename this one a white balance, so double click on the name. And I'll type in the name white balance. Press enter or return to confirm. Let's go back up to menu bar, colors, auto, and we'll choose white balance. And there we go, we have a result. Remember, if you want to see the original layer, simply toggle off the visibility of white balance. If you wanted to compare the equalize with the original, simply left click on that same spot where the I was, so to the left of the equalis left click one, and we can now see equali. If you want to see white balance, you can click on the icon, but you'll notice that nothing happens. This is because we are viewing our layers in a stacked order. So you can think of these as a stack of paper laid on a table, and we're looking from the top down. So original would be on the table, white balance would be on top of original, and equalise would be on top of white balance, which is on top of original, and we're looking from the top down. In order to view white balance, we first have to toggle off the visibility of equalize as it is blocking the view to white balance. S. All right. So let's go ahead and tackle off the visibility of both equalized and white balance. Make sure that original is the active layer, and let's make another copy. And we can rename this to contrast HSV. Let's go back up to our menu bar. Let's go to colors, auto. And we're going to choose stretch, contrast, HSV. We're not choosing stretch contrast dot dot dot, because anything that ends with three dots will open a pop up window, which will ask you to input parameters yourself. So if I click on stretch contrast, you see we get a little pop up window over here, and we have to put in the values manually. So I'll cancel out of this. I'll go back to colors down to auto, and I'll choose stretch contrast HSV. Left click once. Down here, we had the loading bar in our status bar, and now we can see the results of the contrast HSV. So we'll do this one last time. So I'll hide the visibility of the contrast HSV. Make sure that original is the active layer, so left click on it, and we can see the darker backdrop, duplicate it one last time, double click on the name to rename it, and this time, I'll call it hands. Press enter return to confirm. Let's go up to colors. Auto and we'll choose color hands. Left click once, and there we have it. Now we can compare the results of our different filters here. And since we've rename our layers, we now know which filter was used for each layer. All right. Now the next thing we're going to learn is how to move our layers around. So how to reorganize the order of our layers or the hierarchy. To do so, all we have to do is left click and hold, and then we can drag our layers up or down. So I'll grab hands over here, I'll left click, hold, And as I drag it up, you get this white outline here. And it indicates where the layer is going to be placed. If I move a little higher, you can see it would be placed above white balance and under equalize. We can go a little higher to place it above equalize. And once we go a little too far and let go, nothing will happen because we've exited the layer stack area. So left click again, hold and drag Once I see the white outline where I want to drop the layer or release the click, and there you go. We have move hands. Alternatively, you can also use the up and down arrows at the bottom here, and these will again only move the active layer. All right. Next thing is how to delete layers. To do so, make sure first that the layer you want to delete is the active layer. So in this case, let's say I want to delete Equalize. First, I'll make sure the left click on equali so it is the active layer. And then at the bottom right of our layers tab, we have this x over here, and you see it says, delete this layer. Simply left click once. And there you have it, we've deleted the layer. Now, if ever wanted to undo the action that we just did, we simply have to go up to edit. And click on Undo Remove layer. Left click once, and there you have it. All right. So you can go ahead and experiment with these. Get used to moving the layers up or down, change them in order of preference, compare them, get used to toggling on and off the visibility. Remember that if a layer is on top and is blocking the view to a layer below, you first have to turn off the visibility of that layer to see the layer below. And before we finish, I want to introduce you to layer groups or folders. And that is this folder icon down here with ale plus on it. Simply left click once, and it will create a layer group. To rename a layer group, it is the same thing. You simply double click on the name, and now you can rename the layer group. Or press Escape to exit out of this. Another thing you could do is if you double click on the thumbnail of a layer, So let's say I double click on the thumbnail of the layer group. We're going to get this little pop up window over here, and you see it says layer attributes. From here, we can also change the name of our layer. We can also assign a color tag to it. If you see if I add a color tag over here, once we click on, this layer or this layer group over here is going to have a color tag. We can also change the mode, which is the blend mode, which we'll be reviewing later in the course. We can toggle on and off the visibility of the layer. We can also link it, so that same chain that we saw earlier. We also have the options to lock the pixels, lock the position in size, or lock the Alpha channel. Essentially, if you lock the pixels, you cannot draw on the layer. If you lock the position in size, you cannot move the layer around using the move tool, which we'll be seeing in the next lesson. Let's go ahead and press. Okay. And if you remember, we added the color tag, so now we now have this color tag over here on the layer. You can also right click on the layer. And you see you have the similar options over here in this menu. So we can also remove the color tag from here. And how do layer groups work? All you have to do is left click on a layer, drag your cursor over the thumbnail of the layer group, release, and it will add that layer inside of the group. We didn't get this little minus sign over here. If we click on it, it will become a plus sign, and that will collapse the layer group, hiding the layer that's inside of it. Left click again, and it will open up. Now, if you're not seeing a folder, that is because in preferences, I have already toggled this option for myself. So let's go up to edit preferences. If you're on a MAC, preferences will be in the name gimp in your menu bar. And if we go down to interface and enable this option over here, enable layer group previews. Okay, this is what you'll be seeing there you have it. Now, if you hold down shift and you click on an icon, it will isolate the visibility to that layer that you've clicked on. If you hold down shift again and you click on that same eye, it will toggle the visibility on for all the other layers. So let's go ahead and turn off all of our layers. And this over here is the transparency. This checkerboard represents transparency. All right. I hope this wasn't too overwhelming, but that is it for the layers. Before we leave, we're going to learn how we can save our project. So to do so, you can go up to file, go down to save. Navigate to where you would like to save your project. Rename it however you want. Over here, I'll rename this to layers. Underscore V one, and dot CF is the extension for GIMP project files. So it's not a JPEG, it's not a PNG. It's not an image that you can simply open. This is something that you can open with GIMP, and it will hold all of the layer information that we have here. Then simply press save. And there you have it, we've saved this project. Up here in the title bar. You can see it now says layers, underscore v one CF. All right. That is it for this lesson. The next lesson we'll be learning how to navigate between multiple projects, how to combine images together, how to scale our images, create guides, et cetera. I'll see you there. 5. Learn to Navigate GIMP - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we're going to learn some basic navigation inside of GIP. How to combine images together, scale them, move them around, create guides, and all that fun stuff. All right. Let's get started. Hey. Before we get started with this lesson, here's a quick tip. If ever you can find a function a two or a filter that you're looking for, you can always press the forward slash key on your keyboard, and this will bring up a little search menu. Simply type in the term that you're looking for, rather it be scale, posturize, colorize, any of this, and you'll get a drop down with results related to your search. All right. That's it. Let's get right back into it. The first thing we'll do is go up to file, open, navigate to the exercise folder, and we'll go inside of 02 navigation. Now, we want to open all four images, and to do so, simply left click on 01. Hold down shift and left click on 04, and this should select all four images. Then press open. So up here to the left, you can see we have different project tabs. You simply have to left click on the thumbnail so that you can toggle in between them. And now careful, there is this x here next to the thumbnails or the active tab, which will close the project. And since we haven't made any changes to these images, if we were to left click on this x over here, Gimp would simply close the image without a warning. Let's go ahead and open that back. All right. So now we're going to learn how we can combine all of these images inside of this first image over here. Before we do so, I'll rename this layer. So to combine images, there are several ways you could go about it. But one of the quickest ways would be to go to the project tab, go to the layer that holds the image you want to copy. Left click hold and drag it all the way up to the project tab where you want to copy it two, to hover over the project tab. Just for a second, it will become the active tab. Then move your cursor over the image area or image window and release. We have now imported or cup into this project. You can see here we're getting yellow outlines, which extend outside the boundaries of our Canvas. This is because our cup image over here is bigger than our vas, the original Canvas that we had for the background image that we have here. All right. Let's go ahead and repeat the process for our tourist over here. We're going to left click on the layer, hold and drag it up over to the project tab where we want to copy it. Move the cursor over the image area release. We'll do this one last time for our Turtle over here. So left click on the layer. Drag it up to the project tab where we want to copy it. Move the cursor over the image area and release. Now, if we want, we can close out of these other project tabs, since we no longer need them right now. So I'll click on the x, click on the x, and click on the X. Ala. So I'll hide our turtle in our Taurus final, and I'll make sure that the cup layer here is the active layer. Now let's go ahead and scale our cup. To scale the cup, we just have to grab the scale tool. So let's go up to our menu bar. We're going to go inside of tools, transform tools, and we're going to grab the scale tool. You can see the keyboard shortcut here is shift plus S. Now, when we grab the scale tool from the menu bar, it automatically activates the scale tool, meaning that we now have these handles around our image, which would allow us to scale our image. Now, until we press enter a return on the keyboard or click on scale over here, the transform will not be applied. So if I were to press escape, it would cancel out of it. So I'd like to bring your attention to the toolbox over here where we can see that we now have the scale tool as the active tool. So let's go ahead and scale our cup. So I'm going to left click once, and it will activate the Scale tool on the active layer. Now, we can manually input the values that we want up here in this st a pop up window on the upper right corner. We also have this chain over here, which controls the aspect ratio. You can see in the two options. If you have it open, if not, click on the configuration button, go to Add tab and add the tool options over here. So over here, we see at the bottom, we have keep aspect. You can talk with this on and off using the shift keyboard shortcut, and we also have the option to scale around center, using control on a PC or command on a map. Let's see what these do. So if I'm scaling this image, you can see it is not getting distorted. So whichever one of these handles I grab does not distort the image. But if I were to hold down shift on the keyboard, can now see that the keep aspect has been unchecked. If I left click and drag, we can now squash or stretch our image. To reset out of this, simply hit the reset button up here, and it will reset the transforms that we just did. The next one is a round center, which we control with either control on a PC or command on a Mac. I left click on this handle over here. And if I were to hold down control or command, we're now scaling from the center. Next up, we have this centerpiece or center handle, which allows us to move our image around. If you left click hold, you can drag this image around to reposition it. Now, of course, up here, we also have the option to choose different units. If you want to work with different units here for the size. Well, finally, let's just go ahead and scale this into the image and press scale. There we have it. Let's repeat this over here with our tourist. Make sure that the tourist layer is the active layer. Left click on it once, and let's left click on the Canvas one, since we already have the scale tool active. Left click once, and there we go. If you want to see what's happening behind this layer, you can always lower the opacity of the layer up here with this slider. But then you would have to remember to put the opacity back up when you're done. Instead, over in the tool options while we have the Scale two active, we have the option here to lower the opacity of the preview. So show image preview, it's referring to this. We can lower the opacity of the preview itself. So I'll hold down shift left click once on the slider and I'll set the preview to 75. Fs enter return to confirm, and there we have it. Now we can see our cup in the background as well as our table. So you can scale this however, you feel most comfortable, that it will fit into our image. We can also zoom in to make sure that they're the same height or even manually put in the values here. Have we done that with the cup as well? Once we're done, simply press scale and vola. You can see that the opacity of the preview does not affect the opacity of the layer itself. So we're going to repeat this one last time with our turtle over here, so make sure the turtle layer is the active layer. Left click ones on the Canvas, and now we get our handles and we can scale our turtle. You'll see that the image preview remains down to 75%. So go ahead and scale this down and then press the scale button. Okay. So now, if you want to move our images around, all we have to do is to grab the move tool. Now, you could grab the move tool from the Tools menu, go down to transform tools, and we have the Move tool over here. Keyboard Shortcut M, or we can grab the move tool directly from our toolbox, just all the way up. Left quick one, and now we have the move tool selected. When it comes to the Move tool, we have two options in the two options. The first one says, pick a layer or guide, and the second one says, move the active layer. Now, moving the active layer is referring to which layer is active in our layer stack. And this would mean that if we're using this option over here, no matter where we click, we would only be moving the active layer. Whereas with the pick a layer or guide, even if our tourist is the active layer, we can still move our other layers simply by clicking directly on top of them. So if I click over the background here, hold and drag, I'm moving the background. I'll go up to edit and undo the move. So move the active layer is limited to the active layer, and pick a layer or guide, we'll move whichever layer is directly under the cursor. They each have their use case scenarios. And you can also toggle between those two functions by holding down shift on the keyboard. So for example, if I were to place our turtle here over our cup, I had the cup as the active layer, and I want to move the cup. If I have pick a layer or guide active and I click here, we're moving the turtle. So I would have to precisely grab the cup here in the back to move it, or alternatively, hold down shift the toggle to move the active layer. And now, no matter where we click actually, we'll only move the cup. All right. We also have the alignment tool, which could help us align these or we could use a guide, as it says up here. To create guides, all you have to do is left click on either the top ruler or the left ruler. The left ruler will give you vertical guides, and the top ruler here will give you horizontal guides. If you're not seeing the rulers, go up to view, go all the way down, and you'll see here we have show rulers. So simply left click hold and drag, and you can see we're getting this white outline. If you release it outside of the Canvas, nothing will happen. Let's left click again. Hold, drag it down, release it over a Canvas, and we now get this blue dotted outline. When you hover the cursor over it, it becomes red, letting you know that you can now click on it. Hold and you can move the guide around. We can create an unlimited amount of guides. So you simply left click hold and drag them around. And these can help you align images, text, et cetera. We also have on the left here. We can create these vertical guides, and there are other ways to create our guides up in the menu bar. To delete guides, all you have to do is left click on them, drag them off the canvas and release, and it will delete the guide. Alternatively, you can also hide the visibility of the guide. They will still be interacting with your image, but they will not be visible. To delete all of these guides all at once, I'll go up to image, I'll go down to guides, and I'll choose remove all guides. And this has deleted all of the guides that we had. So we can use the guides to align our images. So I will create a horizontal guide over here on our table. Now, let's go up to our menu bar. Let's go to view. Let's make sure that snap the guides is checked on. That way, our layers over here, our images are going to snap to the guide once they're close enough. So I'll grab our cup, I'll drag it down. It's going to snap to the guide once we're close enough. I'll do the same with our tourist over here, snap. And finally, I'll do the same with our turtle. There you have it. We've align our three images. Now, if you wanted to move all three images together, all you have to do is turn on this chain link over here. So if I turn it on for the Turtle, the tourist, and the cup, when I move the cup, all three images will move together. That is essentially what these chains do. It links some of the properties of our layers together. The same would go for our scale tool. If we were to use scaling on these, I would scale all three images. A quick demonstration, I'll grab the scale tool over in a toolbox. Left click once on Canvas. I'll scale the cup up a little bit per scale. You see all three images have been scaled. Grab the move tool. A three happen scaled. I'll go ahead and undo what I just did, undo the move and undo the scale. All right. So unlink these three. Now let's learn how we can zoom in and out of our image. We can use the magnifying glass over in the toolbox. And you see here we have two options up here. Zoom in or zoom out. We also have the toggle button control or command on the MC. Control on a PC or command on a Mac to toggle between zooming in and zooming out. Right now we're set to zoom in. So if you left click once, it will zoom in. I I hold down control on a PC or command on the MC, it will toggle over to zoom out, and when we click, we're zooming out. We also have these scroll bars to move around if we're zoomed in a lot. You can use the scroll bars to move around, or alternatively, you can hold down the space bar, can see our cursor changes over here, hold down space bar, and this allows us to pan around our image. However, if you have these scroll bars enabled, you also have this little arrow down here, which you can see it says navigate the image display. If we left click and hold, this also allows us to move around our image. There is a third option, which is that you can click on your middle mouse wheel. Middle click, and that will also allow you to pan around the image. All right. Now, if you don't want to use the magnifying glass, you can press minus on the keyboard or plus on your keyboard. In most cases, it would be shift in the plus key as it is above the equal sine key on the keyboard unless you're using a numpad. With these keyboard shuts you can zoom in and out as well, or simply hold down control on a PC or command on the mac and scroll with your mouse wheel. Or even your track pad, and it will allow you to zoom in and out. All right. Finally, note that we have a lot of other transform tools available to us, so we can also rotate. We can share, and we have a few more advanced options such as the perspective and three D transform. Let's take a quick look at the alignment tool. Over here, I'll right click, go to alignment, and for the alignment, you'll see if I click on our cup, we get these little dots around our image here. If I click on the Torus, we also get these little dots around the image. If you hold down shift and click on a different image, you'll get the dots around both images. Over in the two options, you can see what you're aligning to. First item refers to the first item that was selected. In this case, it would be our tourist. We also have a few more options in the drop down. Image refers to the entire Canvas. Selection, we'll be looking at selections later in the course. We also have active layer. So which layer is active, I will align the other selections to the active layer. So this is for aligning and this is for distribution. And I guess last but not least, you can always go to view and check Show A, and this will allow you to see the parts of your images that are outside of the Canvas. If I go to view, uncheck show A, you can see we cannot see our cup over here. I'll go ahead and align all three of our images again, and Vla. All right, so that is it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we're going to learn how we can add contrast to our images using levels. See you there. 6. Adding Contrast - Gimp Essentials: Hi there. In this lesson, we're going to learn how we can add contrast to our images using levels. So this is what we have. This is the before, after. We also have this image over here. This is before, and this is after before, after. All right. Let's go ahead and learn how we can do this and First, we'll go up to file open. Navigate to the resource folder. Let's coincide of the exercise folder, and we'll start with 03 contrast. I would like to open both images. So I'll left click on 01, hold down shift, left click on 02, and then I'll press open. Again open each image in its own project tab. Let's go ahead and start with the flower over here. Now, again, I want to reinforce a non destructive workflow. So I'll make a duplicate of my original layer. You do not have to rename them, but it is good practice. So I'll go ahead and make a duplicate, and I'll name this levels. All right. Now let's go up to the menu bar, choose colors, and let's go down to levels. You can see it has a dot dot dot, meaning it will open up a pop up window. Okay, there is quite a bit of information in this pop up window, but we're going to focus on the bare bone so that we can add contrast to our image. And this is with the input levels. So up here. We have this graph over here, and everything that's white on the graph represents the information that is in our image. It is laid out on this gradient down here, which goes from pure black on the left, all the way to pure white on the right side. Then we have the middles which holds the gray tones. You'll also notice three arrows. We have a black arrow in the left corner, the gray one in the middle, and a white one on the right. We can see in the graph that there isn't any information in our image that reaches the pure blacks or the pure darks, if you will. And there's actually a bit of wiggle room here for the brightest parts. To add contrast, all you have to do is left click on the black arrow over here, on the left, left click hold and drag it towards the graph. You can see as we're moving closer to the graph, the darker image gets. We're essentially pulling information in our image and dragging it towards the darks. We can do the same thing over here with the brights, as you can see there's a bit of room here. We can grab this and pull this closer to where the graph starts more or less. Now, of course, you don't ever want to go too far when dragging these arrows. If I grab the black one here and drag it in too far, you can see we're starting to lose information in our image and it's starting to burn the image. So just add the edge of this graph is just right. Now, in my case, I would like to add a bit of light or reduce the shadows in the leaves. To do so, one would think you could just grab the black arrow and push it back, and that is one way. But then we'd be reducing the shadows that we've just added. Instead, I'm going to use the middle triangle here. And how this one works is if you left click and you drag it towards the bright areas, it will introduce more of the information in your image into the darks. And if you drag it towards the left, so if you drag it towards the darks, it will introduce more of the information in your image into the brights. With that said, I can see the default value here was one. And since I want to add just a bit of brightness into these mid tones, I'll simply drag it ever so slightly to the left. I'd say 1.20 is good enough, and there you have it. I'll crush down the shadows just a bit more over here. And then we can press, and there you have it. This is our before, and this is the after. It has a lot more contrast added to it. Let's go ahead and repeat this with our other image, this cat over here. Again, in the practice of non destructive workflow, Let's go ahead and make a duplicate of our original image, and I'll name this levels. Let's go up to our menu bar, colors, levels. Except that this time, I want to show you what's happening with the image as it's happening. Let's go up to our panel here, and let's click on the little configuration button, so the little square with the triangle in it, and we'll go to Add tab. And we're going to add the histogram. Now, the histogram is actually showing you what's happening here in the levels. This is also a histogram, this graph over here, and they're essentially the same. If I were to stretch this one out, you'll see that it has the same shape as this one over here. Just that in the panel, it's a bit more condensed. With the histogram, you can't actually change the intensity. It is only showing you the values of your image. So let's go ahead and repeat the same process, so we'll left click on the dark arrow or the dark triangle here and we'll drag it closer to the graph. You'll also notice that this graph is different from the graph from the flower. That is because the information in the image is different than that of the flower. As I drag the black triangle closer to the graph, you'll see here in our histogram, we can see the changes happening. So I I push this back, you'll see this was the original histogram. This is what we have here. As I drag it closer, we can see what's happening. The information in our image is being dragged into the darks. So again, the same thing, you don't want to go overboard and push it too far because as you can see, a lot of the information in our image has now disappeared and it is crashing on one side. The same thing would happen with this side if I were to push it too far. If I put this back to normal, see we're getting some burns here, which is a lost of information, and most of the information on the graph here is now crashing on the right side. You want to reset all of this, simply hit the reset down here. Let's bring it just close up to the graph. You just want this to maybe touch the edge but not actually crash into it. Again, it depends on what look you're going for in your image. If ever you wanted to add a bit more brightness, you could also push this, but it's already good with the bright areas with this image. All right. And there we have it. Now, before we apply this, I do want to introduce you to two checkboxes that will be reoccurring in the filters, and that is the preview checkbox and the split view checkbox. Now, of course, the preview checkbox, if you uncheck it, you'll see the original image. And I'm not referring to this original image. I'm referring to levels before applying the levels modifier. So if I were to press okay, it would apply those changes, even though we're not seeing them on the monitor. This is what the preview does. It allows you to compare that before and after. We also have split view, which if we check it, it will add a guide to the middle of our image. If you have a a cursor over this guide, you'll see that the cursor icon changes. If you left click hold and drag, you can move it left or right, to do a side by side comparison. On the left side, you have the results of level, and on the right side, you have the original image. And this is something you'll find in most modifiers. So go ahead and press. Now this is what we had before, and this is what we have after. One last thing is that with the histogram, it only shows you the information of the active layer. If I were to click on original here, we'll see the results of original. It's not showing you what's happening on the Canvas, but instead it's showing you the information of the active layer. All right. Well, that is it for levels. And the next lesson we'll be diving into colors. I'll see you there. 7. Change Image Colors - Gimp Essentials: Hi there. In this lesson, I will be showing you how you can change the colors in your image. So this is before and this is after before, after. Let's go ahead and learn how we can do that and gain. Okay. Let's get started. We'll go up to file open, navigate to the exercise folder, and we'll go inside of 04 colors. The image we'll be working with is 07. Let's go ahead and left click, pick open, and there we have it. Again, in the practice of a non destructive workflow, we'll go ahead and duplicate our image. And to stay organized, we can go ahead and rename this. I'll name this U. And let's go up to our toolbar, colors, and this time, we're going to go to U saturation dot dot, so it will open a pop up window. There's quite a bit of information in this pop up, which we'll be covering later in the course. But for now, let's just learn how to change the colors in our image. By default, this should be on master. None of these colors should be checked. Instead, it should be master. And to change the color in our image, all we have to do is to move the U slider. So you can left click hold and drag it left or right. You can also use the arrows to change the values, or alternatively, you can hold down shift left click once and type in the values manually. In this case, I'll simply push it over to the left, get a blue color, and then you can press okay. As you can see, similarly to the levels modifier that we saw earlier. We have the preview button down here, which allows us to targle on and off the effects or results of the saturation, and we also have the split view, which would allow us to compare side by side the color change. We also have these two other sliders here, which I don't recommend ever using lightness unless you really know what you're doing, as it often introduces artifacts into the image, and then we have saturation. Well saturation determines how much of the color. So you says which color and saturation says how much of the color. If I drop the saturation all the way to the left, you can see our image becomes black and white, and if I push it all the way up, the blue becomes more intense. That's it. I'll make sure the saturation is set to zero, then I'll press. Okay, and there we have it. This is our before, and this is the after. It is that simple. The next lesson, we'll be working with an image that has more than one color, and we'll see how we can navigate that. 8. Change One Color - Gimp Essentials: Hi, there. This lesson, we'll be learning how we can target and change a single color in our image. So this is the before, this is the before, after. All right. Let's go ahead and learn how we can do this and g. So for this lesson, at the very end, I will be sharing with you some real world examples of how you can use the saturation on a photo. So stick around to the very end so that we can go ahead and use some real world examples. Let's get started. Let's go up to file open, and while we're still inside of our color folder, we're now going to open 09. So I still want to reinforce this the good practice of making a duplicate of your original image? This is a non destructive workflow? You don't always have to do it, but it is a good habit to pick up, and then later you can decide when to do it or when not to do it. So I'll make a duplicate, and I'll call this U. So we'll go up to our menu bar, colors, saturation. So in the previous lesson, we saw that simply by shifting the U slider, we can change the colors in our image, or reset out of this, hitting the reset color. But what if we wanted to target a single color in this image like this middle one here? All we have to do is to check one of these colors up here. If you do not know, R is for red, for magenta, B for blue, C for CN, G for green, N Y for yellow. It's good to keep that in mind because once you change the U, you can see the colors no longer match their initials. So reset out of this. For example, if I wanted to select the middle one here, you might be tempted to go for blue, and you'll notice nothing happens, or reset out of this. Instead, we'll go for CN, which covers this color, and then we can switch the U, and there you have it. We're now targeting a single color in our image. Alternatively, if you wanted to modify the red separately as well, you could simply select the red up here and change it. These colors work independently from one another, whereas master controls all the colors all at once. So I'll reset the red, only leave the cyan change, and then I'll press, and there you have it. This is our before, and this is after. Now, it doesn't always work this simply. And I'll go ahead and give you an example of cases where it doesn't work. Let's go up to file open, and we are going to open 06. Press open, and there we have it. For this one, I won't be making a duplicate of the image, since I'll be showing you a use case where it doesn't work this easily. So we'll go up to colors, saturation, and now we can pick any color in this image. Let's go for the yellows, for example, and we try changing the U. Already we can see that there are quite a few odd things happening. For one, let me zoom in here. Let me turn off the preview or I'll use the split view for this one. We can see that this orange shirt here or orange piece of clothing is also changing colors while we have the yellow selected. And that is because there is a bit of yellow in it and some maybe yellow reflections or variations in the light, and it's not changing uniformly. We can see down here as well. Let me bring the split view slider here. We can see that this green is also being affected with the changes in the yellow. Now let's try with a different color. Maybe it's just this color. Let's go for red, for example, let's change the u. Now we can see that the other parts of this sweater or piece of clothing are now changing. So I guess if we were to use the yellow and the red together, we could get it to change colors. But let's take a look at what's happening with her face here. The tone or the colors of her face are changing because there is red and skin tone. So side by side comparison. You see that when manipulating red, we're also affecting our person here. Let's reset out of this. Turn off the spit view. Finally, let's try with cyan. If I grab cyan and I change the color to this purple over here. Can does seem to go a bit better. But if I zoom in here, you can see there are certain areas that are still not being changed, and we even have over here on this green shirt, this reflective light, let me go ahead and use spit view to show you. There's a bit of cyan reflective light happening here. It's not so obvious, but once we start using the saturation to change the colors, it is now considering this cyan as cyan and changing the color. This is one case where using use saturation won't necessarily change the colors as cleanly as you would want it to. Instead, in a case like this, you'd have to use selection mask or just a selection, and we'll be learning about selections later in the course. Now, there is one thing I want to show you with the scan here. It's not an exact fix, but it'll give you an idea of some of the other features inside of the U saturation, and this is the overlap. Now overlap works independently of whichever channel you're on. If I turn on the overlap, it doesn't matter what channel you're on, the overlap will apply. It's not going to change. Essentially what overlap says is, when you're modifying one of the colors, overlap gives it this freedom to leak into the neighboring colors. If I'm changing can over here, let me zoom in here, and I start pushing the overlap, Since green and blue are so close to scan, the changes in U are now going to affect a bit of green and a bit of blue. So as I push the overlap up, you can see over here, The colors are changing and once I get high enough, like 100 overlap, it's a more subtle change. You can see this noise that's happening with the sien shirt, and as I push the overlap up, it covers it up a little bit. But of course, it's not doing a perfect job either. A selection mask would still be needed or reset out of this or reset all of them actually. This big reset resets everything, this little reset resets the immediate changes that you've done or the active channel. So for yellow, for example, if we were to use overlap to try and grab this entire orange piece of clothing, push overlap up. Since red is the neighboring color of yellow. It's going to push into the red, and if you remember, there's red in her skin tone, and it will affect the skin tones. So again, there's not an easy fix for this other than using selections. Cancel out of this. Now, here's an assignment for you. Let's go up to file open, and we're going to open 08. Cick on open. Now, I would like for you to try and figure out which color in this image. Can you change using the U saturation, and I can already tell you that you're going to have to use a bit of overlap. So I'm curious to see what you do in the class projects for this particular image. Now, finally, I'll give you a real world example of how you could use U saturation. I'll go up to file open, and we're going to open 02 Valley landscape. I'm going to take a slightly less conventional approach to this one just to really show you how you can master the U saturation to some degree. I'll go ahead again, rename my original layer and I'll make a duplicate, and I'll call this one U. Why not? Let's go up to our menu bar, colors, saturation. The first thing I'll do is I'll drop the saturation for master. This will affect all of our colors here. And then I'll go into each color and I'll push the saturation and look at what changes in the image. For the reds, we can see that we get a bit of dirt showing. The fence is showing a bit of color. In the back, we have this house here showing a bit of color as well, and on the mountains a little bit. Or reset the red color. We'll try with magenta here and push the saturation all the way up. You can see that nothing's happening. Although I do remember, there were some little flowers here there ago. This is the only magenta we have in the image. Let's reset out of this as well. Let's try with blue, see what happens. We'll zoom out. With the blue, we can see that the top portion of the sky is being affected. Now if we were to push overlap, it's going to grab more of the sky because it is leaking into the scans. And let's go ahead and reset out of this. If I grab the sins and push the saturation, we can see that the lower half of the sky is using sin. Again, if we push the overlap, it will grab the upper half of the sky. I'll push this back down and reset the can. Now, let's chart with green, if I push the green, we see nothing happens in the image, even though let me turn off the preview here. We do have green grass. But there's this thing with grass where it doesn't necessarily respond to the color green. So I reset out of this and I'll turn back on the preview. Finally, let's do yellow, and let's push the saturation for yellow. We can see that most of our image besides the sky is composed of yellows. We have the grass is showing, the trees are showing, and even a bit of the ground is showing in terms of color. So I reset out of this. If we wanted to enhance this image, of course, we could always just push the saturation up for everything, and there you go. This is a very saturated bright image. But instead, we can target specific colors and give them different levels of saturation. Now, since we know that the sky is divided into blue and can, we can always push the overlap to a value of 20 or so so that when we are adding saturation to them, they bleed into each other and there's a bit of harmony. So I'll go with blue, and I'll push the saturation up quite a bit into the upper half of the sky, and then I'll grab the can and I'll add just a bit of saturation, so I'll go with 45. Then we already know the greens aren't doing anything, so we have to grab the yellows if we want to make the grass greener. It's also going to affect a bit of the ground, if you remember, because of the overlap, it's also going to affect the reds. Now, I'll set this to 35. If I wanted the grass to be greener, now we can play with the U and push it towards a green color. In this case, it's pushing it towards the right. But if you remember, it is going to affect the reds just a bit. If we zoom in here, let's push it all the way and see what happens. You can see that the fence here, which responded to the red is also being affected. Of course, yes, you can always go for a trippy look like this. But I'll drop this back to, let's say, was it 20 or so, which gives it a greener color. Then we can grab the reds and push it ever so slightly in the opposite direction to remove the greens that we've just added to it. Can see it's getting a little redder again, and we can drop the saturation just a bit, so it's not that colorful of a ground. I'll go with a negative 15, and then I'll press. This is a very green grass. But this is just for demonstration sake. Here is the before, and here is the after before, after. Quite honestly, I don't like how green it is, but this was just to demonstrate. If you wanted to change this, we could always undo the change, but there we have it. That's it for this lesson and the next lesson we'll be learning how to enhance our colors. 9. Enhance Colors using Vibrance - Gimp Essentials: Hi, Dre. And this lesson we'll be learning about vibrance. This is how we can add an extra pop to the colors of our image. So this is the before, and this is the after before, after. No seeing it very well and that's trying a different image. This is before, and this is after before, after. Can see that the colors are a lot more vibrant. So let's go ahead and learn how to do this inside of GM. Let's get started. We'll go up to file, open, and still inside of our colors folder, we are going to open 04. And the practice of a non destructive workflow, or go ahead and make a duplicate of my layer. Of course, I'll rename it. This is for good practice. For this one, I'll call it vibrance. I'll make another copy of the original layer here, and I'll call it saturation. This is just to give you a comparison. I'm going to make sure the high divisibility of vibrant and make sure that saturation is the active layer. Let's go up to a menu bar, colors, saturation, and let's push the saturation all the way up to 100, press. Then I'll grab our vibrant layer. Go back up to a menu bar. I toggled on the visibility. We'll go to colors, saturation. I'm going to go in my presets and I'll grab vibrant. You won't have this for now. I'll show you how you can get this preset. Let's push the saturation all the way up and then press Okay. All right. Now, let's do a quick comparison. This is the original image, and this is the result of saturation. We can see here that although the broccoli looks nice, the cucumbers are burnt, we're losing information, and these tomatoes look radioactive. Now, let's compare the original with the vibrant result. You can see it's very subtle. It's not exaggerated. It's not too much, and the tomatoes are not radioactive, and we still have the information in the cucumbers, although they are slightly greener, as well as the broccoli. Let's go ahead and learn how to create this vibrant preset. Let's go up to colors, U saturation. I've included the vibrant preset in the assets folder. So if you want to import it, simply click on this little square here with the triangle in it. Manage presets, it says. Click on it and go to import current settings from file. We'll get a pop up window. Navigate to the resource folder, and let's go inside of GIMP assets. You have a presets folder, and in there, you should have vibrant. Simply click on it, and click open. And now let's look at the vibrant preset. So if I grab vibrant, here we have it. If you remember, overlap applies to all the colors, so it doesn't matter which channel you're on, overlap will remain the same. For master, we leave everything the same. We don't change anything. For yellow, we push the saturation to ten, and we did the same with red. So we push it to ten. After that, for every other color, so Magenta, blue, cyan, and green, we push the saturation to 60. So there I'll push to 60. And then finally, and the blending options down here. If you click on this little plus sign over here, it will open up this low menu, and then you have color modes or blending modes. Sorry. I'll move this down a little bit and then I'll hit this drop down. Can see we have quite a few options in this list. By default, yours will be set to I believe it's replace. Let me go ahead and reset out of this. Yes. Instead, what you want to do is go in the drop down menu and go all the way down till you find HSV saturation. And then for the opacity, pull down shift left click on the slider and drop it down to 50. It's already on 50, but I'm showing it to you. And then simply close out of this. Hit the plus button up here, name your preset however you want. I've named mine vibrance, and then press k and it will add it to your vibrance preset. Now, for those of you who are familiar with photoshop, the vibrance essentially is trying to mimic what the photoshop vibrance does. And then thanks to this HSV saturation mode, even if we change the U here, you can see the colors in our image are not changing. Though the lightness will still affect them. I'll cancel out this. Now let's try with a different image. Let's go up to file, open. This time we're going to open 05 flost. If we were to compare again the original with the saturation, you can see the colors, the greens look very nice. But every other color looks a little burnt, especially the pink over here, even the yellows, and you can see her hand, her skin tone is very red, it's rashy or burnt. Who knows? Sunburn maybe. Versus the original compared with vibrant, where you see the colors are enhanced. They're a little richer, but we're not getting this burnt effect, and her skin is not becoming so red that it looks unnatural. And while you're in the vibrant preset, you can always go to the red channel and lower the saturation if you feel that the skin tones are becoming too red. That's about it. This is the vibrant preset. You now know how to make it yourself and how it works. Now, for you, I would like for you to try and combine what you've learned about levels and vibrant on one of the images in the folder. Let's go up to your file, open, and let's go for 03. For this image, I'd like for you to practice and use the levels and the vibrants, and see what you get as a result. If you want to share it in the class project, feel free to do so. And this is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we'll be learning how to remove colors from our images. See you there. 10. Remove Colors from Images - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. And this lesson, we'll be learning how to turn our colored images to black and white images. So this is before, and this is after before, after. We also have this image over here. This is before, and here is the after. All right. Let's go ahead and learn how we can do that and again. All right, let's get started. We'll go up to file open. Navigate to the exercise folder, and this time, we're going to go to 05 black and white. I want to open both images. So I'll left click on 01, hold down shift, left click on 02, and press pen. Now, when it comes to turning an image black and white, or first let's go up to our first project tab, the mad hatter. When it comes to removing colors from our image, so making it black and white, one might be tempted to go up to colors, use saturation and dropping the saturation. That is one way to go about it, but it's not the best way to go about it. Cancel out of this. Rename my original layer. Make a duplicate or rename this to BW for black and white. Let's go up two colors. This time we're going to go all the way down to desaturate, and then we're going to choose desaturate. We're going to get a little pop up window here, and let's look at the different modes because we have different modes here for this desaturation. The first one is luminance. Luminance is very well balanced. Then we have Luma, which tends to give it more contrast. It makes certain colors a lot darker, and so Then we have lightness, which actually gives you the same result as sliding the saturation slider from U and saturation. If we went to U saturation and drop the saturation, this is what we'd get. This is lightness. If ever you wanted to use that method, you can always use lightness. Then we have average, which is a combination of luminans and luma. Finally, we have value. Now for value, I'll go ahead and pull up the histogram, if you remember, we used it with levels, and I want to show you something. I'm going to turn off the preview here. You'll see the histogram did not move. If we use value. Essentially, what value does, it removes the colors from the pixels, but it doesn't change how bright or how dark they are. This is why the histogram is not moving. If I were to go to luminants, for example, you would see the histogram pushes towards the darks because it not only removed the colors, but it also dims down the value of the colors. If for luma, it should push even further to the left, so towards the darks. For lightness, not so much so. Finally, with average being a combination of luma and luminants, it'll go somewhat in between. Now, finally, I want to show you something that has to do with the lightness. If you look at the cup here, we can't fully see the details of the cup versus something like luminance, where we can actually see more of the details on the cup and even with Luma. Now, for this particular image, I will stick with Luma and press. And there you have it. This is the before, and this is the after. Let's go ahead and take a look at our second image over here, and again, good practice, rename, duplicate, and rename. C is BW for black and white. Let's go up to colors, down to desaturate and what desaturate. Now, for an image like this, you might be tempted to go for Luma, maybe. It all depends on your style, what you're going for. But for this particular image, I find that value still I find that value works. It is brighter, but it is still creepy, and I'll press and there you have it. This is our before, and this is the after. That's it for this lesson. Now you know how to remove colors from your image. The next lesson, we'll be learning about gradients, which will add colors to our image. See you there. 11. Add Gradient to Images - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. And this lesson, we'll be learning how we can add gradients to our image. So here is the before, and here is the after. And this is non destructive before, after. We also have this image over here before after. All right. Let's go ahead and learn how to do this again. Let's get started. We'll go up to File, Open, navigate to the exercise folder, and this time, we'll go to 06 gradients. I would like to open all three images. So I'll left click on 01, hold down Shift Left click on 03. It should select all three of them, then press open. So let's go to the First tab or Happy Sportswoman. And so far, I've tried to reinforce the practice of making a duplicate of your original image. But for gradients, we actually don't have to duplicate the original image, but instead, we can make a blank layer. So before I make the blank layer, I'll rename this, and this time, I'll call it background. To make a blank layer or create a new layer in general. Inside of your layers tab, go at the bottom left. You'll see this little rectangle here with a plus on it. You can hover the cursor over it. You'll see it as create a new layer and add it to the image. We also have the option to hold down shift to use the previously used values. But first, we'll just left click, and you should get a at a pop up window. You can see appear to as new layer, and there are quite a few fields in here a few options, but we're going to focus on two. The first one being the layer name. I'm going to name this gradient. Then at the bottom here, we have fill width. I'm going to click on this drop down here and I'll make sure to set it to transparency because I don't want anything on the layer. We do not want any colors, any solids. Then we can press. Now let's go ahead and grab our gradient tool. We can go up to tools, paint tools, and there we have gradient. The keyboard shortcut is G, so I left click on it. Now you can notice, it is now active in the toolbox, and it is grouped with the bucket field tool, and it's right above your paint brush or right next to your paint brush, depending on your layout. Then over here in the tool options, we have the options for the gradient tool. The first thing I'll show you is the gradient list. This thumbnail over here that goes from black to white. If you click on it, you're going to get a little drop down with all the different gradients. They have their names next to them. Under the list, you have this little search box. If you know the name of your gradient, you can simply type it in and it'll take you to that gradient. Then we have this minus and plus button, which allows you to zoom in and out of this list. Finally, you can choose between view as list and view as grid. Ve as grid will not show you the names, and it will remove the search bar. I'll leave it as a list. You also have the option to open a gradient selection dialogue. If you remember each one of these tabs is a dialogue, if you click on it, I'm going to dock this to the side of this panel. You can see all of the gradients all at once. We don't actually need this full menu right now, so I'm going to close out of this. Push this back in. Okay. First things first, I'm going to left click anywhere on our layer here, left click, hold and I'll drag it out, and this will draw our gradient. Oh, We went ahead and click on a gradient, so let's go ahead and reset this. We're going to go all the way up, and the default is FG to BG RGB, which stands for foreground to background color. RGB, meaning red, green, and blue. With this selected, I'll simply left click and drag out. I'm holding down the click and I'm dragging out. You can hold control on a PC or command on a Mac to draw a straight line and rotate in 15 degree increments. So I just make my straight line and then I'll release the click. Now, until you press enter or return on the keyboard, you can always edit this gradient in many different ways. You can edit the colors, you can edit these midpoints here, you can add points to your gradient, so you can control the falloff of the gradient. You can add points, move them. A whole bunch of things. I want to reset back to the FG to BG RGB. Four ground to background. You'll notice here it is set to custom. This happens whenever you change or add a point here on your gradient, it goes from whichever gradient you had selected to custom. I just kick on four ground to background, and there you go, it is reset. Now, when it comes to changing the colors of your gradient, you can either click on one of these extremities, those little plus here. You'll see this little pop up window here, changes information. We have end endpoint, and we have start endpoint. You can change the colors for these points right in here. Or you can see now it says custom, or let's go back to foreground to foreground to background. Or you can simply change your foreground and background colors here in those two little squares. So if you left click on the black one, for example, it will say change foreground color. We can choose a color, and it will change to that color. So press. If we click on the white square down here, it will open up the change background color, and we can choose a color for the background, and there you go. So we're still on foreground to background because we haven't made any changes to our gradient line directly. Now, besides foreground to background, you also have foreground to transparent, which means it's going to start from the foreground and gradually go into transparency. Then you have quite a few more options in here, which can go exploring. You also have the hard edge one, which doesn't do a gradient transition, but instead a hard cut. If you add a point here, for example, and you were to change the color of this point, that's say to white, there you go, it would do hard cuts throughout your gradient. Now I'm going to reset back to the foreground to background or GB. Clicking on these two little squares down here, you can see it says, set for ground color to black, background color to white, and the keyboard shortcut is D. Now let's look at the shapes of our gradients. Right here in the two options, we have shapes. By default, we're set to linear, so it does a linear transition. Then we have bilinear. Let me move the start point in a little bit more. Bilinear essentially is similar to linear, except that it interpret it as if there's another end point here on the opposite side. When it comes to our gradient, we can also flip the colors back and forth. Meaning next to our gradient thumbnail over here, if we click on this little button, see it as reverse, it will flip the direction of our gradient. So put this back to normal. Now, the next shape we have is radio, which is basically just a circle. Again, the flipping works the same for radio, a use case for this one is, if you were to use four ground to transparent, and let's flip this. Unflip this, and I'll go back to four ground to background. Then finally, we have square and you have this whole list, which you can go exploring. But this should help you understand the basics of the gradient tool. That's about it. So press escape to break out of this. I'll grab, sorry, I'll grab my linear gradient. In the drop down here, I know I want to use this one over here, blue, green. Next thing I'll do is I'll left click down here, hold I hold down control on a PC or come in on a mac, so it draws in a straight line and I'll drag this all the way up. Then I'll press enter or return to confirm. There we have it. Our gradient has now been added to our empty gradient layer, but we can't see our sportswoman. Now, we could always play with the opacity of this layer over here, and it will give us a result, but it might not be the result that we want. Instead, we're going to use blending modes. If you remember back in the use saturation, we had used blending modes to change how the use saturation was affecting our image. I didn't explain what it was, and I'm still not going to explain it just yet. We will be diving into the blending modes later in the course. But for now, we're going to take a quick look at them. So we're going to click on modes here. By default, you can see it is set to normal. But instead, we're going to experiment with a few of the options in this list, like for example, screen, dodge. You notice that even though the opacity is set to 100%, we can now see the image underneath our gradient. This is because blending modes, other than normal, are using mathematical equations to combine the pixels of the top layer with the pixels of the bottom layer. So we can go ahead and explore all of these. But for this image in particular, I know I want to use linear burn. There we have it. Drop the opacity to 80, and that's it. We now have added a gradient to our image. So let's go ahead and try it on our boat over here. So we already know how gradient works. You could draw directly on your image and change the blending mode up here and such, but this is a very destructive method. So instead, we're going to stick to our non destructive workflow. So again, I'll call this background. I'll go ahead and make a new layer, gradient, press. Let's go ahead and draw our gradient. Or gradient two is already active. I'll go in our gradient list here, and I know I want to use skyline or press enter or return to confirm. Left click up here, hold down Control on a PC or command on a mac, to draw straight line, I'll try it down. Now I just notice, I actually want this to be flipped upside down. So instead of moving the points of our gradient individually, I will simply click on the reverse button here and there we have it. I'll drag this point up a little bit more or bring this one up. Then I can press ter or return to confirm. Let's go ahead and choose a blending mode that works for this image. In my case, I already know I want to use soft light. And I'll drop the opacity to 90. There you have it. A nice little gradient added to our image, giving it a sunset or sunrise feel. Finally, we have our third image over here, and this one is for you. Feel free to use whichever shape of gradient, whichever colors, experiment with the blending modes, and I'm looking forward to see what you make with this one. I do want you to share this image or the results you have for this image in the class projects. That's it for this lesson. The next lesson, we'll be learning how to draw shapes and give or basic selections. All right. I'll see you there. 12. How to create Shapes - GIMP Essentials: Hi. We'll be learning how to make shapes inside of Gim. In this lesson, we're going to learn two different methods. First, we're going to be looking at raster shapes, which are done with selections. And then we'll be looking at vector shapes which are done using the G fig plug in, if you will. All right. Let's get right into it. All right, let's get to it. We'll go up to file, new. Let's go ahead and make a composition of 1080 by 1080. We'll dive deeper into the settings for creating a new image, but for now, let's go ahead and write 1080 by 1080 pixels and press. The first part will be with basic selections. Let's make a new layer. I'll go ahead and call this shape hashtag one. That is because when you add the pound sign in a number, every time you duplicate that layer or create a new layer with the hashtag in a number, GIP will continue the sequence. So go ahead and call this layer shape hashtag one, and I'll set the fill width to transparency for. Let's go up to selection tools. We'll be taking a look at these three top tools over here, rectangle select, ellip select and free select. Let's start with the rectangle select. Each one of these selection tools has common features. One of them is the mode. By default, we are set to replace, and this is replace the current selection. Now, to draw a shape, you simply left click hold and drag, and there you have it. This is our shape. We have a rectangle. This is not fully a square. We also get these handles at every corner that if you left click hold and drag, you can reshape or resize the selection, as this is for now, still a selection. If you wanted to turn this into a shape, you'd have to fit it with a color and release the selection. There are several ways to fill this with a color. One of them is to simply left click on either your foreground or background color. Left click hold and drag it over to your cans and let go, and it will fill the selection with that color. Meaning if we were to open up our foreground color select and switch it to a red color, and we dragged it over and drop, it would change this to a red color. So I'll cancel out of this. Now, once you have a selection, you cannot draw outside of the selection, meaning that essentially the selection limits the amount of pixels that you can interact with. If I were to grab a paintbrush tool over here, and I'm left clicking and holding and I'm dragging, and you see nothing's happening. But the moment I pass the cursor inside of our selection, inside of the boundaries of the selection here, we can see the brush stroke. It limits the pixels that you can interact with. To deselect, we simply have to go to select and say, none. And there you go, we can see the marching ends are gone around or square. Now if I left click and hold, I can draw anywhere I please. So go ahead and clear this layer by going to edit clear. Now, in the modes, by default, I mentioned this is set to replace. We also have add, add the current selection. We have subtract from the current selection, and we have intersect with the current selection. They do exactly what they say that they do. If I were to left click hold drag, this is one selection. If I press enter or return on the keyboard, you can see the handles disappear. If I click inside of it, we get the handles again. You could say it activates the selection, if you will. Now, if I were to left click and hold drag and draw a new shape outside of this shape, you can see this first shape gets replaced by the new shape, which is what the default does. Then we have the ad option, which you might have to guessed, will add to the selection, so now we have two pieces selected. Now, earlier, I demonstrated that if you were to left click inside of your selection, you would get the handles back to change the shape. It doesn't work with multiple selections. Instead, if I were to left click, it will fuse both selections and make one shape out of the two of them. We can go up to edit and undo, and this would give us back or two separate selections. Then we have substract from current selection. Substraction. If I draw a shape over here, make it roughly match with the top of this. You can see it eliminated this top portion of this selection that we have over here, Peppers enter or return on the keyboard, you can see it has subtracted this part of the selection. Another thing you might notice is that our cursor actually changes the icon, here, we have a minus with the ad, we have a plus. Finally, with the intersect, we get this upside down U shape. In intersect, you might have guess, it's going to exclude parts that are outside of the shape that we draw. Meaning, if I draw this over here, It excludes the parts that are outside of this new selection, vipers enter or return. This is what we're left with, it has intersected with the previous selection. This is how these function. You can see they also have keyboard shortcuts. For the ad, it is shift, so you would hold down shift and draw. For the subtract is control on a PC or command on a Mac, so you would hold down control or command and then draw. Finally, for the intersect, you would hold down Shift plus control on PC or shift plus command on a MAC. Now, note, you must hold down these hot keys before drawing. If I hold down shift ahead of time, I get the little plus here. You can see it switches to shift. If I start drawing and then hold down shift release, it will not count as in added shape. Instead, it will simply replace the other shapes. Now when it comes to the rectangle two, we have this option over here, the rounded corners. If we check this, let's zoom in ever so slightly. You're going to get this slider here for radius, and you'll notice that the corners of our rectangle are now rounded, and this is exactly what it does. Now the higher the radius, the more rounded the corners will be. The lower the radius, the sharper they'll get. If we uncheck this, we get sharp corners again. Finally, we have the expand from center and the aspect ratio here or fixed. You get a drop down, you can fix the width, the height, or the size, by default, it is set to aspect ratio. This is similar to the scale tool, if you remember. Now, these are also controlled by hot keys, and I won't get into the hot keys for these too much because they might get confusing as they are the same as the mold hot keys, which means to get the expand from center, you would simply hold down control. But you have to press the hot key after clicking. Meaning, if I click on this handle, and then I press control, it will expand from the center. If I hold down control before clicking and I draw, it will subtract from selection. If it is confusing at first, you can simply left click to toggle these different options rather than use the keyboard shortcuts. Now, the aspect ratio is done with shift, similarly to the scale too, if you remember. If I click here, you can see it restores the shape, and I click on one of these handles and then I hold down shift. It holds the aspect ratio. If I hold down shift in control, control for PC, command on a MAC, it will expand from center and keep the aspect ratio. You can see it checks the checkbox as we're doing this. Of course, you also have other options down here, which are some are self explanatory, the position here, which controls the position of our selection, and the size, which controls the sizing of our selection. You can also change the units, of course. And finally, you have this last checkbox here. We have the strength merge. We'll get to this later. But the highlight, which will, as you can see, highlight the area that is selected. So uncheck this. And finally, we have in terms of shapes, we have the ellipse select, which again, works similarly to the rectangle select. It has the same modes. The only thing it doesn't have is the rounded corners, and that is because it is already rounded. It's already a circle. Unchecked the fixed aspect ratio. And you can see you can draw ovos, flat disc. If I hold down shift before clicking, we get the litle plus, I can draw another circle down here. In return. And the same thing as the rectangle tool. If I were to click on these two selections or either one of these selections, after creating them, it will fuse them back together. All right. It works the same. If we were to left click on one of these colors, hold drag release over our selection, it will fill the selection. So go back to select, none in our clear or layer. Clear. That is it for the the shape selections, if you will. Now if we go back to tools, Selection tool, remember, I mentioned the free select. The free select doesn't draw a shape for you. Instead, if I left click hold and drag around, you can see I can basically draw a selection. And this is our selection. Let's go up to select. None. Now, to close a selection with the free select, you either have to connect these last two dots. I'm no longer clicking. You either have to connect those two dots or simply press enter or return and Gimp will close it for you. I'll go to select none. Now the interesting feature with the free select is if I left click once, move away, you can see it simply draws a straight line. If you hold down control on a PC or command on a mac, it will snap into the 15 degree increments. That way, we could work with angles. If I left click again, see we get another dot. Left click again, we get another dot, and you can still interact with these dots before you confirm. If I left click on this dot, left click and hold, I can now move this dot to a different location. Even if I click here to close it, you can see we still have the dots. Until I press enter or return on the keyboard, we still have the option to deform this selection, if you will. Press enter or return. We have this shape, and then we can fit it up with whichever color that we want. Select none. That is it for this basic shape building, at least with the selection tools. Edit clear. Now, another method for creating shapes, let me zoom out here. Another method for creating shapes, which is not the most conventional method is to go up to filters, down to render and go to G fig. This will automatically create a new layer called G fig. Over here in this box, this is a representation of our canvas, which is why it's white. It's not white by default. It shows you what's on your canvas. By cancel out of this, you can see the G fig layer has been deleted. I'll make a rectangle. I'll grab the rectangle select, and I'll draw a little rectangle down here and fill it up with black. Select, none. Then we can go back to filters, render, G fig. You now see in this the box, we have this black bar at the bottom. It is a representation of your canvas. And the shapes you create, you must create them in here and they'll appear on your Canvas. We have quite a few shapes that we can create from rectangle, circles, ellipse, arcs, et cetera, even a star. Let's go ahead and create a shape so we can look at these other features. I'll start with a star. When it comes to the star, you have to choose how many sides you wanted to have ahead of time. If you wanted a six sided star, we will choose six in here you go. This is a star with six sides. We can delete our shapes by clicking over here on the delete and object option. This is the x over here, and you have to click on one of these dots in a delete shape. I'll grab the star again and this time I'll set it to five. Let's draw a star. Now, by default, it starts with a stroke. You can change the color of the stroke by clicking on the color down here. You get the s pop up, choose a color, press okay, and it'll change the color of your stroke. You can see it's updating live on the Canvas. Next, we have the option to choose which brush we're using for the stroke. If we hit browse on here, we'll get another pop up, and this will simply give you a list of your available brushes. If you choose a textured brush, for example, you can see it adds the texture to the stroke. And we also have this very fin dot over here, which will give you inner outlines. Then this one is the default brush, which will give you thicker outlines. We can close out of this. The G fig window is still open. It is simply hidden behind gimp, I'll go ahead and bring this forward. Next, we have the option to fill with. We can choose a fill. Now you have different options here, but we can choose the color fill, which is a simple fill and choose whichever color we want. I'll go with a blue here. S. Okay. And there you go. It is filled with a color. To move your shape around, you can use the first hand, which is move and object. And to move it, you have to click on one of these dots. If I click anywhere else, I can't move the shape. If I click on one of these dots, you can say I can now move the shape. You also have this other hand here, which allows you to move a single point. Meaning we have three points here on the star. If we click on this extremity point, you can control it. We have this middle point here, which we can also control by clicking on it, left click and hold. Finally, we have this midpoint, which controls the inner points of the star. You can flip it in or out. Very basic features. You also have an option to show a grid and snap the grid. But let's go ahead and disable these for now. Now we can create multiple shapes inside of a single G fig. If I were to draw a circle, for example, we now have a circle, and we can also change the individual colors of our shapes. With the circle selected, we can see the Dotter black letting us know that the circle is the active object. I can switch it to a different color. Let's go for a yellow. Now our circle is yellow. We can also remove the strokes per object if we wanted to. And last but not least. I'll go ahead and put the circle down in this corner over here. Let's say I want the star to be above the circle. You can use these arrows over here to change the hierarchy of the objects, similarly to our layers. The circle is currently active, so I'll move it under the star, and now you can see we have the star above the circle. That is one way of creating shapes as well using GFI. You can close out of this. The nice thing about G fig is if we go back to filters, render, and we choose G fig, while we're still on the G fig layer. You'll notice it didn't create a new G fig layer. It did change the stroke here. That is because these shapes are still editable. Meaning even after creating them and closing out of G fig, we can still move these shapes around by reopening GFI, close out of this. If I were to click on Shape, for example, and I went back to filters, render, and chose G fig, it would create a new G fig layer, and we could add different shapes inside of this one. But that is it for GFI or cancel out of this. I'll delete this layer. In the example I showed at the start of this video, if I go up to file open, you don't have to follow along for this one. We'll just want to show you, I'll go to shapes and selections, 07. I'll go to shape projects. These are some exports that I did. We'll look at these in a moment. But even or not, this backdrop that you see here was created entirely using nothing but selection shapes, the free select in gradients. So we can recreate this over here. We can use guides to help us out. So put a guide down here, and I'll put another guide down here. L et's go ahead and make a new layer, shape one. Let's grab. We don't even need the rectangle tool really to create these until we're making the shadows with the gradients. I'll grab a different color. I'll go down for this time. Show a completely different color for this. Okay, I'll just click. Left click, hold drag, move it over our layer here, release. Press. Then with the rectangle tool selected, I'll make sure it go to view and make sure that snap the guides is enabled. Over here, we'll draw a shape, snap it to this guide. With our gradient tool, I'll switch this back to black. I'll make a new layer, which are called gradient. Space hashtag one. We can draw a gradient down here. Let me make sure to change the shape back to linear, and I want it to go from foreground to transparent. Drag this down a bit. Push this up, press enter or return to confirm, and there we have gradient down here. Then I'll grab our rectangle tool again. I'll make a new selection up here, this top portion, I'll snap it to our guide. I'll grab our gradient tool again. This time, I'll flip to white. Now click over here and drag down. Such. Drag this point up. Little higher. Just to fade out the brightness a little bit, then press enter or return to confirm. We could go up to select none, see what we have so far. Very simple so far. Now, let's make one new layer. We'll call this shape hashtag one. Enter, and you can see it automatically changes it to two. I wrote one on purpose just to show you this. Let's grab our free select tool. Left click once, hold down Control on a PC or command on a Mac. Snap down to our guide. Click once. We'll move in an angle to our guide. Click again. Move down, and now we simply have to close our selection, you can click outside of the Canvas. Once we're done, press enter or return to confirm, and let's fill this shape with the color white. You can choose whichever color, and we'll simply drop the opacity, so you see what's happening here. Let's go to select none. If we want to duplicate this shape over here and you want it to be exact, all you have to do really is with the second shape layer selected, let's go up to edit copy and then go to edit, paste in place. Click on this. And now let's go up to our tools, transform tools, and let's grab the Flip tool. The flip tool will do exactly as the name says, it's going to flip our floating selection. Let's simply click left click once. Can see it is set to horizontal, so it's going to do a horizontal flip. And that's it. Now simply inchor down this floating selection by clicking on the anchor button. There we have it. We have now anchored the flipped version of what we had on the left over here. So I'll go ahead and grab my move tool or remove the guides, and there we have it. It is that simple. And we did this using rectangle select, free select and gradients, and that's it. You could try something similar using the ellipse tool, experiment a little bit. But that is it for this lesson. And the next lesson we'll be learning how to create color palettes and how to take colors from images with gm. I'll see you there. 13. Create Color Palettes - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to create color palettes and how to take colors from images to make color palettes. Let's get started. First thing we'll do is go up to file open. Let's navigate to the exercise folder, and this time we're going to go for 04 colors, and we're going to choose 06 because it has lots of colors in it. There's no need to rename or duplicate this layer. We're simply using it to extract colors from it. Now what we do need is to open the palette dialog. We can do that either by going up to windows, tkable dialogues, and choosing palettes, or simply by going to one of our panels, choosing the configuration button, add tab and choose palettes. Now for the palette, it works similarly to the gradients. To the gradients dialogue, which means you can always go to configure, change the size of your palette and go from list to grid or grid to list. For this, I'll leave it on list, I'll simply make the previews extra large. Now, if you double click on one of your palettes here, some of these I've created myself. Let's double click on one of these palettes. It will open up the palette editor. You have a few options down here. One would be to edit the entry. If you were to left click on one of these, you could edit the color. You can add a entry based off of your foreground color by clicking on this plus, or you can hold down control on a PC or command on a Mac to add an entry based off of the background color. If you left click, it chooses from the foreground, if you hold down control or command, it will choose from the background. You have the x here to delete the entry by entry, it is referring to whichever color you click on. Finally, we have the option to zoom out or zoom in from this palette, and we have Zoom All. If you click on Zoom All, it will fit them nicely into this space. Of course, it's not filling up the whole space. Now, let's learn how to create our own palette. To do so, we can right click on either palette and go to new palette. This will take us to the palette editor where we can change or choose a name for our palette. So I'll call this Test palette two, because I believe I already have a test palette in here. The two in parentheses is referring to the amount of colors in our palette. Beside 30 here means 30 colors in the palette. Now we've created a new palette called test palette, and it is empty or test palette two. To add colors to it. Simply have to go to our color picker tool over here in the toolbox. It is right above the magnifying glass or right next to it, depending on your layout. A left click on it, and now we have the color picker. Before we start clicking, we first have to go to two options and make sure to set it to add to palette. By default, it is set to set foreground color, meaning if I click anywhere on our image, it will change the foreground color. To get the sittle pop up window in this upper right corner, simply check on use info window over here. So it changes our foreground color as we click through the colors. Instead, if we choose add to palette, let's go to our palette editor over here, any color you click on will be added to the color palette. S. That is one way of creating a color palette. It is quick, it is simple. You can also choose simple average. If we check simple average here, let me up the number so we can see what's happening. You'll see there's now a square around our cursor. Essentially what it means, it will average the colors inside of the square and make a color out of it. So if I were to click over here, let's first go to our color palette editor. Click over here. It is making an average from this. Let's choose something more evident. Here we have a little bit of blue and a little bit of yellow. Let's click. You can see this color that we just added, does it fully match this blue, nor does it match the yellow? That is one way of creating a color palette and adding your colors to it. If I were to this number over here, you can see set the number of columns. If I set this to one, we get a single column, and we can see or padded better over here. Yes, the two are related, it's a visual thing. I would recommend experimenting with it a little bit. Now we can also delete entire color palettes versus deleting individual colors. For example, if I click on this color down here and press this x, it would delete the entry that we had so that individual color. If I go over to our palette and I click on this X, it would delete the entire palette that we've created. Let me cancel out of this. Now, let's learn how we can take colors from an image to create a palette. Going to go to our palette, right click, and we're going to choose import palette instead. Last time we chose new palette this time we're going to choose import palette. We're going to get a little pop up window. By default, it starts on gradient. Which means you can create a palette based off of your active colors. It's going from this color in our foreground color, and it is gradually moving towards the black, which is the background color. Instead, we want to choose images. Normally, in this dropdown, if we had more images in our layer stack, we'd see all of these images there. But instead, we're only seeing this one because we only have one image. Next, we have simple merge. It basically does what it says. It would merge the simples, but we only have one image here, so nothing is going to happen. Then we have selected pixels only. This is valid if we had a selection. If we were to grab, for example, the rectangle select and make a selection, well this checkbox is checked, you can see the colors here have changed. It is only registering the colors that are inside of our selection. Anywhere I move the selection, we'll only see the colors that are inside of the selection. Let's go up to select, none, and is now registering all the colors in the image. Even if this is checked, since we don't have a selection. Uncheck this for now. You also have the option to import cutter palettes. If you have cutter palettes save externally, you can import them. Finally, we are at import options. We're going to choose the name of our palette, so I can call this palette image. Number of colors. This determines how many colors we want to extract from the image. In this case, I'd say I want to take 24 colors from the image. Once we click on it, you can see that the amount of colors here have been reduced. Then we have the columns. How many columns do we want to have? This option is somewhat particular, but it's there. And if I were to choose four, for example, we now get four columns. And finally, we have interval. You can see here we only have a bunch of grays and whites. That is because it is picking up this background wall in our image, and it hasn't gotten to the colors yet because we've limited it to 24, and there are 24 variants or more than 24 variants just in this wall. Interval with technically, if we up the number here, you'll see we're getting colors. Interval says, we're going to mix the colors that look alike into single colors. The higher the interval here, the more it's going to mix the different shades of white and gray and say, Okay, this is one color. Then it's going to start introducing or it's going to start grabbing more of the colors in the image because essentially we're compacting the amount of colors in the image. I hope it's not too confusing. The higher the interval, the more it is merging the different colors. For example, even just here in this section, we have a bit of pink, we have some dark pink, we have some lighter pink. The interval, let's go ahead and make a selection right here. Make a small selection, Let's say selection only or selected pixels only. Let's drop the interval all the way down. You can see it's filling up the entire square, like it's giving us 24 colors. Now, as I increase the interval, once I start going high enough, it's going to merge these different colors so much that we're not going to get 24 colors out of this. Essentially, that's what the interval does. Now, once we're satisfied with the colors that we're getting here, in the variations, in the number, et cetera. We can go ahead and click on Import and there you have it. We have, where is it? It's palette image up here with 24 colors. If I click on it, go to Palette editor. Here is our new palette. And now you can click on either one of these to set it as your foreground color, or you can always click drag and release over your canst to fill up a selection or a layer or whichever. There you go. You notice we also lost our shocked woman. We can always get it back by going to edit and undoing, but that is it. We now have created a new palette. And when you close out of Gib, this will actually still be saved. It is saved inside of a specific folder inside of GIPS configuration folders. We'll be diving into these folders later in the course. But there you go. Two methods for creating palettes, either with the color picker or simply by importing it and taking it from the image. All right. That is it for color palettes. In the next lesson, we'll be learning how to copy parts of an image and paste it onto a different image. 14. Copy parts of an Image - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. In this lesson, we'll be learning how we can copy parts of one image and paste it into a separate image. With this, we can transform this coffee cup into a cup of late, or even put the moon in our cup or even the milky way. All right. Let's go ahead and learn how to do this and gain. Let's get started. We'll start by going up to file open. Navigate to the exercise folder, and we're going inside of 07 shapes and selection. Let's go ahead and open from 124. One, two, 34, click on the first layer. Hold down shift, click on 04, you'll select all of them and press open. Essentially, we'll grab different parts of these three project tabs and paste them into our cup of coffee. Let's start with the latte over here. I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'll make sure that fixed aspect ratio is checked on, and I'll simply draw a circle over our cup. I'll align the bottom edge here and use that as a guide for creating my selection. So we don't have to go all the way to the edges, good enough to grab the latte part. And then let's go up to edit copy. Now we can go up to our first project tab and simply go up to edit. Paste. It will paste our previous selection that we've copied as a floating selection. We have the option to either create a new layer with it or incur it to the layer below. If we're to incher it to the layer below, you'd see we no longer have the option to manipulate this as it is stuck to the image below. So let's go ahead and undo this, and we can still edit the floating selection. We can grab our skeletol, left click. And there you go, we can now transform our floating selection. The other cool thing with the skeletol is we can lower the preview opacity. Which will allow us to see what is behind our selection here. So I'll drop this down to 90, so we can see what's happening behind. We can always lower the opacity of the layer itself. But then it adds an extra step after we're done doing or transform to remember to push the opacity back up. So I'll zoom in here, align the bottom edge of our selection, grab the top handle over here and sce it down, and I'll simply align this over our coffee slightly bigger than the coffee to make sure it covers everything. There we have it. Once we're done, let's hit scale. Now we can simply create a new layer out of our floating selection by clicking the plus over here, and that's it. We can also lower the opacity just to let it blend better with the background. That is method number one. It is straightforward, copy and paste. Now let's look at a similar method with one step will do different. Let's do it with the moon, I'll grab our ellipse tool, M our selection of the moon. Once we have our moon, we can go up to edit copy. You can always use the keyboard shortcut. We'll go over to our first image here. I'll hide the at top, and we'll go to edit. This time, instead of pasting our selection, we're going to go to paste as, and we're going to choose new layer in place. I assign a custom keyboard shortcut for this, which is Control plus J or command plus J on the MC. I'll be showing you how to assign keyboard shortcuts. It's actually in the edit menu down here, keyboard shortcuts. So let's go to paste as in new layer and place. Now, you can see it simply paste our selection as a new layer. It doesn't create a floating selection. So that is the difference with this method. We get to skip one step, which is to create a new layer from our floating selection. The rest is just about the same. We grab our scale tool. Align these two, make sure it fits into the cup. We simply scale and I'll drop the opacity and there you have it. Now, this next method that I'll show you is quite different, similar, but different, and we're going to copy these coffee beans over here. To do so, we will grab the ellipse tool, make a selection over coffee beans, I'll zoom in here to make sure I'm grabbing everything except for this part at the edge of the right edge here, which is the body of the cup holding the beans. Make sure to grab just this top part Once we're satisfied with the selection, good enough. Instead of copy and pasting, since we're inside of the same image over here, let me zoom out. With our ellipse tool still active, we can hold down if you're on a PC control plus t. You'll see that the cursor changes with the cross arrow, similar to the move tool up here. With the ellipse to active, We can go ahead and hold down Control plus Alt on a PC or command plus Alt on a MAC or command plus O option, and left click drag. This will cut out our selection from the image and create a floating selection with it. Now, of course, we don't want to do this here with this image, so let's go up to edit. Undo. Instead, we can hold down shift plus t on a PC or shift plus option on a Mt. It will give us the same cross arrow, left click drag, and it will create a copy of our selection and paste it automatically as a floating selection. Of course, make sure that you are on the right layer, that the layer you want to copy from is the active layer. And now it's about the same process. We simply grab our scale tool and align this with the cup. This time, I will align it with the outer parts of the cup, basically, the cups body. I'll make sure that I grab everything except the cups handle. Since we are scaling up, there will be a bit of blur introduced into our pasted image here, and now we can go ahead and make it a new layer. There you have it. These are some quick and easy ways for you to copy and paste elements from different images and paste it into a new image. Now, we're left with our milky way over here. And if we go to file open inside of our shapes and selection folder, we have 05. This one is for you to experiment with. You can use a different image or try and combine these different components inside of this bowl. I'm curious to see what you decide to do. In a future lesson, we are going to learn about masking. It will be a less destructive method to take elements from one image and place it into something else. This is it for how we can copy and paste, and the next lesson we'll be learning how to use text or type inside of IM. See you there. 15. How to create Text - GIMP Essentials: Hi. This lesson will be an introduction to working with type or text inside of GIP, and we'll be making this image over here. Later we'll learn how to embellish it, but let's go ahead and get started. All right, with GIP open. Let's go up to bio open. We'll navigate over to the exercise folder, and we're going to go with 08 type. For this, we'll start with 02 active Woman. Res open. And here's our image. I'll go ahead and rename this to background. To use text and game, it's actually quite simple. We have this A over here in the toolbox, or you can go up to the menu bar, go up to the tools in. Here is the text tool. The keyboard shortcut or hot key is T for text. So we grab our text tool over here. All right. O in the tool options, we have quite a few options. If you've ever used Micro software or any similar software, you'll be familiar with some of these options that we have here. Let's start by creating our text. There are two ways of creating your text, and it's not set in stone. Once you start creating your text, you can always change those two methods, and one of them is to simply left click and start typing. You left click and you type. So it was keep moving all caps. I'm holding down shift. Keep moving. For this here, if we were to continue typing, so keep moving on and on and on and on and on. You'll see it will go all the way off or vis. If I were to go up to view, show all and see all the way off or vis the text will continue. Now, the other way of creating your text is to draw a textbox. If I were to left click hold and draw a textbox and we to keep moving Again, you'll see it automatically creates line brakes, and we have these handles around our textbox. We also have them for this text box over here. You simply left click on it with the text tool active and it will select the text layer and activate the editing mode, if you will. We have these handles here allowing us to resize our text box over here, same with down here. You might notice over here in the box options. It is set to fix this one over here if we If we don't touch the handles, it's set to dynamic, which is why it continues all the way off. If you move the handles, if you watch over here, the box type, simply click and move one handle and it sets it to fix. These are the two methods. I'll go a hand delete these two. I'll go up to view and check, show all, and there we have it. So I'll simply left click once, and I'll type, keep moving, break moving, and by default, our text is justified, left, left justified. Now, you've probably seen these before. If you work with any text editing software, so we can justify to the right, pushing things to the right. We can center it, so centered, and we have field, and field only works with a fixed box, not the dynamic box. For this, we'll go ahead and center it. Now, the next option over here is our color. We can change the color of our text using the color over here. If we want our text to be white, set it to white and our text is now white. We also have thistle pop up box on top of our text box. This is where it gets ever so slightly tricky with the text tool. Any properties that you change in the text box over here will take over the two options for the text. Let me go ahead and demonstrate what I mean. If I were to highlight text, if I left click and highlight this piece of text, keep, we click over here to change the color of our text, so let's go for a blue color, say, Okay, this is now blue. If I change the color of our text over here to red, moving will change, but keep will not because keep is now being controlled or the color at least for keep is being controlled by this box up here. Likewise, for the text size that we have up here, I can change the value, and you can see all of our text is changing size. But if I were to select keep again and change the size of keep up here, I'll go ahead and change the units two points. So if I change the values of keep up in this box, and then I go back here and change the values for our text, you'll notice that only the word moving is changing size. Whereas keep will maintain its size because it is now being controlled up here, so on and so forth. If I were to select keep and change the font up here, in this box up here, let's say, for example, Sens Serif, and I change our font over here, so choose Poppins heavy. You'll see that moving changes, but not keep. So essentially, whatever you change or whichever piece of the text you change using this little fading box up here above our text box, we'll overwrite whatever you have in the tool options. And that's essentially how it works. Although there are a few options in the two options that are not controlled by this little text box up here, and these are the justify, as well as these over here. So the adjust letter spacing, the line spacing or heading and indentation of first line. So if I were to change these values here, you can see this is adjust letter spacing, which does exactly what it says. It will adjust the spacing between the letters. We have a similar function up in this box, which is the change the occurring of our text, and it only works with the selected text. So if I were to change this value over here, You'll see it's only affecting the P over here. I put it in between those two es and I'm simply scrolling up and down on the mouse wheel. I change those values. You can see it is changing the spacing between those two. If I were to grab, for example, these two es, so I make a selection. Let's see now it doesn't show anything because this E already has a value, whereas this E is a value of zero. I change this it will put them at equal values since they're selected together and modify the spacing. But you can see it's not affecting the other letters. Even with no selection, it doesn't affect the other tors over here, if we change this value, it still affects all of the texts. From here on down, this controls our text, no matter what, and for all of these top options here, can be overwritten with this box up here. For this, all delete it and simply type it again, keep moving. And I'll create a space break over here. As you can see, we still have the letter spacing. This setting remains. So if I were to create a new textbox, it would keep those settings. So you have to reset it to zero manually, and that will do the trick. So if I reset this to zero, it does the trick. So I'll delete this layer over here with the key. The texts is not complicated, just that it can be tricky sometimes if you don't fully know how it works. So with that said, I'll go ahead and change the size of our text, I'll make it quite large, change the color to white. And I'll go for Poppins bode. We can find Poppins on Google Fonts. To move our text, we simply have to grab the move tool and we can now move our text, place it wherever we want. Grab the text tool, click and resize our text. Alternatively, you can always simply scale the text box, which will now give it a fixed position and try to match it in. Then we have the adjust line spacing, which changes the spacing of our lines. We also have this option up here, which changes the base line of selected text. So if I were to, for example, grab the K over here, I'm scrolling up and down on my mouse wheel. You can see it is changing the baseline for the K individually from the rest. So I'll set this back to zero, and I'll make our text slightly bigger. I'll move it up a little bit. Such, and I'll change the baseline a bit more. And there we have it. Okay. You also notice we have a check box here which says use editor. Now if we check this, we're going to get this little Pop up box up here with our text inside of it and a few options to control our text. I find this only useful if you want to import text from a text file. Otherwise, I rarely ever use the text editor from this. As I personally find it to be slightly clunky, you can go ahead and experiment with it, see how you like it. It also offers a few options such as changing the orientation of your text. If you want to write your text in a cool stylized way such. I'll keep it to the regular from left to right, goes out of this. Now we can write our powerhouse text down here, so go ahead and make a box and O fat size is still pretty large, drop this down significantly. Click in our textbox to make sure it's active and type in powerhouse. Lower the size of our text ever so slightly. Now if you're wondering why the text is it remaining white and it keeps going back to black, that is because of the foreground color. Since it is set to black by default when creating a new text, It will set it to black. As such, I I were to change this flip the colors, you'll see it is now white. It starts off with the foreground color, and then you can change it afterwards. And I increase the spacing of the letters, grab or move tool, and we can now place this how we want. Now, there's not much to learn about text. When it comes to working with text, this is very basic. You simply left click, type what you want, and then you have a few settings over here. If you ever overwrite the settings in this floating box, which you can see is off the Canvas. Middle click with my mouse to pan. If you were to try and hold down spacebar, it would simply keep adding spaces in your text. As space bar is essentially part of text. I will undo the spaces that I just added. If you want to pan around your image, you either have to middle click with the mouse or you can use this little arrow here if you have the scroll bars visible, and now we can use this to navigate our image pan up so we can see this. Of course, you have these basic options up here, so you can add a cross line to your text. You can underline your text, make it italic, or even make it bold, but we're already using the bold variant of Poppins, so that will not do anything. That is it for the text tool. It is a very simple tool to use in theory. The next lesson we'll learn how to put our text on a path. See you there. 16. How to put Text on Path - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we will be learning how we can take this text and put it on a curve to bend it behind our subject, as such, using the path tool. All right. Let's get started. The first thing we'll do is go up to bile, open, navigate to the exercise folder, and we're going inside of 08 type, and we're going to open 04 studio shop. Next, we'll go ahead and create our text, so I'll grab the text tool. Left click on the Canvas and I'll type in Yoga. I'll change the color of my text to white. It's using the last font that I had used. Let's go ahead and create a new layer. I'll call this bendy tex. Make sure it's set the transparency, press. Now, let's go ahead and hide our text, and let's grab our path tool. Keyboard shortcut is B. The path tool can be pretty tricky. It's simple enough once you understand how it works. So we're going to go ahead and put our text on the path and then get into some of the characteristics of the path tool. To create the curve behind our subject, there are two ways we could go about it. One of them would be to left click one above here. Put the cursor next to our foot. Left click again, and it will create this line in between those two dots. Then you can click on the line. You'll see the cursor changes when you're above the line. Left click hold and drag it. Which is curving our path. We can do the same thing down here. Left click hold and drag, and now we're getting these handles. With these handles, you can click on the extremity of the handle. Sorry. If you click outside of the handle, it will add a new point, so go ahead and undo this. You want to click on the extremity of the handle, and with it, you can now modify the curvature of your path. Once we have a curve that we're satisfied with. Let's go ahead and grab our text layer. It could be visible or not, but let's go ahead and make it visible. Go up to layer and down to text along path, and that's it. I'll hide our text layer, and I'll make sure to select the bendy text layer. Next thing, let's go to our PAF dialog. If you don't have the PAF dialog, you can go to the configuration menu here, go to Ad Tab and add the PAF dialog. Now, the paths dialogue works very similarly to the layers tab, you can toggle on and off the visibility of these paths with the icon over here to the left of our layer. Essentially, when we put the text on a path, it creates a path out of our text that it bends along the previously created path. You'll notice that the text is ever so slightly deformed as well. We didn't have to fill it up with a color. But first, we need to create a selection out of the path. There are two methods to go about this. The first one is inside of the path tab over here, the Path dialogue. Go at the bottom and Right next to the duplicate button. We have this button over here, and this would create a selection out of the path. The other method is up in the tool options. We have it right here. Selection from path. Simply left click on it, and it will create a selection from our path. Next thing to do is to simply pick a color and drop it into our selection. And that is why we created the Bindi text layer. And there you have it. Then we can use our move tool to simply move our text in a comfortable position or location. We could use the rotate tool as well if you wanted to rotate this a little bit more. There you go. It is that simple to put text on a path. Now, how does the path tool work? We're going to look at a few options very quickly. So we'll grab our path tool. As you saw earlier, if we left click, left click, it creates this line. But if you were to left click hold and you drag, it will automatically create those handles bending the path. Then we have these options down here. We already know that the selection from path will create a selection out of the path. Then we have fill path. Fill path will give us a little pop up. Few options over here. It will fill it with our foreground color, and it will fill it inside of our active layer. Let me go ahead and make a new layer for this. We'll call this path path. And we're on solid color. It's basically using the bucket fill tool with the foreground color. So we click on fill, and it fills up the path. And then we have stroke path. So let's go ahead and undo the fill that we just did. So edit undo and stroke path, essentially, it will give you another pop up. Now, we can leave the default for now, but you can see you have several options here. You can use the paint brush tool settings to stroke the path, or you can simply draw a line. Finally, the line with. Right now we're going with stroke line and not the paint brush. For the line with, I'll leave it on ten for ten pixels and stroke. As you can see, the stroke path simply draws a stroke on the path itself. The path tool is very useful, very powerful. It is vectorial, meaning that you can scale the path tool or the paths, however you want, and they will retain their quality up until you fill them up with a color, which then will be a raster result. But here you go. This is how you can put text on a path. This is it for this lesson. The next lesson, we're going to learn a few common layer effects. See you there. 17. Layer Effects - GIMP Essentials: Okay. I know what you're thinking. This is a long lesson, it is. We're going to cover a lot of different layer effects and really dive into some of the setting, so you can get comfortable with terminology, understanding the repetition of certain functions and how they present themselves on their different forms. It's just really some terms that are changing, but it's similar functions, if you will. At the end of this lesson, you should be able to click on any filter or any function really and feel comfortable navigating it with no problems whatsoever. All right. L et's jump right into it. Also, if you ever do run into a problem, there's always the git manual. Okay. Let's get to it. All right. Now that we're inside of Gimp, Let's go up to file open. Let's navigate over to our exercise folder, and we'll go inside of 09 effects. Let's open up all four images. So left click on 01, hold down Shift, click on the red eye, and press open. All right. Gimp has now opened each one of our layers in its own project tab, and let's start over here with the Mad hater. The first thing I'll do is rename our first layer or layer to original, and now I'll make several copies of our layer. If you hold down shift and you click on one of these eyeballs, it will toggle off the visibility of every other eyeball. If you hold down shift and click on the eyeball again, it will toggle back on the visibility of every other eyeball. Likewise, if we hold down shift, click on the eyeball, turns off everything else. If we hold down Shift and toggle on the visibility of original copy number one, for example, I will simply toggle off the visibility of original copy, leaving only original copy number one. With that said, I'll hold down Shift and click on original copy number three, and we'll work our way down. So I'll make sure that our top layer here is selected. Double click on the name, and I'll call this one newsprint. Let's go up to Filters, Distort, and we'll go down to newsprint. All right. Now there are quite a few options inside of this pop up. We'll go over most of them, and the rest I'll leave it to you to explore a bit, but with what we'll cover, it should be enough to understand what's happening. Now, keep in mind that if you have a particular set of settings that you like, you can always save it as a pre set. By clicking on the plus up here with your settings set. First, I'll go ahead and increase the period here so we can see what's happening. The period basically is reducing, if you will, the repetition of the newsprint. Meaning the smaller the period, the more details we have, if I zoom in here, you can see it is repeating more frequently, and the higher the period, the less frequent the repetition. This will help us see a bit more of what's happening with the different color models up here. So in the color models, we have white on black, black and white. We have RGB, which separates the red, green, and blue channel. We also have CMR K, which separates the cyan, magenta, yellow and black channels. So for RGB, you can see that we have the same settings here, the pattern, the period, and the angle, and it repeats for each one of the channels. So to keep it simple, we'll be working mostly with the black and white or white on black, which only works with one channel at a time. So black and white works with black and white on black works with white. So I'll go with black and white. Next, we have the pattern, essentially the shape of our print, if you will. So by default, it starts on line, which evidently is creating lines, and we have circle, which create these circles. And now the circles are actually the black parts. If we were to switch to white on black, you would now see that the circles are the white parts. So I'll stick to black and white. Next, we have Diamond, which essentially creates diamond shapes. Then we have the PS square dot or Euclidean dot. This one, unlike the circle, if we go to circle here in Zoomin, you can see that the circles are touching each other at the edges, whereas the euclidean dot, they do not touch each other. Next, finally, we have the crossing lines, which is creating this checkerboard effect. If we were to lower the period, you would see what it's doing a bit better. You can see. Of course, if we flip it, we're getting more of a grid view. Again, depending on what result you want, you're going to have to play around with these settings, and just keep in mind that there is no right result or wrong result. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. With that said, I'll be sticking with not circle, sorry, I'll be sticking with the Euclidean dot. Okay. And now, the period, as I've mentioned earlier, is the repetition of our pattern, if you will. So the lower the period, the more it repeats, and also by consequence, we get more detail, and the higher the period, the less it repeats, and we get less detail. Finally, we have the angle, and to demonstrate the angle, I'll switch back to line and increase the period. We can either switch the angle by, as you know, left clicking on this slider and moving it around, or by clicking on this visual representation of the angle. You can see that this line over here matches the direction of our line. We can also left click on it and rotate it. That's basically what the angle controls. Then we have the option to lock the patterns, lock the periods, or lock the angles. We won't be diving into these just yet. You can always go ahead and experiment with these, but they're not essential to understanding how to use but they're not essential or learning the basics of the newsprint. We have the quality factor over here. I find that it doesn't do too much of a difference. I can push this all the way up and there isn't of a difference. If we switch to dots, not much of a difference. I'll leave this to 16. And finally, we have the effects down here. Now, the turbulence, as you can imagine, is going to generate some turbulence in our effect. If you look at the results with the turbulence turned down, let's go ahead and choose a decent angle here for this or go for zero. As we increase the turbulence, you'll notice that our lines are no longer going. You'll notice that our dots are no longer in straight lines, but rather they are curving and deforming. We get a lot of noise over here. Basic basically turbulence is creating turbulence. Then we have the block size of here, which it works in combination with the angle boost. By hovering the cursor over any one of these sliders, you will get a bit of an explanation. If you're still not getting it, you can always click on the help down here, which will open either your web browser or the internal Give help. Papa pindo all depending on your settings and the preferences. But essentially, these two work alongside, they work hand in hand. And see if we increase the block size. We can almost tell the seams, if you will. Let's switch to lines, for example. There you go, you can see this breakage of the patterns. Let's go ahead and reset out of this. I'll give you a quick preview of what you can do with RGB, for example. R went to red, chose the Euclidean dots, went to green, and then chose Euclidean dots, and this is what we're left with. Of course, you can increase the period individually for each one. And play around and see what feels best what works best for the results that you're aiming for. In this case, I will stick to black and white, switch this to the dots, go for an average period or a low period. Such, I might actually go with white and black. No, I think I'll stick to black and white. Shift the angle ever so slightly. Add a little bit of turbulence, not too much, just so it's not as clean and press and voila. We have a very poorly printed image over here. I'll go ahead and hide our newsprint layer and turn on the layer below, and I'll rename this one. Mosaic. Let's go up to filters, the stort, and this time we'll choose mosaic. For the mosaic, same thing, if you set up settings that you want to save, simply click on the plus, and you can save it as a preset, and let's get started. We have the tile geometry. Basically the shape of your tiles. Here it is set to hexagon. Before we get started, let me go ahead and increase the tile size. As you can imagine, the smaller the tile size, the more tiles we get, the higher the tile size, The less tiles we get because they are now bigger. If you want your image to still show, you can uncheck color averaging and you'll see that the image will appear. Let me lower the tile size to lower the processing the resources needed for this. Yes, I we uncheck color averaging, we can see our image very clearly with the tiles technically overlaid over it, if you will. For now, I'll leave this checked on and lower the tile size ever so slightly. So yes, we have these shapes. By default, it is on hexagon, thus making some hexagons or the tiles. If we choose square, you'll get square shaped tiles, which is somewhat reminiscent of the bottom of a pool when looking at it through the waves of the water. And we have octagons, so you would imagine eight sided pieces, and finally triangles. I a sharp pieces over here. I'll leave it to the hexagons for now. Now finally, we have tile height. Let's zoom in for this one. Zoom in real close. You'll notice here, we have some highlights and some shadows. The tile height, essentially, is controlling just how much of the highlight and how much of the shadows we have, which simulates a sensation of depth. The higher the tile height, the greater the sensation of depth because with bigger shadows, you would imagine that this is deeper, that these tiles go in deeper. The impression of height, if you will. Then we have the tile neatness. Essentially, let me go ahead and zoom out for this one. If we lower this number, you can see how the tiles look pretty good, averagely good. If we lower this number, we start getting broken tiles. So it's not as neat as it was before. The effect still looks nice, but it's not as neat. If you increase it, then the tiles become a bit more orderly. Then we have the tile color variation. Zoom out slightly more for this one. You'll notice how we have some darker tiles, lighter tiles, so on and so forth. If you lower the variation, they start to look uniform. Of course, not entirely on our character as there are different colors at play on our subject here. If you increase the variation, you see we get more variation between the darker ones, lighter ones, and mid tone ones and the base color fuel. Now, we already know that the color averaging is creating this blurry effect. Now, the spacing of the tiles, however, controls the thickness of these black lines that separate each tile. If we increase this, you'll see we get thicker black lines, creating a larger sp, a bigger gap in between our tiles. Let's go ahead and average this again. Right under that, we have the joints color and the light color. Now, what this is referring to, the joints color is controlling the color of these separating lines. If we click on this, turn it to red, you'll see the separation lines are now red or cancel out of this. Then the light color is referring to the highlights on our tiles. If we increase the height, so you can really see those highlights and switch this color to a blue color, for example, you'll see that the highlights are now blue. And we have the light direction, which determines where is the light coming from. If we were to, for example, switch this the point downwards, let's zoom in here, you'll see that we get the light at the bottom part of each tile and the shadows at the top part. If we switch this over to the right, the light is now on the right and the shadows on the left. And we have the tasing. This, we will notice the difference. If I turn this off, you'll see how these separation lines get very jagged and the tizing basically smooths them out adding these semi transparent pixels, similarly to what we saw when we're working with shapes earlier in the course. Finally, we have random seed. Now, random sll zoom out again for this one. It generates a new layout for the tiles, if you will. With this, we can go ahead and press, or if you want to have an averaging of the colors, or if you want to have the image itself. Again, there is no right or wrong result. It really depends on what you are going for. So go ahead and press, and there we have it. All right, hold down shift, and I'll click on the icon for this layer down here, the original copy one, and re two Ripple. Let's go back up to filters, s, and let's go down to Ripple. We have the imptude. Essentially, the higher the imptude, the stronger the ripples. The lower the imptude, the weaker the ripple, if you will. Then we have the period. The period is similar to what we saw in the newsprint, which means it is the repetition of our ripple. A lower period will repeat the ripple a lot more frequently, and a higher period will repeat it less often, so we will lower the frequency of our ripple, if you will. Then we have the phase shift. Now, this essentially is a continuation of the ripple, if you will. If I increase this ever so slightly, pay attention to these two bumps over here. Let's push it ever so slightly. You see how the two bumps are moving, almost as if the ripple was actively happening. It is rippling through. That is what the phase shift is doing. The ripple continues and now we're seeing other phases of the ripple. That is what the phase shift is doing. Finally, we have the angle, which you can already guess is going to change and which angle the ripple is coming in from. So if we were to, let's say, decrease the period, we can better see which angle it is coming from. Or we can look at it visually over here. Finally, we have these drop downs. The resembling method and the clipping are things that all go over thoroughly later in the course. So let's focus on the wave type. Right now, we have it to sine. We have the option to choose triangle, which gives us sharp edges. Then we have saw too, which is If you've ever use a saw, the teeth of the saws tend to look like this, and that is what it is mimicking, if you will. I'll stick to sign for now, increase the period, so it's a bit more flowy. Now we have the Abbass policy. Right now it is set to none, which is why we can see the background. The Abbas policy essentially is to explain this, think of the transparency as the abbass. It is nothingness. It is the Alpha channel, the transparency. Right now it is set to none, meaning we're not doing anything to transparency. In the drop down, you see we have the option to clamp, loop, black or white. We'll start white. White will add a white feel to the background. I increase the period in the amplitude, so we can really see what's happening. All of these areas are transparent areas and they're being filled with white. If we chose black, it would fill it with black and with loop. To explain this better, you'll notice, let me zoom in over here. This would be the pinky finger of our subject here. And since the pinky finger is going off the vas down here, it is being loop at the top of the vas over here. So essentially, whatever goes off the vas gets repeated on the next side of the canvas. Then we have clamp. Clap essentially is stretching the pixels at the extremities. The pixels are sticking to the edge of our image and then it's being deformed on the inside. Just know that clap will remove transparency to make it simpler. Now, tileable For those of you who are used to making sticker packs or seamless patterns, this will be useful. If ever you're working with the ripple, and you need to create certain patterns. So I'll go ahead and uncheck this. And now I'll go for a result that I'm somewhat satisfied with. Cubic is good enough. If anything, I'll give you a quick runthrough of these. Neres, I'm not fully sure. It mostly appears for certain filters. Linear is okay. It's not great, it's okay, passable, if you will. Cubic is good. No halo and low halo are technically better, but cubic is good for most things. And then we can go ahead and press okay, and there we have it. And so hide this layer, I'll go to the original copy. And let's go ahead and rename this to waves. We'll go up to filters, the stort, and we'll go down to waves. Now, the waves is very similar to the ripple effect. If you've ever dropped a rock in a puddle, you'll see it creates those waves which are like ripples, similarly to what we did with ripples, except that here we have the point of impact right at the center of our image and hits, and now the waves are coming out from this point. Now, the first thing we have here are the coordinates of where you dropped the rock. If you imagine that we dropped a stone, and our canvas is a puddle of water. You can either manually enter the x and y location for our stone. Or you can click on this arrow over here, which will give you a let's say this color picker icon on our cursor, similarly to the color picker over here, but it's not picking up colors. Wherever you click, will become the new center point or the point of impact. So if I click on the hat up here, it now becomes the point of impact and the ripples or waves are coming out from this point. And that's all this does. If you want to remove the picker, simply click on it again and there you go. Like I said, you can input these values manually in here. So go ahead and put this back on his space. Now, the amplitude controls just how strong the ripples are. The higher the imptude, the stronger the waves. I know it's waves, but these are basically like ripples, which are like little waves. The stronger the ampitude, the stronger the waves, if you will. The period, again, similarly to the previous filters, the period determines the repetition of our effect, if you will. Finally, we have the aspect ratio. Now, the aspect ratio, note that the default is one, and this gives you a circular result. By increasing the aspect ratio, it is squashing down your result from top to bottom. If you see here, it's like we're looking at a puddle from an angle and not from the top down. If you lower the aspect ratio, it will then squeeze your waves from side to side. So hold down shift, click on the slider, put it back to one, so we get a fly rounded result. And that's it. Press, and now we have our waves. Our layer expands, and that is because of the clipping options. If we change clipping from adjust to clip and we press, you'll see that our layer does not expand, and that's essentially what the clipping does. Or hide or waves, I I'll make three more copies of our original layer. I'll start with this one over here, and I'll rename this curl effect. Let's go up to filters, this stort, and all the way at the bottom here, we have page curl. One thing I'd like to bring to your attention is that every other effect here has a G next to the name or before the name, and these are geo effects. When you use these effects, it gives you the option to preview the results. These options down here, you can see have two gears next to them. Let's go with the page curl. You might notice it doesn't offer any preview as to what is going to happen to our image. Page curl effect, we do get a small box here in the middle showing us what we are working with. For the curled effect, we can choose which angle we want the curl to happen. I'll stick with the lower right, and let's flip it to vertical, horizontal, depends on you. Go ahead and experiment with these, but let's see what it does. Press, and there we have it. It looks like our image is being curled up like a page. If I hide the curl layer up here, you'll see it cut a piece of our image. And created this curl layer. Now, these two I would normally place inside of a layer group. I would make a layer group and put these two in it and that would be our page curl or paper curl. Okay, let's go ahead and hide this. Let's move to the layer below, and let's rename this cubism. Now, we'll go up to filters, and this time, we're going down to artistic, and we'll choose cubism. Now, similarly to what we saw for the mosaic. You have the different tile size, which controls how big the cubes are or how small, the bigger the number, the bigger the cubes, the smaller the number, the smaller the cubes. And then we have the tile saturation. So if we lower the saturation, instead of lowering the saturation overall for our image, re Zoom in here. You'll notice we get a lot of transparency patches, no matter the tile size. So we're getting a lot of transparency, and this is what the tile saturation essentially is doing. If we increase the tile saturation, we're getting full solid colors. And then even if you had the tile saturation lowered, for example, and we're getting some transparency, but you did not want any transparency, you can take out the transparency by changing the background color. So I'll first put up a bit of saturation, so we can see the colors. I'll grab the color picker over here. You can always click on this and choose the color manually. By the default, it is set to transparent, so zero Alpha, I'll grab the color picker, pick a color from our image, and now if I lower the tile saturation, you'll see we're still getting a fully opaque background. These little white dots over here are the desaturated value. Again, just a reminder, there is no right result or wrong result. It really depends on what you're going for. Works for me and press. Okay. There we have it. So a hold down shift, click on where the eyeball for this layer would be. Finally, we're going to call this water pixel. Let's go up to filters, down to artistic again. And we're going to go for water pixels. The water pixel might be slightly heavier than some of these other filters that we've looked at. Again, they work just about the same. You have the superpixel sizes, the smaller it is, the more detail you get. And if you want to lower the weight of this process, you can always use split view. That way, the preview is only being shown on one half of your image, making it lighter on your system. So the bigger the number over here, the less detail we'll get as the pieces are much bigger. The gradient smoothness. Let's zoom in to get a better look at it. If we lower the gradient smoothness, it takes a second. Again, this is somewhat of a heavy filter. See we're getting more noise at the edges of each color. And if we increase the gradient smoothness, this is real time. I'm not accelerating, nor am I slowing this down? It takes a while to load as the water pixels is a tad heavier. You see we're getting somewhat less noise. Now, the spiral regularization is trade off between superpixels, regularity and adherence to object boundaries. If we up this number here, give it a second, and there you go. Essentially, instead of having instead of having these organic shapes more or less, we're getting more of a cubic result, if you will. These are the cubes. Finally, we have the superpixel colors, which is on average, and we can choose random, give it a few seconds. If you remember the average is basically making an average of the colors from our image in random is generating them randomly. Of course, I would stick to average. If I press, it will take a few seconds for this to load. But first, I will lower the spatial regularization. Press and there you have it. This is our water pixel result. All right. We went through quite a few effects. Let's move on to our next image. 18. More Layer Effects - GIMP Essentials: All right. So we went through quite a few effects. Let's move on to our next image. And let's first rename our original layer and I'll rename this to original. I'll make four duplicates of this image. So one, two, three, four, and we'll start with the top layer and call this Bloom. O hold down shift. Click on the icon to toggle off all of the other icons. Then we'll go up to filters, light and shadow, and we'll choose Bloom. Now as you can see bloom is basically just adding some bloom to our image. It's very straightforward, if you think about it. We can control the threshold of the bloom. The higher the threshold, the less bloom we're getting. As for the softness, let's go ahead and zoom on one area so we can really see. If you increase the softness, It is somewhat averaging out the bloom. If you decrease the softness, it becomes a lot harsher. We increase it. See we're getting it's softer, lower, it's a lot more of a harsh result. You can see it over here on this highlight. As for the threshold, if you decrease the threshold, getting even more bloom, you increase the threshold, we're getting less bloom. For the radius, it is essentially how much area does the bloom cover? So a higher radius will cover more area. The lower the radius, the less areas it covers. So if we move here to a dark part of the image, right here. As I increase the radius, you can see the bloom gradually growing in and covering more space, so a higher radius. As for the strength, you can already guess it, it will control just how strong the bloom is. So if you zoom out, increase the strength and you get a very blown out bloomy image. And finally, we have limit exposure, which will, as it says, limit the exposure. Thus averaging it out just a bit. Press. And there we have it, that is it for Bloom. Let's go ahead and hold down hit. Click on the icon for this one, Tgling it on. Make sure to select layer. For this one over here, let's rename this to background, or create a layer group, and I'll move layer inside of this layer group or rename the group. Long shadow. I'll grab our text tool, if you remember? It is still using the previously used font. I'll make a text box up here and all right as we had it before. This is pretty big for the text. Let me lower the size here before we continue. Okay. All right, keep moving. Decrease the line height. Grab or move tool, and move this up. I'll change the color of our text over to white. And now with our text layer active, we can go up to filters, light and shadow, and we're going to choose long shadow. We get a few options for the long shadow, by default, it is a solid shadow, if you will, we can choose the style of the shadow. So we have finite, which gives you this very hard edge shadow with a limited distance, a finite distance. We have infinite, which will essentially drag the shadow out as far as it can or rather as far as the size of or layer. So if I were to expand this layer to the size of a canvas, this shadow would continue going on. Let's go ahead and do that. All right click on the layer, go up to layer to image size. It converts it into a normal layer, if you will. We can go back up to filter, reshow long shadow. If we switch to infinite, it will cover our entire layer. Then we have the fading. The limit of the fading is controlled by the size of your layer. If the boundaries of the layer is inside or canvas, the fading will cut at the boundaries of the layer. Then we have fading fixed link, which essentially is the same as fading, but with a finite length, if you will. We can then control the length up here, so we can make it longer or shorter. It is up to you to determine what are you going for? What is it that you want to achieve? And then we have the midpoint here for the fading with the fixed length, which is similar to a gradient. If you remember the middle point that we had, the midpoint stop. So it is similar to this middle point that we had in the gradient. So the further or the higher the value of the midpoint, the more the shadows are extending to the edge of our long shadow. The lower the values of the midpoint. The less pronounced the shadows are. So the transparency is the one dominating. Then we can choose the color of the shadow. So click here, pick a color, or you can use the color picker up here and pick a color from your image. Now, for the composition here, we have a few options. We have shadow plus image, which essentially is the shadow plus our text. We have shadow only. If we click on this, you'll see that our text becomes black, and essentially this is a shadow. Let's try a different shadow to see if we get a different result. There you go. Go back to fading. Then we have shadow minus image, and here it will eliminate the image and only leave the shadow, and it will do this with any one of the shadow types that we use. Again, there is no right or wrong result. It all depends on what you are going for. Want to use shadow plus image. And for the clipping, we can leave it to adjust. It might expand our layer a little bit. And let's go ahead and press. Okay, and there you have it. Our layer has been expended as the shadow goes off the Canvas. If ever you want to move your layer a bit, you would have extra shadow to work with. But there you have it. This is the long shadow effect. So I'll go ahead and collapse our folder and hide it. Let's move on to the next layer and I rename this wind. Let's go up to filters. And this time, we're going to go to the sort. We're going to go down to wind. Now, the wind effect. This is what we get for starters. For the style, we can choose between wind or blast. The blast is a bit more hard edge, as you can see. For this, we'll stick to wind. Then we can choose the direction. Right now it is set to left, so it is moving from the right to the left. We can switch it to right, so it'll move from the left towards the right. Then for the edge affected, we can either have leading, which means if our direction is right so it is going from left to right, the leading edge would be the left, and the trailing edge would be the right. And if we say both, it will take both the left and the right edges. Then we have the threshold. As you can see here, higher values restrict the effect, the fewer areas of the image. So if we lower the threshold, the more of the image will be affected. If we increase the less of the image will be affected. Now, it all depends on your desired threshold. And finally, we have the strength, and as you might have guessed it, higher the strength, the stronger the effect, lower the strength, the weaker the effect or less pronounced the effect. And then we have this random C down here again, and you might have guessed it already. This will determine the distribution of these strokes, if you will. That's about it for this one. We can go ahead and press. Remember, the clipping. If it's set to adjust, the layer will grow, if ever parts of the image extend beyond the Canvas. If we set it to clip, it will cut out anything that goes beyond our layer. I'll leave it to adjust, press. There we have it. So I'll hide this layer. Let's go down to the layer beneath it. Tg on the visibility. This one, we're going to rename it to linear motion blur. So let's go up to filters, blur. Let's go down to linear motion blur. The length of the motion blur. Let's go ahead and simply increase it, so you can see what's happening. You'll notice we have these two dots on the screen, and this is because of the on Canvas controls. So you can also click on the Canvas to control the length of the motion blur. You can see these values here are changing, as well as the angle. Now, the motion blur would be good for a speeding car. Maybe someone running or anything in motionary, as it says, motion blur. Another thing you might notice is at the edge of our image here, if we zoom in, can see we're getting some transparency as the entire image is being affected by the motion blur because nothing is extending outside of our canvas, but rather it is blurring what is inside and leaving these little gaps of transparency. Which is something to take into consideration. All right. So that is it for this image. Let's move on to the next image and look at a few more effects. Here we have it. First thing I'll do, I'll rename our layer to original. And let's make a few copies. We'll make four copies for this image, so one, two, three, and four. We can hold down Shift, click on the icon for the top layer over here. This will toggle off the visibility of every other layer. Let's rename this top layer here to vignette. Now let's go up to filters, down to light and shadow, and we'll go down to Vignette. So essentially, we can control most of these sliders by using the controls on our vas. First things first, we have the vignette shape. It starts as a circle. We can choose a square, a diamond, and then we have horizontal, and vertical. Now, these are the different shapes. For this image will stick to circle. The principles are essentially the same for each one of these shapes anyhow. Then we have the color. We can either pick the color from here, clicking on it, and choosing a color or using the color picker and picking a color from our image. Next, we have the radius, and this is the overall size of rvignette. So a smaller radius, smaller vignette, higher radius, bigger vignette. We have the softness, and the softness is this middle circle here, if you will. Then we have the gamma, which is essentially these dotted lines. The proportions is the shape of rvignee, if you will. So if we lower the proportions, you can see we're getting a more rounded vignette. We have the squeeze, which controls the squeeze of r vignette. This is similar to the aspect ratio that we saw for the ripple effect. I'm not mistaken or the waves effect. You can also control this by using the points on our Canvas. We can use this to edit the shape or we can simply do it on the Canvas. Next, we have, of course, the position of our vignette, which we can control with these two sliders. Or we can click on the cursor over here, if you remember. It will add this color picker icon to our cursor. Again, it's not to pick the color, but rather to pick the center point of our vignette. As I said, you can control these points on the andas. Let's go off and turn off the coordinate picker. If I grab the left point here, it will move the left and right. If I grab the top one, it will move the top and bottom. Same thing for this middle circle here. But if you click and hold down shift, it will control the overall radius. We can also click on this inner dotted line to control the gamma of our vignette. Then we have the rotation of our vignette. Of course, you can see it simply rotating it. If this was a full circle, the rotation wouldn't do much. And then we have the on convis controls. If we check this off, we no longer see the visual representation of our Vignette and we can control it with these sliders, but finally, we can go ahead and press, and there we have it. We've created our Vignette. All right. So let's move on to the next layer. So I'll toggle on the visibility. Make sure it is the active layer, and let's rename this to circular motion layer. Circular motion blue. Motion blur. All right. And with our layer active, let's go up to filters, blur, and we're going to choose the circular motion blur. Now, essentially, this is very similar to the linear motion blur, except that as the name says it, this will be circular. For this one, we can control the location, so the origin point. We can also use the coordinate picker, and we have the angle. Now, the angle determines, if you will, just how twisted our motion blur is. So let's start first with a very low value. You can see here we're still getting this circular blur, but at a very low value. Let's say we want it to have it up to three. This might be a little slow in your system. This filter is also a tad heavy. Then on square satisfied with the result, we can simply go ahead, press, and there we have it. It's a circular motion blur. We can see that the layer expands outside of our canvas. If we go up to view, show all, we can see what is happening. So let's go back to view Uncheck Show A. And a hold down shift. Click on the eyeball position for our next layer. Make sure it is the active layer. And let's call this Zoom motion blur. You might have guessed it. We're going to go up to filters, blur, and this time, we're going to choose zoom motion blur. Now, the zoom motion blur, similarly to the linear motion blur, can give you a sensation of speed, but moving forward or backward depending on the blur factor that you choose. So you can go to negative values, which will give you a reverse sensation, maybe depending, but as you can see, it is also shrinking our layer. And with positive values, the higher the value, the faster we're going or the more intense the motion blur. As the name says it, it is creating this zooming effect. Of course, we have the controls on the canvas here down here because of the on Canvas controls. So let's go ahead and pick something that we're comfortable with. Keeping in mind that again, there is no wrong result or right result, it depends on what you're trying to achieve. Then we can just press, and there we have it. Motion bur applied. Again, if you go to view, show all, we can see how it stretches our image out of the Canvas to create this zooming effect. All right view. Let's uncheck show all. Finally, let's move to our other layer down here. We'll call this lens flare. The infamous lens flare. Let's go up to filters, light and shadow, and we're going to choose lens flare. Now, you might recognize some of these controls. We have the coordinate picker, and we can manually put in the coordinates. Now, this is a very destructive manner of using the lens flare as it will apply directly to our image. So instead, I'll go ahead and cancel out of this, create a layer group, or put the lens flare inside of our layer group, and I'll create a new blank layer. And I'll call this lens flare, one word. And let's go ahead and fit it up with black, so I'll just grab our foreground color here, black. Left click, hold drag, drop it over a layer. It's all black now. Let's go up to filters, light and shadow, lens flare. Now, if you want to see what's happening underneath our current layer, simply change the blending mode of our lens flare here, the black layer. Over to screen. And essentially what screen does, it doesn't take into consideration the pure black in an image. It only shows any value that starts to go above the pure Blacks. Which is why we can see our image and we can see our lens flare very clearly. Later in the course, we'll be diving into blending modes and we'll learn more about these different blending modes. So we can grab our coordinate sicker, click even off of our canvas. Somewhere high up in the trees. And we get our little lens flare, then we can press and there you go. This is a non destructive way of creating your lens flares as it is not applied directly to you. Image, we can always change the intensity of the values with the levels tools, for example, or even the curves tool. You can talk it on and off, so on and so forth. Control the opacity. This is a non destructive way of creating our lens flare. So I'll go ahead and call this layer ns layer effect. And there we have it. So we've just gone through quite a few effects. Finally, I'll show you one last effect. So let's go ahead and rename this to red eye. It was already called red eye with the extension. I'll duplicate this layer, and I'll call this red eye fix. And then we'll go up to Bilers and hence, and we'll go down to red eye removal. Now, this is one way of using it. For this image is not causing any trouble. You can see it removes the red eye. But if you were to, let's say lower the threshold or increase the threshold, sorry, you'll see that the skin tones will be affected. Now, if this image was a full on image with different people and lights in the back, the red eye could cause some problems. The best way to go about this, cancel out of this is to grab our ellipse tool. So a better method of doing this, we'll go up and grab our ellipse too, and we're going to make a selection around the red eye. Then we can hold down shift or simply toggle on the ad mode, or simply toggle or simply toggle on the ad mode. But I'll just hold down shift and draw a second ellipse over here. I'll center this properly. Press enter or return on the keyboard to confirm, and now we can go ahead and apply the red eye removal. So filters, enhance red eye removal, and there we have it. Now, even if we were to increase the threshold, there's no risk of affecting any skin tones or accidentally affecting any lights in the background of a full image, if you will. Press, select, none, and there you have it. So that is it for the common layer effects. I know it's been quite a journey. And the next lesson, we're going to learn how we can crop an image. See you there. 19. How to Crop Images - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we're going to learn how we can crop our images down to a specific size or even crop them up to a specific size. We're also going to learn how we can straighten an image. Let's get started. First thing to do is go up to file, open. Navigate to the exercise folder, and we're going to go for tin cropping and scale. Let's open all three images. All left click on 01, hold down shift, left click on 03, and then press open. L et's move over to our first project tab with our runner over here. The first thing to do would be to grab our crop tool. To do so, we can go up to tools down to transform tools, and the third option here is crop or shift plus C. We also have it over here in the toolbox. It is next to or above the scale tool, depending on your layout. Let's go ahead and use the crop tool with the default values right now, and to use the crop tool, you simply have to left click hold and drag, and this basically makes a selection. The crop tool is very reminiscent of the rectangle select tool. In the sense that we get these handles at every corner. Over in the tool options, we also have the expand from center and the fixed aspect ratio with height or size depending on which one you want to go with. You can also achieve these by using the same keyboard shortcuts or hot keys, which are shift and control. If I hold this corner, hold down shift, I'm maintaining the aspect ratio, I I hold down control on a PC or command on a MAC, you can see we're now scuding it from the center. Let's go ahead and make a selection. Around or subject here and press enter or return to confirm. There we have it. This is the default for the crop tool. You'll notice that our canvas has been resized to our selection. But the layer has not. The layer still has all of these extra pixels that extend outside of our Canvas. If we go to view, show all, you can see we still have the white background continuing here. Let's go to view, uncheck show all, and we'll go to edit undo the crop. Now let's try with a few options from the two options here. The first one at the top is current layer only. As you can imagine, this will only affect the active layer. If we go ahead and make our selection again, press enter or return to confirm, it will only crop the active layer and not affect the Canvas at all. So we can go back to edit undo. The next option here is delete cropped pixels. You'll notice that this option is grade out. Well, we have the current layer only check. If we uncheck current layer only, we can now check the delete crop pixels, and let's go ahead and make our selection and press enter or return. There you go. Now, the result is similar to the default for the crop tool with the exception that it is now deleting the pixels that are outside of our Canvas, outside of the selection that we made for our crop. Let's go to undo uncheck this. Now let's look at allow growing. Before we check this option, You can go ahead and make a selection, and if you try to move it outside of the canvas, you'll notice that it is not allowing us to. Not let us go outside of the canvas size. This is where the allow growing comes in. This will allow you to grow your selection beyond the edges or the boundaries of the canvas. Then underneath it, you see we have this drop down with bill width, where we can choose what we want to fill the extra space width. Now, I'll leave mind to transparency. This really depends on the size of your active layer, if you will. Press enter or return. You see it now changes the size of our Canvas, but it does not delete the pixels that are outside of our crop selection. This is because we didn't delete crop pixels, and it would allow us to grow, and it would delete any pixels that are outside of the selection that we made. Let's go ahead and uncheck this, go up to edit undo. Finally, you can see we have the expand from center and the fixed aspect ratio, which are again, very similar to the rectangle select or even the ellipselect. We also have the position and size, which are similar to the rectangle and ellipselect tool. If we were to make a selection here with our crop, we could use the position to change the position of our crop by changing these values, or the size of our crop selection by changing the size values. We can also change the units. Then we have the highlight check box over here, which we also saw with the rectangle select. Under that, we have guides. For now, it is set to no guides. But if we click on the drop down, you'll see we have center line, rule of third, rule of fifth, golden sections, and diagonal lines. Essentially, these guides, if you're not familiar with them are designed to help you create a more appealing composition. For example, we have a runner here, typically, since they are looking towards the right, to give the impression that there is room for them to keep running, we could switch to center lines. And we could make them we could place them behind the center line, thus giving the impression that there's a lot more room for them to run towards. This would simply help you. This is just to help you with your composition. Press enter a return, and we would crop our image according. Let's go ahead and undo this and I'll turn off the guides. Finally, we have the auto shrink. We'll make a selection around our subject here. If we press auto shrink, you'll see that the crop tool will reduce the selected area to fit around our subject. With this image, it is quite easy since the background is a single color. It's a white background, and our subject can stand out from the background. There's enough contrast here for the crop tool to easily identify the subject of our selection. And that's essentially what the auto shrink does. It will identify what you're trying to grab and it will reduce the boundaries of the selection or round that object, if you will. Now finally, the shrink merge is you can see here it says, Use all visible layers when shrinking the selection. This is if we had transparency in multiple layers, then GIMP would read all of the visible pixels from the layers to try and identify what is the subject of our selection. And that is essentially it for the crop too. It is very straightforward and easy to use. So all press escape to exit out of this. Now let's move to our second image over here, and we'll use the crop tool to make this into a 16 by nine resolution or rather a nine by 16. We're going to use the crop tool over here to make our selection, and over in the size, let's say I want this to be 1080 by 1920, which would be the dimensions for a Instagram show reel or YouTube burial, which is basically the vertical format of a standard video, if you will, 16 by nine. We could also use the center line over here to really make sure that our road is well at the center. Then once we're done, we can just press enter or return to confirm and we have cropped our image. Now, I did not delete the pixels on the side because we could use a filter that could make use of these additional pixels, or if ever we wanted to pan the image left or right, it would be useful to have these extra pixels. If you do not need them, however, you can always check the delete crop pixels. This changes our composition, as you can see, O Canvas is now a 1080 by 1920. Again, the crop tool is a very straightforward tool easy to use. Now let's move to our third image over here, where we're going to use the measure tool. If you look at our image, you can tell that there is a tilt. It is slightly tilted on the right. If we grab our ruler up here and create a guide, let's place it over the roof of this house. Let's put one over these logs on the floor here. Let's zoom in. I'll grab our move tool, so we can move the guides. You'll notice that the roof of this house is not a straight line. It is actually tilted towards the right. Same thing with the logs over here on the floor. There is a tilt happening towards the right. Even if we were to place a guide, let's say roughly around the edge here of the mountains, you can notice that again, it is tilting towards the right. Let's go ahead and straighten up this image. We'll go to I delete all the guides by going up to image. Guides, remove all guides. Et's zoom out a little bit. Of course, to straighten this, we need to grab our measure tool. Let's go up to tools, and right here, we have the measure. The keyboard shortcut or hot key is shift plus M. We can see over in our toolbox that it is grouped with the color picker, and it is right next or above the zoom tool or magnifying glass, all depending on your layout. Let's first look at the tool options for the measure tool. First, we have the orientation. By default, it is set to auto. The measure tool tends to do a very good job at guessing which orientation you're trying to fix. Is it horizontal or is it vertical? But you can also manually choose which one you want to work with. Next, we have this checkbox here for the use inf window. It is reminiscent to the infol window that we have for the color picker. By default, this will not be check, but I like to have this inf window here to see what I'm working with. If I left click anywhere on the Canvas, hold and drag, can see we're getting this line over here, and this little pop up window, which is the inf window, giving us some information about our measuring tool. First, we have the distance. This is the distance between this point and this point. Then we have the angle over here. You can see this little line up here, which is essentially a horizontal line. And if you remember in geometry, we have this little symbol, this curve arc here, which represents the angle. Right now we're working at a 37.71 angle. This line relatively to this horizontal line. Finally, we have the width and height of this area here. Now, you can see all of these are in pixels. If we wanted these in a different unit of measurement, we can go down to our status bar down here. We have this little drop down over here. If you don't have the status bar or you turned it off, you can go up to view, you can go down to show status bar. So over here, we have this drop down with the Px, since we're working with pixels. Let's click on it. Here we have all sorts of measuring units. If you wanted to see these values in inches, for example, we would choose inches, and it would add the values and inches over here. So go ahead and switch this back to pixels for now, and I'll press escape to exit out of this. Next, we have the straighten parameters. First, we have transform. Transform is, what do you want to transform? Do you want to transform the layer, a selection, a path, or the image itself. O entire composition. Then we have the interpolation. If you remember, linear is okay, cubic is good, no halo and low halo are better depending on the circumstances. Of course, none will put no effort whatsoever into maintaining the quality of our image after a transform or a scale. Then we have clipping. By default, this will be set to adjust If you remember the difference between adjust and clip, Adjust will leave the pixels that extend outside of our Canvas untouched, clip will delete any parts of our image that go outside of the Canvas after or transform. Now with the measure tool, we have crop to result and croppt aspect. Now, croppoot aspect is referring to the current aspect ratio of our image or the layer itself, and then crop to result, which will not maintain the aspect ratio, but it will crop our image. In a theoretical, let's jump into practice. For starters, we'll start with adjust. Let's zoom in here on this house. What we want to do is measure the tilt of this roof, for example. Our left click here, hold down my mouse by in and drag to the other end just so we can really get the tilt over here. We can see it's a 1.44 degrees. Let's zoom back out, and we can click on straighten. Now, the transform is working on the layer, so only the active layer is going to be straightened and modified. This will not affect the Canvas or any other layers if we had more layers in our layer stack. You can see here all it did is rotate our image, and we're left with these transparent areas since our image has been rotated. Since we had the clipping to adjust, the parts of our image that extend beyond the Canvas have been left alone, so they haven't been deleted. Let's go up to edit undo. Let's go up to tools and go down to transform tools, and we're going to choose rotate. Now, if we were to rotate this, we can see what's happening. Essentially, the straighten is simply rotating this, but taking into consideration the angle of our measuring tool to fix the tilt. This is why we're left with these transparent areas. Because as you can see, as we're rotating the image, parts of it are dipping down on the canvas. These parts are going up, these are going in, so on and so forth. Escape the break out of this and grab or measuring tool. Essentially, with the clipping, if we were to set it to crop to result, for example, it would crop the excess areas of our image. Let's go ahead and try this out so you see what I mean. I'll zoom in on the house again and or make our selection or rather identify the tilt. Zoom back out, and let's go ahead and straight in the image or rather the layer. And you can see it rotates the layer just like it did before, but it crops anything that sticks out, which is why we're left with bigger transparent areas. So essentially, the clipping when set to crop saves us the trouble of having to crop the layer ourselves. So let's go ahead and undo this. Okay. This is if you only want to straighten the layer. Let's say this is our final image, and we simply want to rotate it and make sure that the Canvas is cropped to the content of our image. Then we can go and switch the transform to image. And depending if you want the aspect ratio to be kept or not, you can choose between crop to result or crop with aspect. Let's go with crop with aspect. Again, we have to identify the tilt. And let's straighten our image. Now, remember, this is no longer going to affect just the layer, but instead, it's going to affect our entire canvas. If we go to view, show all, you'll notice that the parts of our image that are sticking out of the canvas were not deleted. Let's hide this. But our Canvas itself has been reduced in size. To see this, if you pay attention up here to the numbers up here, so the dimension of our Canvas. Let's go to edit undo, and you'll see that these numbers are at a higher value. Essentially, that is what the crop does to our image. It crops down the entire Canvas to fit the proportion of just the visible parts of our result. And that is essentially it. Let's go ahead and straight in our image. Straighten and there you have it. If we create a guide now to check our roof or grab the move tool using M on the keyboard, you can now see that the roof is straight enough. Same thing with the logs over here on the floor, and even the river over here, if we put it there. There's no longer the strong tilt towards the right. Now, I'll delete all the guides by going up to image, guides, remove all guides, and there you have it. This is how you can either crop your images or straighten that is it for this lesson. The next lesson, we'll be looking at how we can create a specific size document. See you there. 20. Scale and Resolution Print vs Digital - GIMP Essentials: Hi. If you're going to take anything away from this lesson, let it be that when it comes to print and digital, there are two different mediums. Print, normally, you want to work with real world units and not pixels. Always make sure you're either using inches, centimeters, millimeters, whichever work for you, but it cannot be pixels. Print requires a minimum of 300 DPI or PPI. Digital does not. So you can work with pixels and digital or you can simply use 72 DPI or PPI. All right. That's about it. Let's get back to it. We have our image open here. You can find this image inside of the tin cropping and scale folder inside of the exercise folders, and we're going to take a quick look at the difference between your digital scale and your print scale. To scale and image inside of GIMP, you simply have to go to your menu bar, image and go down to scale image. Above that, you'll notice we have print size. There's a difference between your resolution or your scale for digital and your resolution for print. When it comes to printing, you want to have a minimum of 300 PPI or DPI. PPI stands for pixels per inch, and DPI stands for dot per inch, a term used for printing, whereas PPI is used for digital, but they're essentially the same. Now, inside of the print resolution, you'll notice inside of the units here, if we open the drop down, that we do not see pixels. That is because pixels are not a real world measurement. They are relative to your screen, whereas inches, millimeters, points, centimeters, et cetera or real world units, and that's what you want to use for print. Because, you know, it's a real world rendition of your image. Now, however, if we go inside of the scale image, you'll see we do get the pixel values, and we also have the real world units here. Now, notice at the bottom of our units up here, we get the pixel values, so we can switch this over to inches, for example. As the word says it, PPI pixels per inch, so how many pixels inside of an inch? If we increase the amount of pixels that go inside of an inch and there's a finite amount of pixels inside of our image, you can imagine that the image is going to scale down in order to fit all of the required pixels inside of each inch. If we lower the PPI, it's going to increase the size of our image because less pixels inside of an inch means more pixels to go around. Oh, I'll demonstrate this right now. So as I said, the minimum that you want for print is 300 PPI. So let's switch this to 300. Now, look at the pixel values here and look at the inches values. So I'll go ahead and enter 300. Notice that the inches, so the real world unit have gone down. The dimension of our image would be reduced. We'd get the print quality, but we'd get a smaller print. And you'll notice that the pixels did not change. That is why inside of the print dimension, we do not see pixels because pixels are not a real world unit. The same thing would happen in the opposite direction. So if we were to lower this to 72 DPI or PPI, the dimensions, the real world dimensions of our image would increase. And again, the pixels do not change. But all right. So let's say we need this image for print, but it has to be a specific size. Let's say it needs to be like a poster, so it's going to be 11 by 17 or 17 by 11. Well, inside of this particular menu, the scale image menu, we can do that. So let's say this is going to be 17, 17 by 11. Now you'll notice that the pixel values have gone up because we've increased the real world dimension, and we've increased the resolution, the PPI. And so our pixel values increase. Now, as for the quality, I'll leave it to cubic. If we're to scale, GIP is going to fill in those missing pixels for us by using the pixels that are currently there, and it's going to invent pixels to fill in the gaps, if you will. We scale. And there we have it. Essentially, it's to say that if you're going to work for print, make sure that you're looking at the real world units and not at pixels. And it is recommended to uncheck dot for dot if you're working towards print. Dot for Dot is fine for digital. So if I were to again undo the scale, we look at this over here, grab a screenshot. So as you can see here, with the 150 PPI, we're getting fewer pixels because you need less pixels per inch. And over here with the 300 PPI, we're getting a lot more pixels per inch. All right. So I hope that wasn't too confusing, that is it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we will be learning about ma. 21. How to use Clipping Mask - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. This lesson, we'll be learning how to use a clipping mask where we can take an image such as these apples over here and clip them to our letter A. It is non destructive and highly customizable, where we can grab our apples and move them in here and it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool effect. We can do the same thing over here with this window, clip it inside of the letter H, and we can still move this window inside of our letter. Even these leaves, clip them inside of the letter G over here, and We're not limited to clipping things inside of letters, but enough about that, let's jump into game and learn how we can create these clipping mask. All right then, let's get started. First thing we'll do is go up to File, Open. Let's navigate to our exercise folder, and we'll go inside of 11 selections and masking, and we'll open 05, red fresh apples. We have our apples over here. Let's just create our text. For this, I'll grab the text tool. Left click on our Canvas, and I'll type in the letter A, hold down shift, so it's a Capital A. The font I'm using is Alpha Slab one. You can find this on Google Font. I'll grab our move tool so that I can place this roughly in the center of our composition. Next thing to do is to move our letter A under our Apples. Select our apples. I'll go ahead and rename this two apples. Right click on the layer. Go up to composite mode and by default, it is set to auto. Auto is using union. We want to switch it either to clip to background or intersection. There is a small difference between the two. Let's start with clip the background and there you have it. It is that simple to clip an image to the layer below it. If we grab the move tool, so we still have to move tool, and we can still move the apple inside of the letter A with no problems at all. Before we continue, I'll show you the difference between clip to background and intersect. If we move our apples here, so we can see the edge of our layer, the apples layer, with this yellow line, let's move it all the way across our A. You can see we still have the letter A underneath our apples. Obviously it's over here. And that is because we're using clip to background. Now, if we were to right click on our layer, go back to composite mode and switch to intersection, you'll see that we no longer see the letter A. What the intersection does differently from the clip to background is it only shows the parts of our two layers that are overlapping each other, which means since our top layer over here is not overlapping with this other half of A, nothing appears in where they overlap, only the apples will show. I personally prefer to leave it on clip to background. That way, it's easier to see when something is off, or maybe sometimes you want the thing in the background to show, in this case, the A. With the move to, I'll go ahead and put our apples back inside of the letter A. In the example that I showed in the beginning of this video, we had a drop shadow. Let's go ahead and create our drop shadow, and we can troubleshoot some of the issues that we're going to run into. We'll grab our letter A. Now there are two ways to create a drop shadow using the filters. Let's go ahead and look at the first method. We'll go to filters, light and shadow, and we're going to go to drop shadow. This one will be using the Geo operation, meaning we will get a live preview of what's going on. If I were to hide our apples here for a moment, and you can see we're getting this drop shadow. The thing with the Geggo is that it is a de it's a destructive method for adding a drop shadow. All of these settings as they are, press. You can see that for starters, our layer is no longer a text layer. Secondly, our drop shadow is attached to this layer, so it's attached to the A. If we were to enable the apples again and we zoom in here, you'll notice that the drop shadow is reddish and what we're actually seeing is the apples on our top layer here. If I were to hide the apples, you can see this is a completely dark drop shadow, so it's a black drop shadow with a lower opacity. And we turn on the apples, we can see the apples through it. This is because when we clip the apples to the layer below, it only appears. So the top layer only appears where we have visible pixels in the layers below. In this case, the drop shadows count as visible layers, only that they are semi transparent. And that is the issue with using the Gag drop shadow for this operation. Let's go up to edit. We're going to undo item visible, undo the drop shadow. Now, the other method for creating drop shadow, let's make sure that the A is selected. Is to go up to filters, light and shadow, and we have drop shadow legacy. One of the differences is we do not get a preview of our shadow. The second difference is that this method creates a new layer that holds our drop shadow. My settings over here, I have the offset set to ten for x and offset set to ten for y. That is how far to the right or left or how far up and down. Offset x, left and right, offset y up and down. Positive values, push it to the right, negative values would push it to the left. For the y, positive values, push it down, negative values will push it up. Then we have the blur radius, I'll set it to 15, 15 will work just fine. I'll leave the color of the drop shadow to black. By default, you'll have allow resizing check, and this can resize or canvas size. In this case, we do not want this to happen. Make sure that allow resizing is checked off. Of course, we have the opacity, 60 should work just fine. We can always change it after, and let's go head and press. This creates a new layer called drop shadow, which holds our drop shadow. If we were to hide the letter A, you can see we still have our drop shadow here. Now let's go ahead and turn on our apples and same issue. The apples are showing through the shadow. And that is expected. The difference is we now have our drop shadow on a separate layer. In order to isolate the effects of our clipping mask, we have to create a layer group. Let's go ahead and create a folder, a layer group here, I'll place it all at the top and we'll put our apples inside of the layer group. You can see the clipping effect is no longer applying, which means we can now see all of the apples despite the fact that we still have our letters underneath it. This is because by default, layer groups, the mode, the blending mode is set to normal. And they are isolated to the content or rather they are restricted to the content inside of the layer group. If there's nothing else inside of the layer group, there's nothing to clip to, so it shows the entire image. If we are to switch the layer group mode to pass through, it would then take into consideration every other layer in the layer stack. We'll leave this to normal and we'll simply place the later A inside of our layer group. Our composition up here is now isolated, and we have our drop shadow and our clipping effect. Finally, we have this checkerboard on the back, which represents transparency. If we want to have a solid background, we can simply go ahead and create a new layer. Get this little pop up here, layer name background, that works fine. For the fill width, let's go ahead and make a white background. It really depends on to you. You can always go for transparency and fill the color in yourself. But let's go with white and press, move this below in there we have it. If you want a stronger drop shadow, simply grab the drop shadow layer. Let's increase the opacity. Let's say 80, for example. If we want the extra blur on our shadow, First thing to do is increase the size of our layer. We can either use the crop to or simply right click on the drop shadow, go up to layer to image size, and then we can go up to filter, blur, Gagen blur, and increase the blur level. This depends on what result you're going for, press and voila. You can also use the move tool if you want to bring it out a little bit more, push it on a different direction, et cetera. For this, I'll go ahead and undo the move. It is that simple to create the clipping mask. Now, let's go ahead and call this apple comp. Cp for composition. If we wanted to group the drop shadow with our composition over here, of course, dropping the drop shadow inside of the folder would give us the same issue. It would start to consider the pixels of the drop shadow. But instead, what we can do is create another layer group, so I'll make another layer group outside and call this. Let's say we call this comp A. Since it's for the letter A, move this on top, simply move our folder inside of this new comp, and place the drop shadow inside of that folder and move it beneath this folder over here. And there you have it. Now they're all grouped together. We can move them all together at once, or go inside and move the individual elements. That's really it for the clipping mask. Before we finish, I'll simply scale down our apples. Let me lower the opacity here of the preview so we can see the letter behind it. Make sure that we're not going smaller than our letter. I'll switch the interpolation to low halo scale and Vo. A quick side note is since there is no visual indicator that this layer is being clipped to the bottom layer, what we can do is right click on it and add a color tag. You can elect one of these colors to represent the clipped layers or clipping layers, and assign it to it. Let's say if red was your color of choice, then now you know that this layer is being clipped. This would be a nice reminder as a visual system. Feel free to go ahead and practice with the other images available in this folder. We have the vintage window and the rain water green leaf. That is it for this lesson. This is how you create a clipping mask, and the next lesson we'll be learning how to make selections inside of Gimp. 22. How to Remove Background - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we will be learning how to make selections. We're going to take this image over here and remove the background. Let's go ahead and learn how to do this in gi. Okay, let's get started. First, we'll go up to file, open, navigated the exercise folder, and we'll be going inside of 11 selections and masking. And let's go ahead and open up zero, zero and 01, and press open. All right. We have our watermelon over here, and you would imagine that if we tried to make a selection of our watermelon using either the rectangle select or ellip select, it would be quite difficult to select both pieces of the watermelon. Even if we use the free select tool, it would still be quite a challenging task. So I'll go and select none. Instead, what we'll be using for this selection is the fuzzy select tool. It's right next to or right under our free select tool. So let's go ahead and grab our fuzzy select. The keyboard shortcut, as you can see, is U, and the fuzzy select tool is a particular selection tool. Let's go ahead and look at a few options in the tool options first. You can see we have the same modes that we have for the rectangle or ellipselect. It's either going to replace, add subtract or intersect. The keyboard shirts are the same. Shift to add control on PC to subtract or command on a MAC, and Shift plus control on a PC to intersect or shift plus command on a MAC. Then we have enti lasing, which is always good to leave on. We also have the option to feather the edges, and this simply adds a bit of a blur to the edge of our selection. Here we have select transparent areas. We can leave this checked on for this project. Simple merge would be useful if we had multiple layers and we're combining the pixels when making a selection. Finally, we have diagonal neighbors. Now, the diagonal neighbors, the best way to illustrate this, I'll go ahead and grab our rectangle select. By default, the fuzzy select tool would grab each pixel as they were, so it would do a selection of this sort. It would grab top pixel, bottom pixel, pixels to the right and pixels to the left. With the diagonal neighbors enabled, it will also consider the pixels that are diagonal to our center pixel. That's essentially what the diagonal pixels does. It's grabbing these four corners when looking for the pixels to grab. Let's go ahead and grab the fuzzy select tool, and we have the threshold. Now, the threshold determines just how much of a reach or fuzzy select tool has. To see this better, let's go ahead and turn on the draw mask. If I were to left click on the Canvas, you'll see we get a selection. If we turn on draw mask and I left click and hold, we get this pink area, and the pink area represents the parts of the image that are being selected by our fuzzy select. This gives you a nice visual representation. Now up here, we have this drop down to select by, either, composite, red, green, blue, alpha, et cetera. In most cases, we'll be using it with the select by composite. We'll leave it to a composite. Let's go ahead and refine our selection. Already with one click, you see we have a pretty decent selection. Although these bottom areas here are not fully selected because of the shadows. To add the shadows to our selection. We can either hold down shift on the keyboard and continue clicking closer towards the shadows, or we can go up to mode and toggle the add the current selection. In my case, I'll simply hold down shift and continuously click closer and closer on the shadows. Now, as for the threshold here, if I were all hold down shift to do this since we really have a decent selection, if I were to click, left click, hold down my mouse cursor and drag the cursor ever so slightly towards the right, you can see that the threshold is increasing and we're grabbing more and more of the image. That is what the threshold is. It is how far of a reach does the fuzzy select tool have. Now if I were to drag the cursor and I'm still clicking, if I drag the cursor towards the left, it doesn't have to be big movement. Depending on how zoomed in you are or how zoomed out you are from the image. But I'm gradually and slowly dragging the mouse cursor towards the left. You can see that the threshold is being reduced. That's essentially what the threshold does. We can also change the value ourselves up here. You see when we left click, The fuzzy select is grabbing parts of our watermelon. So hold down shift, click on the slider, and I'll set this back to 15. Click on the white part, I hold down shift and add these bottom parts here gradually. So essentially, we could always left click hold and drag ever so slightly towards the right to increase the threshold as we're grabbing the shadows. At the top here, we can see that it is also grabbing parts of our watermelon, but we don't have to worry about that just yet. Let's just make sure to grab all of the shadows down here. Let's go ahead and zoom in to really see what we're doing. And k. So we're almost there. So I'm simply holding down shift and clicking since my mode is set to replace. I'm holding down shift to toggle the ad mode. I'll zoom in a little bit more just to make sure I'm grabbing these pieces nicely. Here, I'm holding down the click, and I'm dragging towards the left to lower the threshold, so I don't grab parts of my watermelon. All right. That's good for the shadows. Now we can go above here at Zoom in, and now we want to use the substract. You can either hold down control on a PC or command on a Mac or simply toggle on the substract mode, or hold down control. And with one click, you can see we have eliminated the selection of the watermelon up here. Now, before we do anything, keep in mind that we were clicking on the white background, meaning that our selection right now is the background and not the watermelon. If I were to grab the paintbrush tool, left click and move around, you can see we're drawing on the background, but not on the watermelon. So let me go ahead and undo this. In order to grab the watermelon, we then have to go to select and invert. This will invert or selection. If I were to pass my paintbrush tool again, I would then be drawing on the watermelon and not the background. I'll go ahead and undo this. If you remember in one of the previous lessons to copy parts of our image that is selected, we can go up to edit copy. Now let's go over to our first project tab with the table over here. We'll go to edit. We can either paste or paste as, new layer in place. This will skip the floating selection, and there we have it. Now we can grab the move tool, adjust this on the table. However it fits best, and even use the scale tool. We've placed our watermelon on top of this table. That is one way of making a selection, and that is with the Fuzzy tool. There are a few other ways of making a selection. Now, before I deselect our watermelon over here, we've switched over to the Watermelon project tab. Before I do so, I'll go up to select, and I'll go down here and tick on two path. Now, if we can see it loaded, if we go over to our Path tab, and remember, if you do not have this tab open, this dialogue, simply go to the configuration menu, add tab and go to Paths. I'll go to the Path tab, and if I turn on this path over here, I'll go to select. None. What it did is it took our selection, and it converted it into a path. So if I were to grab the path to or simply double click on this path over here. We can see we now have a path selection around our watermelon, matching the selection that we just made. So this is a nice way to retain your selections. Now it's very easy for me to simply click down here on the path to selection. And let me get out of the path too. You see we now have our selection again. Quick and easy. All right. So I go to select? No. Now, an alternative way to make a selection is over in our pre select tool, if you right click. We have the sissor select. Let's go ahead and grab our Scissor select. The Sissor select doesn't always give the smoothest selections, but it is one option for selecting. Now, first, let's go over to the two options, and we can see we have again the same modes, replace, add, substract, and intersect. At the bottom here, we can either fetter the edges, and we also have the option for interactive boundaries or interactive boundary. I'll go ahead and check this on. And we can start making our selection. To use the Scissor tool, you simply have to left click once. No need to hold it. I'll add a point, and then we can left click up here. You can see it creates this path here, if you will. And to add points to our selection, you simply have to click on the line, left click hold, and you can drag it wherever you want to place it. I'll go ahead and do the same a here, I'll drag it to the edge, release. I'll grab this one, bring it closer to the edge as well. Click down here. It's grabbing it nicely. You can even click pretty far away, and the scissor select will do its best to identify the edges of or the continuous parts of your subject or object. I'll add a point over here and I'll drag it to this edge over here. The same right here. As I mentioned, the scissor select does not always give the best result and tends to have jagged edges. It's best to use for smooth surfaces or special occasion, we could say. There are ways to refine the selection after we make it. One of these options from the get go would be to use feather edges, but we'll do that in a moment. We can always feather after selecting. I'll click up here. We can see it's grabbing the inner part of the water meton leaving this outer part. I'll go ahead and click on this, drag it out. Already we can tell that this part is going to be a bit tedious. Now, if ever by accident, you are to, let's say, clicked inside of our watermelon. To delete this point over here that we just added, you can simply press delete on the keyboard and it will delete your most recent point. Prepress delete again. Deletes this point, delete each time we press delete, it's going to go backwards. I'll bring this in. And finally, when we're done, let me zoom in here so you can see this, you simply have to hover the cursor on the first point we created. You see similarly to the path we're getting these overlapping circles and simply click on it. Now to confirm the selection, you can either press enter or return on the keyboard or simply click inside of the selection you made. If I left click once, it activates the selection. Now, of course, you can see here we have a lot of parts missing from the selection we just did. As I mentioned, there are ways to refine this. One of the ways is if we go up to select, go down here and we have this option here called Quick Mask. We can toggle on the Quick Mask, you click on it. Every part that is red is not selected, and the parts that are selected basically do not have this red overcast. How to use this tool is essentially with the brush tool. If I were to draw right now we are on black. And this will be a quick parentheses when it comes to masking, which we'll be learning more about in the next lesson, but this will be a quick introduction, if you will. We can see this is a quick mask. When it comes to masking, the color black will hide anything. We'll hide pixels, and the color white will show pixels. Meaning if I flip my background and foreground color so that we have white as the foreground color, and I were to draw over here on the background, you can see it is no longer red, meaning it is going to be part of the selection. Let's go ahead and undo this. So white shows black hides. If we zoom in here, we can paint over the parts of our watermelon with the white. Because again, white shows black hides. So if we paint with white, it will include these parts of the watermelon into our selection. You can see this is a It's a more complex process. It requires a lot more patience. We can use the keyboard Shirkat x to toggle back and forth the foreground and background colors, to go from black or white. We can use the black here to paint over here. So on and so forth. So we're not going to go through the entire process for this one. It was just to demonstrate the Scissor select tool. Once we're done, we'd simply go to select down to Taco Brick select. And if we zoom in here, you can see it added these parts to our selection. Of course, we could take our time and really paint in every part, but not for this lesson. Let's go ahead and select none. Finally, the other method we have for selecting is with the Fuzzy select tool, all right click, and this is the select by color. So gee shark shift plus O. Select by color, as the name suggests, we'll make selections based off of the color that we click on. And see it has the same options as the fuzzy select. Let's go on draw mask. Right now, our background is white. If we simply left click, the hold, you see it grabs most of the background, just like the fuzzy select. If we zoom in here, it might be hard to see, but we have these tiny little selections here that were made inside of our watermelon because some of these pixels are white, just like the background. This to really depends on the image that you're working with. Here we have too many white pixels inside of our image to really to safely make a selection. But if I were to hold down shift, click down here. You can see as we're grabbing more variation of the color white, it is grabbing more parts of our watermelon, especially the highlights. Let's go ahead and hide the selection. You can go down, and say show selection. If we check this off, it won't show the selection, but the selection is still active. If I grab my paintbrush tool and I start painting on the canvas, you see we are not painting on the watermelon. So the selection is still active, it is simply not visible. So I'll go undo the paintbrush. So you see we have highlights here and they tend to lean towards the white. We have these white little dots on the watermelon, and these highlights over here, which are also leaning more towards the white. So if we go back to view, show selection. That is why the select by color tool is grabbing these parts in our watermelon. But this is one option for making selection if you really have enough contrast. For example, if I were to click once on the watermelon with this tool, it would grab all the similar colors versus if I grab the fuzzy select, let's go to select none and make one click on the watermelon. It will only try and grab parts that seem like a continuation rather than the colors. These are three different selection tools that we just saw. We saw the Fuzzy select, the select by color, and the scissor select. Now, each one of these have their use cases. But that is essentially it for these selection tools. Now another method for selecting, first, let's go to select none. Another method for making selections is the path tool. This one really requires a bit of patience and practice. Essentially, it would be to use the path tool to make a precise selection around or water meton. I'm simply left clicking, holding and dragging to create these curves. Around the water menton. This is one of those tools that's very powerful, but requires, as I said, patience and practice. But this should give you a good idea of some of these selection options that we have. So we'd go around the water menton. Of course, to continue the selection, if you remember, we have to select one of the ending points and continue from there. If not, for example, if this was the active point over here and I click, it will simply create a new point. I'll go ahead and undo this and make sure we grab this ending point over here. When moving the handles, if you want to move both handles at the same time, if you remember, we hold down shift, and we're now moving both handles together. I'll bring this in closer. Now, when making selections, a good advice is to not grab exactly at the edge of your object, but rather ever so slightly in. It's better to be slightly in than at the very edge of your object. We can move these in ever so slightly. I'll make a straight line here, it's going to I won't be incorporating all of these little bumps in the watermelon, this over here at a point here by holding down control on a PC or command on a Mac. Click to at a point. I'll move this down a bit. Finally, to connect those two points, we can hold down control on a PC or command on a Mac. We get these overlapping circles and click, and we have finished our selection here. Let's just Then we can simply press enter or return on the keyboard and this will make a selection from our path. Grab the move to n v. Let's go ahead and do edit copy. You can hide this layer over here. Select. None, edit, paste as, new layer in place. It's actually not a bad selection. Very sharp. Here is a lot smoother. If you want to know if we've grabbed any of the white background, we can go ahead and create a solid here, I'll call it background, this to the bottom, and I'll fill it with black. We did not pick any parts of the white background. Now, let's look at the fettering. Although we don't need it for this example, this particular example, but we'll still learn about it. If we go to the path, we grab our first path that we made with the fuzzy select. Make it a selection. Now we can go up to select. And we have a few options here for the selection. We have the option to shrink our selection. If you grab shrink, you can choose the units, you want to shrink it by. Let's say 20 pixels, press. You can see our selection. It is now going in on our watermelon. Let's undo this. We didn't have the option also to grow our selection. Same thing. Let me push it the higher number, press. Now we have grown our selection, and it extends outside of the watermelon. Let's undo this. Finally, we have the fettering. I'll go ahead and grab Fetter, and I'll give it an exaggerated number. Just to really demonstrate what it's doing. I press. 27 should be just fine. If I were to, let's say let's invert the selection. Invert, dit clear. This deletes the background. Let's turn on our black background. You see this white halo around the watermelon. This is essentially what the fettering does. It creates a sort of blur with our selection. So it is grabbing a bit of the pixels outside of the selection versus what we have with the other selection, which is a lot sharper. All right. Select. Essentially, this is how we can make selections inside of. The next lesson we'll be learning about layer mask. 23. How to create layer Mask - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we'll be learning how we can create layer mask inside of it, and we have our image here over the cup, and I'll activate the layer mask and alla. This is a non destructive way of hiding pixels in our images. Let's go ahead and learn how to do this inside of M. Okay. Let's get started. First thing we'll do is go up to file open. We're still inside of the 11 selections and masking, and we're going to open two images to start. We're going to open 08, so I left click on it, and then holding down control on a PC or command on a Mac. We're going to click on 03. Let's go ahead and press open, and there we have it. So we're going to take this eyeball and put it in our cup of coffee. Do so. We're going to grab our ellipse too. I'll go ahead and check on the fixed aspect ratio. I'll make a selection around the eye. I wanted to grab a little bit more of the eye, so I'll move up a bit. Once we have something we are satisfied with, we can go over to our layer, right click on the layer, and let's go up to add layer mask. Alternatively, we also have this option down here right next to the x to the lete. Have this shortcut to add a mask. You see, we have a few hot keys that we can use. Let's go ahead and click on our layer mask and we'll get this little pop. Now, by default, it will be on white full opacity. If you remember, white shows and black hides. We saw this in the previous lesson, but this is how layer mask work. Whatever is white on the layer mask will show the pixels, and whatever is black on the layer mask will hide the pixels. We have selection down here. If we were to pick selection, it would make our selection be white and everything outside of our selection would then be black for the layer mask. Let's go ahead and pick selection for this one and press add. Now you can see there is this layer, if you will, this mask added to the side of our active layer, and this is the layer mask. Everything that is black and the layer mask is hidden. We can see it's all transparent, and everything that is white shows. We can see the eye and here. Let's go to select none. If we want to see just a mask, hold down t on your keyboard for PC or Option on the mac and click on the mask, not on the layer, but on the mask. You can see we're now getting green outlines around our mask, and this means that we are seeing the mask. Okay We can see the mask here, we could grab the paint brush tool and essentially edit the mask by painting inside of it. Go ahead and undo this. We can also invert the mask if we went to colors invert. You'll see a flip the colors of the mask. Go ahead and undo this again, to hide the mask or rather see the results of the mask, hold down on PC or option on the MC and click on the mask again. Now, if you want to disable the mask without deleting it, you can hold down control on PC or command on the MAC and click on the mask. Now we get red outlines and we're able to see our entire image. This means that the mask has been disabled. It is still there, but it is not active, which is why we can see our entire image. To undo this, it's the same, you hold down control on PC or command on the MC and click on the mask again. And if ever you wanted to delete the layer mask, we can simply right click and go up to delete layer mask. We also have the option to apply the layer mask. What this is referring to, if we click on it, can see applying the layer mask, essentially converts the masking, which is non destructive, and applies it as a destructive filter, meaning it simply deletes the pixels that were hidden by the mask. Let's go ahead and undo this. There are a few keyboard shortcuts to apply the mask or delete the mask by clicking on the thumbnail of the image. I don't want to overwhelm you with keyboard shortcuts. You don't really have to memorize them right now, but I do feel it is necessary to at least mention them. To apply the layer mask, we would simply have to hold down Shift plus control on a PC or shift plus command on the mac and click on the layer itself. The thumbnail of the layer, and it will apply the layer mask. You can undo this. If you want it to delete the layer mask, hold down control and click on the layer thumbnail and it will delete the layer mask. Control on PC, come in on the MAC will delete shift control on the PC and shift command on the MAC will apply. Let's go ahead and undo this. These are the same keeper scuds. You can see that are available to us down here. With that said, we can now click on our layer, Left click hold and drag it over to our first project tab, release over the image area, and Voila. We've imported the layer plus the layer mask, and we can simply grab our scale tool, left click to activate it. Let's go ahead and place the eyeball inside of our coffee cup. I have my interpolation set the low halo and scale. Now, another thing we can do is to blur the edges a little bit. To feather them. One way to do so is to click on the mask. Now, it is important to note the difference between having the mask active and having the layer active. Let's go over to our first project tab over here. Et's make this bigger, so I'll go to previous size and make this gigantic. Let's scale this open. You notice we have white borders around the thumbnail of our image here. We have these little white borders. If we click on the mask, we now have the white borders around the mask. This means that the mask is active. And if we click on the thumbnail, this means that the thumbnail is active, or rather our layer is active. There is a difference between having the image active and having the mask active. So it's important to keep that in mind when applying certain transforms and edits when you have a layer mask. Okay. So if I were, for example, to go up to filters, blur, Gaugin blur, and let's increase the size of a blur. We can see that the eye or image is what is being blurred. Let's cancel out of this. Now, if I left click on the layer mask, making it the active element of this layer, and we went back to filters, blur, gage and blur, and we increase the value. You can see our image itself is not being blur, but rather it is our mask that is being blurred. If we want to see the effects of the blur on the mask, if you remember, hold down all on PC or option on a MC and click on the layer mask. Now we can see the effects of the blur. To toggle off the visibility of the mask, hold down on PC or option on Mac, and click on the mask again. I Valla, we now have a bit of fettering on the edges of the eye of our selection. So it's not as sharp and it blends a little bit better. Next thing we can do is to lower the opacity of our eye, so lower to 50, and we're getting some very nice results here. All right. I hope this wasn't too much or too overwhelming because we're going to go ahead and repeat this process with a different image. We're going to go to file open, and still inside of the 11 selections and mask, we can do the same with our cappuccino here or Moca. Not really sure what this is. We're going to grab 02, open, and let's grab the ellipse two, and we're going to basically repeat a similar process. This time, instead of blurring the edges of our mask, we can activate feather edges, which essentially does the same thing as blurring the edges, and we're not going to go too close to the borders because if you remember, fettering the edges is going to create a bit of that blurriness around the edges of our selection, and that can start to leak onto the cup itself. We're going to make sure to grab inside of our moose over here, and then we can click on the mask. You can see here if we hold down shift and click, it will apply the previously applied values of the mask. What were the previously applied values? Selection. If I hold down shift and click on the mask, it applies the mask to our selection. We'll go back to select, none. Left click on the layer, hold, drag it up to our project tab, and drop it over the image area. If we zoom in here, you can see that the edges are not as sharp, they're a little bit blurred. That is because we activated the fetter edges. Now, the interesting thing is that you can also apply a mask to a layer group. This is important because this will give you somewhat of a clipping mask effect. Let's take a look at what this looked like. Let's go over here to our most project tab. I'll make this ever so slightly smaller. It's actually a little too big. Let's create a layer group, and we're going to put our cup inside of this layer group. Now what we can do is we're going to left click on the mask. Go up to edit copy, and now we're going to add a mask to our layer group. Now we could go for selection, but since we have nothing selected, let's add the mask, you'll see it becomes all black. So for this, we can invert the color, and it will be all white. And with the mask selected, we'll go back to edit, and we'll do paste in place. Let's incre down in alla. We have pasted this mask over to the new mask that we created for this folder. Now we can delete this mask down here. So if you remember, you can right click and go to delete mask. And we now still have the mask, but it is on the layer group. If I grab or move to, I can move the image inside of the group without affecting the mask itself. That's another cool feature of the masking in combination with a layer group. That is it so far for the layer mask. Remember, black hides, white shows. All right. The next lesson, we'll be learning how we can select a subject from an image. 24. Forground selection tool - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we're going to learn how we can select a subject in our image, making use of a special algorithm using GIP. Let's get started. We'll go up to file, open, navigate to the exercise folder. And this time, we're going to go to remove background. And let's go ahead and open up all of our images. So click on 01, hold down shift, click on 07. Let's open all of these. We'll be going through various use case scenarios. For some of these, it would be best maybe to use a different tool, and this is what we're going to go over. So how it works, some of its shortcomings, if we could say so. And just to really demonstrate some of the results. So we're going to start a little bit slow, and then we're simply going to accelerate a little bit as we go through the different use cases. All right. So we can start with this image over here, our chihuahua on top of our cat, and For this, of course, we could always try and use the fuzzy select, left click. We can see it's doing a pretty good job. But as soon as we get down here, because of the reflection, the fuzzy select isn't too sure what to select because the reflection really resembles the cat, the cat's fur because it is a reflection of the cat, and so the fuzzy select is getting confused. Let's go ahead and deselect. Alternatively, we could also try and use the select by color. We can see it's doing a pretty good job. I'm holding down shift, totago, the Ad mode. We're getting a very good selection so far as we can see. But as soon as we click down here, again, because of the reflection, it is matching the color of our cat and suddenly it grabs the entire cat or parts of the cat. Again, this is not working. Select none. Of course, we're not going to use the path tool over here and try to match the fur of the cat or of the chihuahua, especially not the whiskers. How can we select our subjects and separate them from the background? Well, there's a special tool for this. Let's go over to our Size select too or where the Free select too is, right click, and we have this option here called foreground Select. We'll grab the foreground select. And now things are going to get a little bit more advanced, but bear with me. We're going to make a selection around our subject. A rough selection doesn't have to be closed to the subject too much. And the foreground select W selecting works like the Free select tool. If we left click, drag away, left click again, we're creating different dots. You can see here. Or if we left click hold and move around, we're going to make some more organic shapes. We press escape to get out of this. Let's make a rough selection around our subjects. I click down here, draw a line close to the paws of our cat, move out, make sure not to grab the whiskers. Just a rough selection. We're almost done. You can also control the points that we created just like the free select, so I can hold this point, move it back up. Click, click, and let's close our selection. Next, we can press enter or return on the keyboard vola. We're halfway there. The next step is to draw the foreground. You can see here we have a paint brush tool cursor. We don't have to grab the paintbrush tool. It's all done with the foreground selecto. We can change the size of our brush here if I up the stroke with. See we have a bigger brush size here, if I click. The next step is to draw over our subject. If you ever go outside and draw a bit of the background, you can either undo, so go to it do draw foreground, or you can switch to draw unknown. Let's first make the mistake again, so let's click over here. We can switch to draw known down here and draw over what we just did. Of course, the draw background is to draw on the background. We can also change the color for the selection preview. Cick in here, we can choose whichever color works for you. Pink color if you want to, becomes pink or Green. The best is to pick a color that has enough contrast with your image, if you will. But I'll stick to the blue, works fine for me. Let's go ahead and continue drawing the foreground. Let's draw the foreground edit do draw. We'll just draw the foreground here. You don't have to select everything just enough. For example, we're over here. You see we have a small gap between the ear of the cat in the leg pit armpit of the chihuahua, where we can see the background. For cases like these, it's best to not draw on these holes. For example, with the fur up here, let's lower the size of our brush. For the fur here, you don't want to draw on the fur where it's mixing with the background because then the foreground select tool is going to get confused and it's going to think that you want to grab a bit of the background here. We don't want to do this. Instead, we simply want to do a rough selection inside that really only covers our subjects. Just remember, it doesn't have to be perfect. It simply has to be good enough. Then we can refine the selection as we go. Go ahead and grab. The more information you provide to it, the better. It will save you some time later when you need to refine the selection, and this should be good enough. Now, let's go over here back to our tool options. Here we have several engines for calculating the selection, if you will. We have Matin 11 and Matin global. I find that Matin global does not produce the best results. Now you can try both and experiment with them. But for now, I will stick to Matin ven, when it comes to these two sliders levels and active levels. I find that leaving it to two to two works great. It gives you good results, but it's a little bit heavier on processing power. One method that I found that makes it a lot lighter on processing power, which I will be using for this example to save on time and processing power is to push the active levels all the way up to ten. It might seem like it would make it heavier, but actually it doesn't. It makes it a lot lighter, at least on my system. Again, experiment on your system with this. Now once we have a rough selection here, we're going to click on preview mask. Now, simply give it a moment to load. It's calculating in v. That was pretty fast. Now, you can see down here that it selected a bit of the pause of our cat. Everything that's blue is considered as the background, and of course, what is not blue is considered as our subject. Another way of viewing this, which I find is a lot clearer is to use the gray scale. The gray scale, however, is a little bit heavier than the color preview. If we switch the gray scale, remember, This is creating a mask or generating the the equivalent of a mask and everything that is white shows, and everything that is black, we'll hide. We can see here there's a bit of leaking in the colors or in our selection rather. Let's go back to color. Before we continue, I have to mention that pushing the active levels all the way up to ten does generate a bit more noise. If you had this to two to two, I would most likely generate less noise, so these leaks over here. Now, we can do this either with the preview on or with the preview off, and that is to continue drawing the foreground areas or background areas. But I'll turn off the preview mask because it's heavier on your system when you add to the foreground with the preview on, or even if you add to the background with the preview on. Then we'll preview again. You can see it's doing a bit of a better job. We can zoom in, and let's do one tap. Each time that you're drawing, it will load the result immediately. And this is why it makes it heavier. If you're trying to make multiple strokes, you can imagine how much time this would take because you would have to pause and wait for it to, pause, wait for it to load, so on and so forth. That's about it. We're then going to learn how we can refine our selection. So Let's look at it one more time, see if we've made it better and not worse. Change to gray scale just to make sure. We can fix most of these quite easily, back to color and now we can hit select. Let's add our layer mask. We can click on mask. And this is pretty good. Go to select none. I see, we have this little blue spot over here. It would have been a nice idea to lower the brush size super low and add one little dot of background right here, and it would have actually figured out that this is part of the background. But anyhow, let's go ahead and create a new layer, so a solid background. I'll fill it up with black. Move it under our layer. Now we can see where the noise is. We can see there's quite a bit of little noise around here. It's very noisy. One way to fix this is we're going to grab our mask over here. Let's go up to colors, and we're going to grab levels. A better way to do this is with curves, but curves can feel a little bit more intimidating for newcomers, so we're going to do it with levels. Now, if you remember, by pushing this black slider here, we're introducing more information into the darks. And since we have our layer mask selected, it's going to increase the strength of the dark areas, and we can see how the noise is being reduced here in our image. If we hold down Alt on PC or option on the mac and click on the mask, we'll get a preview of the mask. If I were to push this all the way back here, we can see all this noise. All these gray areas represent the leaks that we have. As we push this black triangle further towards the right, it is increasing the darks. We can see here rapidly the noise. We can always paint over these, or we can simply push the white arrow in a little bit more. Now, of course, we want to see what's happening with our actual image. Hold down ult on PC or option on the mac, click on the mask. This blue that we're seeing is not the background itself, but rather it is a color cast. That's a little bit harder to remove for image. Of course, we don't want to go too far with the black slider, for example, as it's going to remove from the whiskers. You can use the middle slider, however, to push towards the darks as we track the darks in This is good enough. We have a bit of the fur, the whiskers, dotted, but we're not going to spend too much time on this. Let's go ahead and press to apply our levels. Then we can grab the paint brush tool, set it to white, and let's increase the size here and simply paint over these parts that are not fully white in our mask. Now, remember, you want the mask to be active. If we had the image itself active and we painted, it would paint on our image. So let's go ahead and undo this. Sorry, did it again, Let's grab our mask, and we can paint over here. Now, we're using a hard brush. It has hard edges. Instead, let's go ahead and grab a softer brush. So see it better. I'll go over to a brush brush tab over here. See we have some soft brushes. I'll grab this very soft brush over here. Another technique for working with these edges in a mask is to switch the blending mode of the brush to overlay. Essentially, what this will do is, let's say I have white selected over here. Let's preview our mass A on PC or option on a MAC. Click on the mask. If I draw here, you see nothing is happening, even though we have white as the foreground. This is because of the overlay mode. It will not draw on pure black. However, if I were to draw that say next to these whiskers here, you can see it's going to intensify the parts that are already leaning towards white. Of course, this is not necessarily going to give us a good result because of the blue overcast, let's go ahead and undo this. Have to undo twice, undo paint brush. With this, we can use it to paint softly over the paws and we're using a soft brush as well. We're getting there. Then we can switch to black. Since we're still on overlay, it's going to do the same thing. If I draw directly on the cat, nothing will happen because it is closer to white than it is to black, so nothing will happen. Over here, we can draw on these darker areas to refine it a little bit and softer than overlay is soft light. It's even softer than the overlay. Overlay would be harsh compared to soft light. I can draw over these areas a little bit to remove some of the You can click multiple times to repeat or reinforce the effect of our paint brush here. We're just trying to remove these parts because they're part of the table more than anything. Another method would be to use a brush with texture. It's not such a soft cut because we are working with fur here, but I'll stick to this brush for now. You can see this is really a game of patients. Patients and and practice. It's not too bad. I have a pretty decent selection. It's not perfect. Of course, let's go ahead and remove this little spot over here. With this active, I'll lower the sides of our brush, make sure to go back to normal. Otherwise, it won't affect this at all. We still have a very soft brush. Let's zoom in here, left click and let's gently move our brush around. I'm still holding down the click. We're still on that soft brush. So it's not too harsh. Removing some of this blue here. I'll let go of the mouse, click again and continue the process very softly trying to remove a bit of the blues over here. As such, Okay. All right. That's pretty good. Of course, this is happening. Again, these blue casting, is because of the background. These animals were actually put in front of a blue background. If I hold down control on a PC or comment on a mac, click on our mask. We can temporarily disable it. This is because they are really in the scene. The blue color is casting onto them. Hold down control on a PC or comment on a MC, click on the mask again. This is a pretty good result, except for down here, can increase the size of a brush. Make sure to set it to white, and let's draw over here a little. All right. We're not going to do too much of this for the other images. This is really to give you a better understanding of the process that goes behind selecting your subject properly. Now we can tackle the blues by making sure first that we're grabbing our image over here. Let's make a duplicate, hide this first one here. I'll call this original. Why not? I here, I'll call this U. You can already guess what we're going to do. Let's go up to color U saturation. Let's grab the color blue. Let's temporarily deactivate the mask. We can hold down control on a PC or command on a map. Click on the mask. Make sure that we have the image active and not the mask. With the blue selected, let's start dropping the saturation. What we're gauging for is to see if the background itself is going to be affected. It doesn't seem to be affected so much so. Let's try with SN. Yes, science seems to be the color that we want to target. Hold down control on the PC or come in on a mac, and let's click on the mask again to activate it. Let zoom in and see the result. As we're dropping the saturation down, we don't want to go too low. It is reducing the blue cast on our animals fur over here. We can lower the lightness ever so slightly, and maybe even the U, so it's no longer blue, but maybe something that looks a bit more like the fur, let's see if something works. Not so much, not so much. Lightness, very little. We can talk on off the preview to see the before and the after. It's very, very subtle. But it does reduce the blue enough and press in voila. We've made a pretty nice, decent selection, and this is not one of the easy selections because we're working with fur here. All right. Let's move to another image. Now, for this image over here, we could simply use the fuzzy select and holding down shift to include some of the shadows, maybe up the threshold a little bit. This would actually be enough. We wouldn't really need to use the foreground select for a scenario such as this one. With the contrast of colors, even, we could go as far as to use the select by color tool. But as you can see here with the Fuzzy select tool, and this is not sped up or anything, we can already make a very decent selection. Now, we did select the background, so let's go to select invert. You can create our layer mask, choosing selection, add v. So if we were to zoom in here, look around, we might get a little bit of blue outline, let's go ahead and create a background. 's fit it with black, move it under. As you can see, it's not bad. If we move this image over here, now, in this case, the fuzzy select tool wouldn't be much use because of all of this texture on the ground, making it harder for it to identify the continuous areas. Even the foreground select too would actually have some shortcomings for this image over here. And we could use the levels tool again, try and eliminate some of these areas outside. As you can see, it would chip in on the shoes themselves. For an image such as this one, the path tool might actually be a better option. Because these shapes are simple enough, so you would be able to quickly create your selection around the shoes, and it wouldn't be too much of a hassle. Then of course, you can zoom in and make sure that you're getting in there a bit more precisely, grabbing all of the parts of the shoe. But even here, you can already see it is much faster than using the foreground select in this particular case v. Of course, you could go in and you refine these edges, so on and so forth. But you see how with the path tool this generates faster result, better results. Then with this image of here, there is one technique where you would duplicate your image and you would tweak the values, so we go to levels. We make sure that the whites are a little bit more white, the darks are a little bit more dark. And this would essentially help differentiate between the foreground and background elements. Already here we can see the contrast is much better, and this would help make a selection. Now if we were to try with the fuzzy select tool, the contrast is not that strong. B ground is still white or leaning towards white and the suit is white. So it wouldn't really make a perfect selection. So Escape out of this. Let's go ahead and rather do it with the foreground select tool. If we make our selection around our subject, Color, draw foreground. If we zoom in here, you can see that on the visor or the helmet. If we grab all the way out here, we're going to start grabbing a bit of the background. Let's say we were working with this and we wanted to preview a mask. There are two areas that I should draw in background for. You can see here, it's leaving hole inside of these spots right here. Let's give it a go, see how it goes. But already here we can see there is a bit of noise all around, and that might be a bit more tedious to remove our previous tries. We would still have to refine it. Grab slayer over here, levels and crush everything. That's supposed to be dark. Put a bit of light in the As you can see, we're still getting some decent results that we can refine. But there you have it. Actually, I leave this on a black background. For this image, you can imagine it wouldn't be the most clear cut result. We're going to do this one with the four ground select tool. As there really isn't another way of grabbing these two unless you're using the path tool or the four ground select tool because the colors are so similar, and even if we're to try and use the fuzzy select tool, the grab that's just our subjects, because you don't always have to go for the background. I want to make that car. Instead, we can use the four ground select tool for this one and make a rough but not too rough of a selection for these two. I just notice I haven't really explained those three different components. We have the background area, the unknown area, and the foreground area. Essentially, the unknown would be that space between what we're trying to grab and the background. Let's say that wiggle room, and then the background, which is obviously what we do not want to select. Finally, the foreground, which is what we do want to select. Now, I would hope that that came across already, but I guess it's best to just clarify it. There we go, and here should definitely draw that it's the background whole area. Yes, it will most likely touch the hair and eliminate some of the hair for that area specifically. I'll draw background over here. Let's preview. If we watch this in the gray scale, we can see it's not great, create a background, but in the color black. Then if we go to color levels, and we refine this. Already, you can see we're getting decent results. Then from there, it's actually much easier to refine this that we have here than it would be to make the whole selection ourselves. Then we'd have to simply clean up the shoe and clean up parts of the floor, just to refine it a little bit and smooth out some parts of the hair. But already you can see this is a very decent result. Then we have this image right here, which is very similar to the chihuahua on top of the cat, and we could even use the select by color tool here, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, there we go. Because of course, here there's much more contrast. Let's see what happens. We create our leer mask. Let's invert this so colors, invert, and we're left with a lot of bluish tones or blue tones. Let's put this on a black background, I guess. Of course, we can go in and refine the selection, maybe grow the selection and feather it a bit to remove some of the blue. Of course, if we were to try and do the saturation adjustment here and lowering the saturation of the blue, it will also affect the dog as well. Such and if we put a bit of overlap. There you go. Again, not a super refined result, and we're losing the whisker over here and we can go ahead and clean it. But already you can see that the four ground select is not the only option to go ahead and get the results. Of course, for the four ground for this image, we probably go at it quickly as it's a simple shape to begin with. So if I were to simply make a rough selection, and we'll draw the foreground. I'll make it a huge brush. Not too too big. Remember, we don't want to go to the edge of the fur where it mixes with the blue. If I look over here, I'm already leaking and brush. Such. Sometimes it'll take a bit of loading time to confirm the selection that you made if it's a large area. Now let's go ahead preview this. Takes a couple of seconds. Val. Now let's look at the gris. It's very good. Create or layer mask. Then we can grab the mask itself, go to the levels, darken the ds. From here, we simply choose just how far we want to go, how much of the fur details we want to leave in and make a duplicate because otherwise, we're going to lose the original U saturation, I'll use the last settings our use, to the presets and Vo. See here we're getting some decent results. There you go. This is one of them. Get this little bright, noisy surrounding with the color select that we'd have to go ahead and refine ourselves. Then we get this one with the foreground select, which grabs the fur very nicely. Then finally, we have our last image over here, which is very easy to grab. For this one, if we were to use the fuzzy select tool besides this dark area here, which might get selected. To avoid this, what we could do is create a new layer. We're going to call this, let's say outline, grab our paint brush tool, switch to a very evident color. Let's say like a red or we could do this with a path as well, even smaller, or go for just one pixel. And I'll draw this red line here at the edge. I'm drawing this on a new layer above here. Maybe I'll do the same over here. Draw over the edge of this one. Now we can grab the fuzzy select, turn on the simple merge. It's going to take into consideration the pixels inside of a top layer as well, and we make our selection. I'm holding down shift. What it's doing, it's keeping the selection from grabbing these dark parts. Having a bit of issue here, we could always control to take this out and we have this little gap over here. I guess we could grab. Let's go ahead and grow our selection. So I'll go to select grow two pixels, and that's then fetter selection. Since we didn't choose the fetter edge up here, Let's feather by two pixels as well. I can make a copy, create our layer mask. I'll go ahead and invert this, colors, invert, and hide this top layer here. Let's create a new layer, the background. Make it red for high contrast, move it all the way to the bottom, and there you go. We get a very decent selection. Again, this is a mask, so we can always refine some of the edges. If I were to go ahead, make this white, grab something a bit more smooth. Lower the brush size, and we could simply draw over this and smooth it out. See here we're having this piece of the armor gon, hold down control and PC or comment on the mac click on the mask itself. We will hide the mask and we can draw over. This is still affecting the mask as we're drawing. We can make a small selection around it, hold down control and PC or comment on malick again, and we'll activate the mask again. Since we added a bit of fettering, we're not getting hard harsh edges and v. So we just went through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven images very quickly using the either path tool, Fuzzy select tool, Cutter select tool, and foreground select tool. So you can use them in combination to get some very good results. So that is it for this lesson in the next lesson, we're going to be working with the Warp transform tool. See you there. 25. Unified Transform - GIMP Essentials: In this lesson now, we're going to learn how we can transform and warp our images. We'll start with the transform, which is using the universal transform, and this is Unified transform. Sorry. The Unified transform basically incorporates a lot of these other transforms, and then we'll look into the warping. When it comes to transforming or even scaling, you can make a selection. It scale, for example, click and you're going to scale this. Then if you were to scale, it's going to cut this little piece out of your image. It scale this area, and it puts it as a floating layer. I'm going to undo this, select none. You can also rotate. If you rotate, it rotates the entire composition composition. If you were to make a circular selection, move this over here. Such, it rotate, which is Shift R. We could rotate the mug. Again, it gives you this option. Even if I make a new layer, it makes a whole inside of this. You'd have to copy paste. Undo this. I'm going to duplicate this layer, hide the bottom one. Now let's look at the unified transform. I'm going to make a selection, doesn't have to be a perfect circle. Let's go to the Unified transform shift t, left click, and now we get multiple handles. All the way outside is how you can rotate. This little dot inside, this handle inside of this square so you can control this standalone handle. You can also control Z out of it. This outside handle. The big square is for scaling. Then you have these regular handles here. You can always hold shift or control to control how the scale happens. Then we have the shear. You can also hold shift or 26. How to Warp Images - GIMP Essentials: Hi, there. In this lesson, we'll be learning how to use the Warp transform tool, and we'll be turning this image over here into this right here. Right? Before? After. Before, after. We also have this image here. This is the before, and here is the After before, after. All right, let's go ahead and learn how to do this in gm. All right, then, the first thing we'll do is go up to File Open, and we're going inside of 13, transform and War. Let's open up 02 and 03. Let's move over to our first project tab. And first thing I'll do is rename our layer, so I'll go ahead and call this original, and I'll make a copy. Now, for the W transform, we don't actually have to do this. But for the effect that we're going for for this particular image, it would be best to separate the subject from the background. By this point, you already know how to make a selection. So I'll go ahead and quickly isolate the subject from the background with the fuzzy selecto. I'll zoom in here on the laptop. Hold on Control on PC or command on a Mac to tackle the substract modes. I can deselect the laptop. Now, to eliminate these particles, I'll go to select, grow, I'll grow by two pixels. Make sure I'm not cutting too much. I'll go to shrink, and I'll shrink by just one pixel. Make sure I'm not cutting too much of our character out. Then I'll invert the selection because right now we have the background selected, edit, copy, select none, edit, paste as, new layer in place. All right. So we now have our subject isolated from the background. And as for the background here, I'll grab the bucket fill tool. I hold down control and PC or comment on the map. And this temporarily turns the bucket feel into a color picker. If we left click on the canvas here, you can see the cursor changes, and our foreground color is now the color that we just picked. A hold down shift, left click and vola. We have a solid background plus our subject. I'll grab the move tool and move the subject ever so slightly lower since we'll be growing the head of our subject here as we saw in the beginning. In order to not cut too much of the subject out, I'm going to grab our crop tool, grab our entire canvas, then I'll allow growing and push this up ever so slightly. Let's enter or return. I'll right click on our background layer here, layer to emit size, which will grow our layer, grab the bucket fill tool, and fill again. Now we can grab the subject with the move tool, and we don't have to move him so low anymore. All right. So now I want to isolate the head of the subject. None of this is mandatory, but it does offer more control in the end. You can use whichever tool you feel the most comfortable with. In my case, I'll grab the Path select or rather the path tool. You can always create a mask afterwards. Does it have to be perfect. You can always clean it up after. Click on. Select from Path. Now we can go up to edit copy, edit, paste as new layer in place, select none. And let's hide the body for now. I'll create a layer mask on our head over here, white, full opacity. I'll rename this to head for now in body. This over here can be background. So grab my paint brush tool, make sure to switch our colors back to black and white, and I'll grab a ever so slightly softer brush. Make sure to have the layer mask selected, and I can paint away And what I'll do is simply apply the layer mask at this point. Now we can show the body. We have isolated the head. Now I can grab the scale tool and scale the head. I'll make the head much bigger. And I'll switch the interpolation here to no halo and scale. All done. So of course, we can see that ear showing up in the back. We can always create a layer mask for this layer over here. I hold down shift and click on the layer mask. Now it uses the previously used settings, grab our paintbrush, X to toggle back to black. V. We've eliminated the ear in the background here. So let's grab our head again, and finally, we can grab our warp tool. So I'll go up to tools, transform tools, and at the bottom here, we have the warp transform. Kb Sircut, W. There are quite a few options in the tool options, if you look here. The first one we'll go over is the behavior. For the behavior in this drop down, we have the option to move the pixels, grow the pixels, shrink in area, swirl clockwise, swirl counterclockwise, erase the warping, which means undo the warping that we did. Or smooth the warping. So if it's too rough, you know, smooth it out, it's almost like the erasing the warping, except that it goes. It's a bit more subtle, I could say. So we're going to make the head layer match our canvas size. And the reason for this is, if I were to left click hold in track, can see how this part of the face cannot extend beyond the layer. So I press escape to undo this because the warp transform, essentially, doesn't apply until you apply it. It's almost like using the scale tool. Until you either press enter or return to confirm or you switch tools, it is not yet applied. So you can always press escape to get out of it. So I'll right click on the layer and go up to layer to image size. We see here that the size is for the size of the brush, and the move pixels as we just saw, we'll move the pixels. You simply left click hold and you can move them in any direction. Then we have the strength, which is how much of the effect is applied per click. So each time we click, how strong does the effect happen? The spacing here I'll demonstrate using the normal paint brush. So I'll switch to a hard brush for now. We have the spacing over here. So they both have similar settings. So I'll left click hold and drag. You see here we have a continuous line. And if I increase the spacing, left click hold and drag, It spaces out every iteration or each iteration of the paintbrush. Essentially, that is the same for the spacing of the orb tool. It will space out the iteration of the transform. Then we have the interpolation, and it all depends on the quality you're going for and what you're working on. For the Abbs policy, we saw this in the common layer effects. So we can clip or loop the areas that are near transparency. But here we won't really be working with so much transparency. So I'll just leave it to none. And we have these two check boxes, high quality preview, and real time preview. These, of course, as the name suggests, will either give you a higher quality for the preview and real time results, but it will use more processing power. It will make everything a little slower, even the real time that you know in parentheses slower. So we'll leave these unchecked for now. And the stroke. Now, during motion, this means if I were to use something like the grow area, for example, and I left click. See, it did a small growing, and I'm still holding down the mouse click, but nothing's happening. Now, during motion means that when I move around, it's going to apply the warp transform. But if I stop moving the cursor, the transform stops being applied. And then we have periodically, which you would imagine would apply it periodically. So I press escape and see it will undo the transform that we just did. And then we have animate animate, we will look at maybe later in the course. But yes, you can animate the transforms that you create. This will create multiple layers, and it's a whole process. Now that we're a little bit more familiar with what we're working with here. Let's go ahead and get started. We'll start by growing an area. You can use the open and closed brackets on the keyboard to change the brush size. If you hold down shift with the open or closed bracket, open it will increase or decrease the size of your brush a lot faster. So I'll go ahead and choose a size that encapsulates the glasses and such. And I'm clicking multiple times. So each time it grows, I'm clicking. Or if I hold down the mouse click and move around slightly, it will grow it a little bit. I'm going to grow the eyes. I'm going to grow in between the eyes as well. Then I'll switch to the move pixels. And I'm going to lower the strength here to 30 so that it doesn't apply the transform very strongly, we could say. So it's a more gentle transform. The control ed or command d also works. If you are to backtrack if you steps in the transform. Then I want to pull the ears out ever so slightly. So I just left click, hold drag, left click, hold drag. Okay. I might increase this area, about the forehead, but mostly the hair, so I switch over to grow area, and left click, and as I move the cursor, it is gradually increasing. And since we lower the strength over here, it's not doing something too crazy each time we're moving around. Now it really depends on what you're going for. But we could use the shrink area, which you can imagine will do the opposite of the grow area, and we could shrink slightly down here in the neck, but it will shrink the chin down a little bit. Take a step back and see what we have so far. Not bad. I'd say this is okay. This is okay for now. For the erase warping and smooth warping, we'll be looking at this on the next image that we're going to work with, as well as the swirl clockwise and swirl counterclockwise. But you can already imagine what these two do. So that's basically it. We already have our result right here. And at this point, what we could do is unify the head in the body. Now, you could make copies of these if you don't want to lose this separation, but I'll go ahead and merge the head down on the body by using the merged layer down here. Left click and alla. The little loading here was get applying the transforms because I hadn't press return on the keyboard, and anything else you do will essentially apply the transform. And there we have it. This one, I can rename it to p. Now we could apply some filters. I'll start by applying inside of filters, enhance the sharpen or unsharp mask just to make it crisp again, and It's not too much either. Finally, I'll go back to filters, artistic, and I'll go for cartoon. Now this really depends on what you're going for. So you don't have to do these exact same steps. But this is just to take it a bit away from the realism and voila. Finally, if we wanted to, we could go ahead and add a Vignette filters, light and shadow, vignette. Throw the outside and push this one in. Okay. Maybe 80. So it's even more subtle before, after. Maybe even more subtle? So 60. All right. Since we have a separation, we could even apply the vignette to the background alone and have our character really shine and pop out from the image. Even add a drop shadow if you wanted to. But that is basically it. Now let's move over to our second image and learn a bit more about the warp transform or the warp tool. If you remember in the example, all we did was shrank the stomach ever so slightly. I'm going to rename the s layer to original, make a copy, so duplicate it. Now we want to just slightly transform the stomach. But not the arm. So if I were to grab the warp tool here and I tried to transform this, you see it's going to grab the arm and with it in the background. Now, one reason to separate the arm here, to make a selection and do some separation is because eventually, the arm shape might not really match what an arm would look like the further back you go. And there we go. All I did was click drag, click, Drag, click, drag, and this gave us our result. I don't want to go too far with this one. And this looks just fine. Then we press enter return to confirm V. Let's say, for example, we were really pushing it in. And we realize, I think we might have gone too far. The shape is no longer really looking realistic. We need to do something about it. We can go up to the drop down, go to smooth warping. You can lower the strength as well, if it's too strong. You can see here it's undoing the warping that we did. I'm simply left kicking and holding and passing it around. To erase, however, it would simply push it all out. I can press Control Z command on a Mac and it will undo the erase that we did. If we press Control Z command Z on a Mac again, it would start undoing the smoothing that we did. Or go ahead and erase the second passing of war that we did. Here is the before after before, after. The last thing that we have to see with this tool is, of course, the swirl clockwise and swirl counterclockwise. Let's go ahead and apply this to our bread over here. I'll go to swirl clockwise, and you can see what's happening here. We're swirling the bread in a clockwise motion. Swirl counter clockwise does the exact opposite. It's going to swirl it in the opposite side. The reason why I have to move the mouse cursor is again because of this option over here. Now, as for the quality of the warping, how do we change the interpolation to something like no halo or low halo? We would have gotten much more crisp result, if you will. Now, if you remember, if I press escape right now, it will undo the transform that we just did to the bread. That's it? Now, of course, for this, you do maybe want to take your time and make sure that it doesn't look so lopsided because it's not as smooth as it could be. That's it really for this tool or press entered, confirm this and Vo. And the next lesson, we're going to learn about layer blend modes. See you there. 27. Layer Blend Modes - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we will be learning about blending modes or layer modes, if you will. This will be a quick overview. Let's get to it. First thing to do is let's go up to file, and this time, we're going to choose open as layers. Navigate to our exercise folder, and we're going inside of 14 blending modes. And we're opening all three images. Let's left click on the first one. Hold on shift. Left click on the third one, press open, and there we have it. Now, this first image here gives you a breakdown of the different categories of the layer modes or blend modes. As you can see, we have quite a few. For those of you who might be familiar with photoshop, game does have more blend modes than photoshop, but essentially they cover around the same basic ones. We have the normal ones, which is by default, we're using normal. You can see it over here in the current layer mode. Then you have dissolve, color erase, erase, merge and split, which are some that you might rarely use, except for maybe dissolve. For lightin and Darkin, the name is very much saying a lot about how they function. Lightin will add light darkin, will not remove light more as introduce shadows, if you will. Contrast, we used some of the contrast ones when we're working with gradients. Inversion. This one is the one that is particular to Gim. I believe Photoshop does not have the inversion modes, or it doesn't have all of them from the ones that GIMP has. Then we have the HSV, which is U saturation value. Then we have LCH, which should be lightness chroma and U. For more information, you can always go to Gibs help page. It is docs do g.org and then your version of Gib. 2.10 in this case. You can add English if English is your language, and then simply you'll get a whole list where you can then choose different topics. For this one, it's layer modes. It gives us a bit of information about the different layer modes. We can go into each of them individually and they'll give you more information. We can see here that they mentioned that layer modes permit complex color changes and images. Essentially, it's simply using certain mathematical equations to mix or blend together the pixel values from top layer to bottom layer. That's essentially what the blending modes or layer modes do. Now let's go ahead and hide this first image over here. Next, we have these two layers. The gradient is meant to be on top of this red solid here. And let's look at the red solid verse. At the top, we have a lighter version of this red solid, right under it, we have a darker version of it. Then we have black solid, white solid, both at the left extremity and the right extremity, as well as in the middle. Then we have this gray bar that extends across our canvas, which is a neutral gray. If we were to go into our colors here, you can see neutral grays would be 808080. And that is what we have here in the middle. Finally, at the bottom here, we have this gradient, which covers most colors in our color wheel. Or I think all the colors are in here. With these, you can use this top gradient, this normal gradient up here to test the results of the different blend modes. Now, the first one we're going to look at is going to be dissolved. Disve doesn't seemingly do anything when you look at it. But once you start to lower the opacity, you can see what the dissolve is doing versus if we were normal, UT would simply be a gradual transition from opaque to transparent. But with the dissolve bin mode, it is fragmenting the layer as it becomes transparent. For the normal modes, I won't be diving into them too much as they are rarely used, and you can always read up on them if you're interested. As we mentioned earlier, the blending modes orlayer modes are broken down into different categories, and you can see the separation here with these dark lines breaking them down. So we have the lighten category up here, which does the opposite of the darken category, or the darken does the opposite of the lighten category. So lighten only does the same as darken only, but in reverse, and so on and so forth. So multiply would be the opposite of screen, dodge, the opposite of burn, so on and so forth, as we've mentioned. So if we go ahead and try some of these, so I'll simply be pressing the down arrow to switch blend modes, you can see here how they affect your image. And this is why I created this image here. I do recommend creating a layer mask on the gradient on top here. Let's grab our rectangle select. Let's make a selection at the bottom here, grab our bucket fill and fill this up with black. This will allow you to compare the red up here with the red down here and see some of the changes better. And with that done, we can go ahead and continue flipping through the different blend modes and seeing their result. Hard mix, for example, would limit the range of colors. If you remember down here, we had this gradient showing us the different colors and the transition between them, but once we use hard mix, you can see here it breaks them down into their solid form. We have pink over here, we have the blue, the cyan, the green, and the yellow. So this would be basically magenta. Essentially, you can go ahead and flip through these and look at the results that they're giving you. And this might help you understand the blending modes better. Now, for a good reference, if you want to dive deeper into what these blending modes do, I would recommend searching Picks im Perfect. He has an amazing video on the blending modes and explains them in depth. That's about it for this lesson. This was a quick overview of the blend modes. Now, just remember, Lighten will add light, Darken will remove light. Contrast Well, it works in the form of contrast to give you a quick example here. Let's just go ahead and look at overlay. We look at overlay here. This is our original image, and this is with overlay. It adds a bit of shadow where it can, and it adds a bit of light where it can. Right at the middle, once it starts reaching the neutral graze, it stops add it stops adding light or shadows to our image. Soft light is similar to overlay, but it is less intense, if you will. I recommend you experiment with these and learn about them. Remember, you can always go and search for Pix and Perfect. It will be on YouTube that you'll find him. Great video on the blend modes. All right. Well, that is it for this lesson. The next lesson, we'll be taking a look at retouching skin or the Hal tool. So corrections here and there. See you there. 28. How to use Heal Tool - GIMP Essentials: H i there. In this lesson, we'll be learning some quick retouching techniques, where we'll be retouching this skin for this image over here. This is before and this is a before, after. And for this image over here, before, after four after. This is a very subtle result here as DT four not that yellow, but enough about that, let's go ahead and learn how to do this inside of g. Okay, let's get started. First thing to do, we'll go up to file, open, we'll navigate to the exercise folder, and we're going inside of 15 retouching. L et's open both images. I'll left click on 01, shift left click on 02 and open. Let's move over to our first project tab over here. I'll call this. Can call this original or background depending. And there are two available tools for retouching skin or retouching images in general. But we're working with skin over here. These tools are, if we go up to tools, paint tools, we have the clone stamp two or the clone two and the heal tool. C for the clone, H for L. Let's start with the clone tool, although it is not what we will be using for this particular image. There is actually a third option for retouching, and that is with let's go to the paint tools, perspective clone. The perspective clone has some special use case, and we'll be diving deeper into the perspective clone tool once we get to the content aware lessons. To increase the size of our brush here so we can really see what's happening. Most of these settings are similar to what you would find in irregular paint brush, except for down here where we have the source and the alignment, as well as the simple merge. Now for the source, of course, this only appears for the clone tool and not the heal tool. We want to leave the set to image for this. Then we have the alignment. Now, the alignment really just determines how the tool behaves, and we're going to see how it behaves by default when we're none. I'm going to pick an area that is easy to recognize or distinguish. Let's say this spot right here. Have a bit of redness. To use this tool, if I left click, you see down in the status part, we get a warning that says, set a source image first. To set the source image, you have to hold down control on a PC or command on a Mac and left click somewhere. Can see we have what looks like a selection around this area, and this now becomes the source image. If I left click anywhere else, it will paste this image wherever we click. If you left click hold and drag, you'll notice two things. For one, the source image selection moves with our cursor. It basically is mimicking the movements of our cursor, whatever it goes over, our cursor will clone and paste right under where we're passing it. I controls that out of this, controls, controls, or commands that on a mac. If we were to choose, for example, the lips over here as the source image, click and move. You can see how we can pick the lips and redraw them somewhere else. But this is cloning. This is very on the nose, you could say, so it controls. If we were to grab a piece of skin here and we said let's clone it over here, it doesn't really match as well as it could. Not to mention that for these sort of tools, usually you'd want to use a softer brush and not something with such hard edges. That is the clone tool. Now, for the alignments here, you can see how none. It follows the movements of a cursor after we click. But once we're done clicking, we release, the source image selection returns to its original position. Now, for the align over here, you'll see that it's already following our cursor, the source image selection. If I hod down control on a PC or command on a Mac and I set the source over here and click. It does the same thing as when we were on none for the alignment, except that when I release the mouse click, it doesn't return to where I had originally said it. Instead, it follows our cursor everywhere. Control s out of this. Then we have the registered. The registered has special use cases. Because if I hold down control on the PC or come in on a Mac and I set the source over here, if I left click, you'll notice it is following my cursor. It's overlapping with the cursor, so nothing seems to be happening, and this is for special use cases. Finally, we have fixed, which you can imagine, if I set the source, you hold on control or command, and you left click, Now when I click somewhere else, it doesn't move. The source that we selected stays put and it will simply repeat it everywhere that we click. Controls that. Now, this doesn't work great for the clone tool. However, for the heel tool, this can be quite useful. As for the simple merge, we're going to see what it does when we jump to the heel tool. This is our clone tool over here. I will right click on it and go down to the healing tool. Now again, they are similar, except you can see here, we don't have to choose a source, although we do have the simple merge option as well in the alignment. And the alignments work exactly the same for both of them. So if we want to fix some of the skin here, so what we could do is simply let's first pick a softer brush, so we're not getting hard edges, can increase the size. And let's say this skin over here seems to work just fine. Let's make sure we're grab something that we can really work with. So I'll grab up here. Now, remember that once we start clicking, the source image is going to follow the movements of our cursor. We want to keep that in mind as we're clicking. I can left click over here once. Undo. Let's make a bigger birth size left click. We can see it's not cloning what's up here. If I were to set this as the source, as we did earlier and click over here, for example. It's not exactly cloning what we have here over on the skin. If I left click and move, It's not just copy and pasting, and it's a lot slower sometimes. Ifever you're getting a system lag, consider not left clicking holding and dragging around, as this one is a lot heavier. Let's grab the lips again as we did earlier. Left click. You can see we are seeing the lips here, as we saw earlier. If I start moving over, let's try this again over the hair. It seems like they're doing the same thing. But they are not doing the same thing. It's not a carbon copy. With the lip selected over here, if I click over this white background, you'll see that it's giving us a much more faded image because it is merging the layers of the background here, so this bluish white color and trying to mix it with the source image. Whereas, if we were using the clone tool to do this, it would simply give us right now we're set to fix. That's why it's doing this. Let's go to none. Undo this. It would simply give us a clear copy. Okay. So that's part of the difference. So the healing tool might seem like it's doing the same as the clone tool, but in reality, it is trying to mix and merge the pixels together. So if I clip over here, simply tapping, left clicking, tap, tap. Now, this method is destructive, which means it's applying it directly to our image. I'm going to control Z or command Z out of this. Make sure we undo all of these transforms or these modifications. Instead, we're going to turn on simple merge. We're going to pick a sample here on our image. And then we're going to create a new layer and I'll call this ski. With this, click over here. It's also healing, without the simple merge, this wouldn't work. Our turn off simple merge, and I'm clicking, nothing's happening. But with the simple merge, it is combining the information from multiple layers and allowing me to paste it on this layer up here that we just created. And this would be a less destructive way of going about this process. Now, there are other tools and methods that you can use in conjunction with this to get better results that are not as harsh. For example, choosing parts of the skin that are closer to the areas that we want to fix. So to match the lighting, if you will, for some areas. So now many little taps would work. And it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. How much are you trying to change the original image. You can use this tool to remove graffitis from a wall, even to remove a person from an image if you have enough information in the image to properly replace the pixels that you want to replace. Typically, when doing this skin retouching, you would use a bit of blur, maybe some high pass layer to introduce the texture back, minus the details that we want to remove a whole process really. It's a pretty easy one as well. I just a bit of practice. It's not that hard to go about it. So I'd say that this is good enough. I'm not trying to create a baby smooth face. I'd say this is good enough. I'm not trying to push it too far. And the best part about this is we can lower the opacity of this layer over here, and it will through some detail, so we can go, let's say 70. So we're letting some of the details back through. All right. Now let's move over to our second image over here. And for this image, what we'll be tackling the teeth. The first thing we'll do is isolate the teeth or we'll make a selection around the teeth. So I'll go ahead and call this original and make a copy of it. I'll make our selection using the Free select tool. I pressed F on the keyboard for quick access, and I'll make a selection. And there we have it of return to confirm, and this should be, I think good enough. We have a bit of the lips here, hopefully, it won't be too much of a problem, and I'll rename our layer two U. You can already guess maybe what we're about to do, colors, U, saturation, we're going to target the yellows. And since this image clearly is not all yellow only, we're going to add just a bit of overlap. And we can start to lower the saturation of the yellow. Now we're removing the yellows. Let's say negative 70, and we can up the lightness ever so slightly. Let's say five. Can do a side by side comparison. On the left is the result of our use saturation and on the right is the B four. I before, after. I selected none with the keyboard shortcut, Shift plus control plus A on a PC or shift plus command plus A on a MAC. That is it. So these were two simple processes of retouching. The next lesson, we'll be learning how we can install some custom brushes into get. See you there. 29. How to install Brushes - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In today's lesson, we'll be learning how we can install custom brushes inside of GIMP. So we have some of the default brushes that come with GIMP over here and a few custom ones that I've installed myself, which are the fur brushes. So if I were to go up to the configuration button up here and I switched to a list view, all of these fur brushes over here have been installed manually by myself. All right. So switch back to the grid view. All right. So let's go ahead and learn how to do this and g. Well, the first thing you'd want to do is to download your brushes. In the resource folder, there is a GIP asset folder, go in there, and then you have the brushes folder. So brushes And a lot of the licenses for the brushes that I've provided, ask that you not share the brushes as stand alone, so not to redistribute them, although they are free. Out of respect for that, I decided to only include the links where you can go get the brushes in a text file, and here is the text file. And each one of these will take you to a different set of brushes. So let's start with the first one here. We won't be opening all of them, but just to show you how you can install the brushes. So we can either copy it or simply open in my case, paste it in your web browser. And we have this first website over here, where you'll find a few interesting brushes that you can get for free. And let's go ahead with this over here, the fingerprints. We click on it. Simply hit download. We can see what's included in the package. So it download, vocate to whichever folder where you'd like to download the brushes. This case, or put it inside of the course folder. Next, Had over to the folder where you've downloaded the brushes, extract them from the ZIP file. These brushes over here are from resource boy. Let's go inside of the folder. And you'll be greeted with a dot ABR file. If you don't see the extension, you can always right click on it, check the properties, and it might show you the extension in there. And from there, let's go back inside of Gim. And from Gi, we're going to go to edit and down to preferences. And remember, if you are on MacOS, prefences will be located in the name GIP inside of your menu bar. Go to preferences. We get our pop up window, and now we're going to go to the folders. Let's press the plus over here to extend the folders. And the first folder here is brushes. Let's pick the first path up here. And we'll click on this cabinet icon up to the right. You can see it as show file location in the file manager. Simply left click on it, it will open up either the brushes folder, or it will take you to the 2.10 folder, which holds the other resource folders. So let's go inside of brushes. And from here, all we have to do is you can either copy and paste the brushes over here. You could create a link and put it in the brushes folder or simply paste the file itself. It's up to you. And that's about it. Once you have your ABR file inside of the brushes folder, So we can close out of the preferences menu. If we go over to Gimp. You can hit this little button down here, this circle. It is a refresh button. If you're not seeing this menu, simply go up to the configuration button and make sure that show button bar is checked on. And if we were to refresh our brushes, we give it a moment and V. We now have our custom brushes added to our brush collection. The same goes for all of the other brushes in this link. You would simply go to the website and find the download button, and you can download these brushes. And installing them is just as simple. You would extract the zip, if it's a zip, or simply extract the raw file. Or AR, and copy and paste the ABR file into your brushes folder, and that's about it. That's all it takes, and you either close out of gap and open it again or hit the refresh button down here, and it will refresh your brushes list. If we were to grab our paint brush, grab a brush, let's go over to the tool options. You can see they tend to be four K as indicated on the page itself, it mentions that they are four K. So by default, they will open into a four k dimension. Once you click on these brushes. One work around for this is to uncheck this link chain over here. If we uncheck the link chain and you are to set a size for your brush over here, No matter the brush that you grab, the size of the brush will not change. If you turn on the length chain over here, and you grab a different brush, it will change the size of the brush. But there you go. We now have our fingerprint brushes added into Gim. So that is it for this lesson. And the next lesson we'll be learning how we can install plug ins and script inside of Gim. See you there. 30. How to Intall Plugins - GIMP Essentials: H i. This lesson, we'll be learning how we can install scripts and plugins inside of gm. Let's get started. This is a very simple process. It is similar to how you install brushes inside of Gim. Let's start by going up to edit preferences. Remember, if you're on MacOS, it will be in the name gi inside of your menu bar. Once we're inside of the preferences, we can go ahead and open up the folders, drop down, so click on the Little plus, and we can navigate to the scripts, for example, choose the first path at the top, and we'll click on this cabinet up here. So Show file location and file manager. It will either take you inside of the scripts folder itself or inside of the 2.10 folder. Once we're in here, we can close out the preferences inside of GIP. And since we'll be installing these scripts first, let's go ahead and open up the scripts folder. I already have these scripts in here. But essentially, inside of the resource folder provided with the course, we're going to go inside of the GIP asset. And there are two things to bring your attention to. The first thing is the plug in script GIP text file over here, which holds the links to a few extra plug ins and scripts. But let's go ahead and look at the scripts folder. And inside of the scripts folder, you'll see what we have the same scripts that I have over here. You can simply copy them, so select everything copy and paste them over inside of the scripts folder. And that's about it. You can see the extensions here are SCF and these are the scripts. Now, for the Plugins, it's just about the same, so we'd go back to the 2.10 folder, we go inside of the Plugins folder. And inside of the assets folder provided, we also have a plugins folder. And inside there, you have a few plug ins. Simply copy and paste them inside of the plugins folder. And next time you start up gimp, you'll have these scripts and plug ins activated, and you'll have these extra options in the menu bar. And we're going to focus right now on the assets folder over here. The plug in script Gi. Now, this is a text file, and I'll give you a few links. The first set of links are for plug in scripts and brushes. And down here are a few honorable mentions, which are old scripts and plug ins for GIP, and most of them still work with this release of GIP, the 2.10 series. We also have the GGO link over here, which will take you to the GitHub, which will allow you to download a few extra Gego operations if you are used to using Gago Now, the links above, we have bi Gimp re synthitizer, Gim resynitizer for Mac. The gimmick, a link where you can go get the gimmick plug in, which is a very powerful plug in, by the way. I really recommend getting this one, as well as the BiP in resynitizer, of course. All of these in the top are actually recommendations. Except for the photo gimp, this really depends on you. This is something to make Gimp look and feel more like photoshop. We'll dive into each one of these. Let's start with BIM. So I'll go ahead and open this in my web browser. Now, what BIP is is a batch processing application for GIP. So if you wanted to apply certain filters or modifications to a series of images. Inside of GIMP itself, it is not easy or even possible really unless you know how to use the Python full console. But with BIP, you can do this very easily. So you would simply install this plug in. So to install this, well, first, we have this link up here, if we open it in a new tab, this takes you to the official website that I know of. And you can download the installer for Windows, Mac Wes, or the source for Linux, if I'm not mistaken, you can see the latest version right now being the 2.6, but you can still get it directly from the GitHub website, and you have the instructions on how to get it and install it. For windows, you would simply click on this link over here and download the Git plug in bit in 32 EXC file. So if I open this in a new tab as well, I would take us over here. And all we'd have to do is to download this down here, the EX file, and execute it. You also have the MacOS version here, which is in a TAR file TR gz, and this is the equivalent of a ZIP file, if you will. Simply extract that and follow the instructions from there. I'm assuming that you know how to install software on MacOS if you're using a MacOS. If you're using MacOS. That is basically it for B. You also have the compiling instructions here for Linux. And down here some more instructions for the MacOS. So it will take you to that same page. You can choose which one you want to go with. You download the Tarpi extract, and there you have it. All right. So that is it for BIM. It is a batch processing plug in for GIMP. Now, for the next thing on our list, we have the GIP resynitizer, which is the equivalent of the content aware tool and photoshop. We're going to learn how to use the re synitizer, and GP in the next lesson right after we learn how to install it. So over here, it takes us to the GitHub page. And if you scroll down, we have the installation section down here, where we can see that we can install it on Linux using Flat Pack. If you've installed GIP on Linux, us in Flat Pack, you can install the resyitizer directly from there. If not, you can download the source. Now, if you are on Windows, you can click on Install resyitizer for Windows. It will take you over to this page, then click on the link over here for Windows. It will take you to this page over here, then simply click on Download. I'll ask where you want to download it, I'll put it inside of the resource folder for now, and then let's go over to our resource folder, and there we have it. From there, all you'd have to do is extract the ZIP file. Inside of this folder, you can see we have these PY PY files, the Plugins, and PY is for Python. If we go to the plugins folder over and you get resource folder, you remember, you go to preferences, and from there, you'll find the folders, and it will take you directly inside of here. You simply have to copy the contents of this folder in here. Of course, you can skip the read me in the semi, which is essentially read me but infringe. If we open up the read me file, see they give you some instructions and on how to use it and what to install and where to install it. So you want to copy these files over here, which are these. Including the re syntizer dot eXC in re synitizer GUY dot eC. So you can hold down control and select the ones that you want to install. Pick all of these files and copy and paste them and here or simply drag and drop inside of the pleg ins folder. It is that straightforward to install the re syntizer, for windows. Now, for MacOS, you're going to want to go to this link over here, which will take you over to this page. Then you want to scroll down and download the There we go. Rsynitizer plug in GP 2.10 sx TGZ, which is the equivalent again of a ZIP file. Simply download this, extract it, and copy the Python files into your Plug ins folder inside of GIP. The GIP resources, and that's about it. So that's it for the resynthitizer. Next, we have the gimmick. So let's go ahead and visit the gimmick website. So over here, we are on the Gimick website. You can simply go to download and choose which one you need. So if you're on windows, you want to go with either the EX installer or you can get a ZIP file. If you're on Linux, you can make sure to choose the right distro variation. You have the flat pack option as well. If you've installed Dix If you've installed GIMP through the flat pack. And finally, you have the MacOS option down here, which you can see a test we do not officially maintain a MacOS built of gimmick. We're aware that the people have successfully built a gimmick QT plug in for GIMP. You may find useful resources here and here. So it's more of an adventure when it comes to the MacOS. Next, we have the photo game. So let's go ahead and open this. And as I've mentioned before, the photo game is essentially a form of plug in that will help you to get gm to look and feel like photoshop. So it will install the keyboard shortcuts and a few functions that have to do with the track pad and mouse movement, and few other options, I would imagine. I personally do not use it. I cannot walk you through the entire process myself. If you go through this information, it should be pretty clear how to install it. You also have a few YouTube videos on how to go about it. So that is it for this one. Next, we have the amp help, which is a collection of scripts and brushes. It holds a collection of scripts and brushes. And up here, you can see we have the scripts. And these are not exactly the most advanced scripts you could go for, but they are here. They're an option if you want to explore, and you have a few brushes as well, and they're not the most spectacular brushes to say. But again, maybe you need some of these, maybe you want some of these. Maybe they'll make part of your process. Easier or faster. It's up to you to go ahead and explore them, and you have a few how toe as well, and that's about it. They give you a few updates on what's been going on and how to manage some of the resources that they offer on the website. All right, so that's about it for these links. And for the honorable mentions, I'll leave it to you to explore them or not. And the get go here can be quite useful. That one I would recommend maybe exploring the G. But that's about it. That is how you can install these plug ins easily along with these scripts. There's not much to it. And of course, you simply close out of GIMP. And next time you open it, you'll have these extra options in the menu bar, as well as these as well as the extra options over in your filters, and heance, we'll have the heel selection, which is basically the Gim resyitizer. And over in the image option here, we have the interleave layers, which we'll be looking into once we dive into the animated gifts class, which comes at the end of the course. All right. So that is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson. Where we'll be learning how to use the Gib re synthetizer. All right. See you there. 31. Content Aware Fill -GIMP Essentials: H i. In this lesson, we are going to learn how to use the re snitizer again inside of Game. And we're going to go from this image over here to this we'll be taking this image. And even this image here. There we go. And finally, we have this one here and Let's go ahead and learn how to do this inside of Gim. Let's get started. First things first. We'll go up to file open. Let's navigate over to the exercise folder. And this time we're going inside of 16 content aware. Let's open all four images. A left click on 01, hold down shift, left click on 04, and open. Let's go over to our first project tab, and if you've installed the plug in, resyntizer over and filters, hence, you should have the hell selection option available. It's actually a very straightforward process. I'll call this original, rename our layer, make a duplicate, and I'll rename this one to Recent. First thing we have to do is make a selection. So I'm going to use the free select tool for this. You could always use the foreground select so that it really narrows down your subject here, but it is not fully necessary. I want to left click. I'll make a straight line and make a selection around our subject. With the foreground select, you could make a more precise selection of your subject, which might help V. We have our selection. Per return to confirm, and our selection is done. Now, let's go over to our filters menu, down to Enhanced and we choose Hill selection. We're going to get this pop up here. The first thing is context sampling with and pixels. If you want it, you could grab your measure tool, and you could measure the distance let's activate the info window here, and you could measure the distance from your selection all over the surroundings, and you would know how far does 50 pixels go when grabbing these samples. The measure two can be quite useful for this one. All right. Skip out of this. Next, we have the sample from. So we have three options in this drop down. We have all around, we have sides, and we have above and below. As you can imagine, all around is all around our selection. Sides is left and right, and above and below would be at the top and at the bottom. Now, for a selection like this one, I would go for sides because at the bottom here, we have the street. But let's start with all around. And for the filling order, we'll leave it to random. Now, I doubt that 50 pixels will be enough to get a nice result, but let's go ahead and get started. So we simply click on. Now, depending on your system, system resources, this might take longer or less time. But V. This is the first result. As I mentioned, I don't think that 50 pixels is enough for this image. Press Control Z on a PC or command Z on a mac to undo this. Can go back to filters, enhance heal selection. Let's choose a radius that's much further. Let's say we still have our measure tool here so we can actually measure how far we want to go. 140 pixels. We're going all around. Let's simple from the sides and say, Okay. From the left and the right side, it will grab its samples. Now, the bigger your image, the longer this process will take, the heavier it's going to be, et cetera. This did a pretty good job. Still not perfect. It's good enough to the point that if I'm going to select none, now we could use the heel tool at this point, or even the clone tool, but we can use the heel tool as well. I'm grabbing the clone tool to fix some of these areas. See here, that's a little too much, too strong, with something super soft. This is for the top part right here. It's not perfect, but it's already a pretty good job. Then we could go down and grab our free select tool again. Make a selection for the boots. T returns confirm, filters, enhance he selection. For this one, I'll leave it to the sides, I'll grab my measure tool over here just to see what we're working with over here. I guess 100 might be good for this one. Let's try 100 and say, Okay, and done. Now we can select none. We still have the shadow on the ground, although it might seem as the water here. If you ever feel something's weird, you can always grab the hell select and touch up around the area. But even touch up this part of the wall. And there we have it before, after, before, after. There is a third option that we haven't explored yet, which is the perspective clone tool. The reason why is it involves perspective, but let's go ahead and take a quick look at it. If we were to let's say we're going to grab our soft brush, then let's look up here. The two options, we have perspective clone. The first option here is modify a perspective. This means if I left click on the Canvas, we're going to get these handles, There are quite a few more controls around here. What we're going to do is grab this inner square inside of this big square. This inner square, and I'll drag it down and align it with the wall here, and then I'll grab this inner square for this top right corner, and I'll drag it up and align the perspective with the wall. You can see it it's now matching the wall. I'll do the same thing down here, I'll drag this up, so it matches the wall. And this one is already aligned. Then we can switch over to prospective clone, and let's increase the size of our brush, just to demonstrate or create a new layer, perspective, and I'll make sure to activate the simple merge over here and V. I'll grab this layer over here, I'll left click right here, to mark the area that we want to grab, hold down shift and I'll click passer head. Now, what this is doing, it is matching the perspective that we selected. This is the result that we got up here. This is it. We have this right here. Now, let's go ahead and make a new layer. We'll call this cloned, and we're going to switch over to the, the simple clone tool, and we'll left click right here, roughly around the same area. Let's compare the two. The one that we drew with the perspective is gradually getting smaller as it's fading or getting closer to the vanishing point. Vanishing point is if you were to draw a line from up here that goes all the way down and a line from down here that goes all the way up, you would get a intersection point and that would be your vanishing point. Essentially, the clone perspective is respecting the vanishing point and it's going along with it. Was the clone tool doesn't know that this vanishing point exists and it's simply copying the same size that we have here and it's pasting it along the wall. This is why it doesn't seem like it's getting smaller as it's going further down. Same thing goes for this over here. We could grab the free select tool, make our selection. As such, filters, he'll select. Now I'll do the sides again because the top here might be problematic. We can grab the measure tool, see what we're working with here. 100 pixels just might be fine. This image is larger than the previous one if I'm not mistaken, or the selection is larger. How do we use, for example, the foreground select tool or took her time to make a better selection of the subject? It would equal a smaller selection and thus a slightly faster process. Just a bit more, and vola. If I select none, you can see it did a pretty good job and still somewhat tell that some things off with the texture of the wall. But let's go ahead and grab our healing tool. Grab a sample over here, and we can simply say if I can align this, then hold down shift, click. To. Let's go all the way up here, click, click here, hold down shift, click down here. As you can see, it wouldn't be that difficult to get this texture back. Of course, we have this little error down here, which we can always fix. But I think it illustrates the point. Still a little odd, but oh, I did it on the original image. Not to worry. What I can do is I can copy this image here. So I'll go to edit copy, can go over to our history. So if I go here at tab, and I'm looking for undue history, and let's go all the way up to the free select over here. I'll select none. Then we can go to edit and paste the layer that we had selected in Vo. So before, after. As I said, we can always go ahead and fix this. So there we have it. This is the before, and this is the after. Now, for this image over here, same thing, now let's not forget to rename, make a copy. And with this copy here, I'll grab the Free select two again, I'll zoom in a little bit, and I'll make my selection around this baby cow. All right. Filters, enhance, al selection. And for this one, I will switch it to all around, and I'll grab the measuring to and make sure that I'm not grabbing anything too far here. 100 might be much. Let's go with 60 and say, Okay. As you can see, we're working with a smaller selection, and so it is going much faster. This is a pretty good job, right? This is before, and this is our after before, after. All right. Let's move over to our next image. Let's duplicate, make our selection, or grab the free select, or hold down Control on a PC or comment on the Mc to exclude this part of our selection. Down here is very much a different tone as up here in v. Now all we'd have to do is make another selection for the bottom side here. We could grab the shadow as well, but I will not. I'll say show heel selection and say. Super fast, this is a very small selection, and there we go. Can always our over here. See pulling down shift to draw the straight line, v. Then we have this random shadow on the floor. This is not perfect, of course, not perfect at all, but it still gets the job done. All right. There we go. Have R before, R after before, after. You can see it is a very easy to use plegin. Another thing we can do with the re synthesizer is, I'll go ahead and make a duplicate of this one, I'll grab our lips tool, I'll make a little hole over here, I'll go to edit, and I will clear the hole. Now we have a transparency area right here. Then I'll go up to filter and hands, and I'll say heal transparency. We're now going to go for inwards towards center because this is a hole, and I'll give it 100 pixels to work with and say, Okay And Voila. We have now filled this hole with the content surrounding you. If we were to, for example, grab the crop tool over here, grab our image, allow growing. Let's push this to the side here, press Enter. Let's now make the layer to the maize. Let's undo this. This is because it doesn't have an Alpha channel, so let's add an Alpha channel, meaning it didn't have transparency, layer to ma size, We're going to go for 100 and now we're going to do outwards from center since we are filling an edge. Now, it didn't do an amazing job for this one. I could undo. Now, what if we tried something a lot larger like 200? With 200, it did a much better job. Of course, not perfect still, but we can always grab something like the hell tool. Then we could always go ahead and touch up all of these small inconsistencies, and there you have it. That's another feature of the re synthesizer, which is the Hals transparencies. These are the two functions I use the most for. That is it for the resynthesizer. The next lesson, we are going to learn how we can export our images. If you have a project with multiple layers, how to batch exploit it. I'll see you there. 32. How to batch export images - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In this lesson, we are going to learn how we can batch export images or layers from gm. Let's get started. So already here, I have our image here, and we have several layers. We have four layers over here, each of them having a particular effect applied to them. And we would like to export this. Let's say we want to export all four images altogether. So a batch export. Well, the quickest way to do so is simply to go up to file. Export As. Navigate to where you'd like to export these files, essentially, and I'll go ahead and put them out here. Then all we have to do is go ahead and name it. I say Mad hater filters. To batch export, simply change the extension. We're going to have it Mada filters OR O R A. And that's really all there is to it, you simply call it dot a, it Export, then there's nothing more to do, you simply wait for GM to export each one of the images. Once it's done, we simply navigate to where we exported or file. Here, we have the dot Oura and to open it. There are essentially two methods. You can either extract it right here and there or you can try and mount it like an external USB or CD. If we go ahead and choose extract here, we didn't get a folder, the Mad hatter filter dot Oat files. And let's go inside of the folder, and we get all of this. Now, inside of the Mad Hatter filters dot or files, simply go to data, so let's go ahead and open the folder itself. And there we have it. We have each one of our images right here exported. This is how you can quickly and easily batch export your layers. That's really all the layers to it. All right, that is it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we'll be learning how we can save our GIMP projects as dot PSD or Photoshop. See you there. 33. How to save project as PSD (Photoshop) - GIMP Essentials: Hi there. In this lesson, we'll be learning how we can save our GIMP projects as dot PSD, which is the extension for Photoshop project files as Photoshop cannot open the CF project files of GIMP. Although inside of GIMP, you can open the dot PSD files. Let's go ahead and learn how to do this. First thing we'll do is simply go up to file, new. Choose a composition which you want to create. Let's say 1,600 by 1,200, for example. You can always change that later. Once we have our project created, let's go up to file. Instead of choosing Save As, we're going to choose export as. Locate where you would like to save your file. And let's go ahead and call this V one dot PSD. That's all there is to it really. You simply have to add the extension of dot PSD. If you go down here to the select file type by extension, hit on the plus, you'll see these are all of the extensions that you can use to save your game files as. And there's quite a list. In there, you also have the PSD format, which should be right here. Z, its Photoshop image. That's about it. We simply choose or add the PSD extension ourselves, it export and VO. If I navigate over to where I exported or file, we now have this as a PSD, and it is now compatible with Photoshop. We can even open it up again and you'll see GIMP can open it no problem. Up here, you can see PSD, project V one. That is it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we will be learning how to create animated gifts inside of GIMP. S there. 34. Create and Export Animated GIF - GIMP Essentials: Hi, dear. In this lesson, we'll be learning how we can create an animated gift inside of Gim and how to export it. And this is what we'll be working with. So let's go ahead and learn how to do this inside of Gim. All right, so let's go ahead and get started. The first thing to do is to import our frames. Of course, we could start from scratch, creating a new project and building up our animation from there. But for this particular case, let's just go ahead and import the frames that are provided in the course resource. We'll go to file, and we're going to choose open as layers. Because if we open if you remember, GIMP will open each one of the images into its own project tab, and we want all of them to be inside of one project. So we'll choose open as layers. Navigate to the exercise folder, we'll go inside of 17, give animation, we have a folder called frames, and we'll grab all of our frames. O left click on 000, hold down shift, click on 008 and open. GPA has imported all of our images. Now, right now, they have a transparent background. But there are a few things to note when it comes to animated gifts. The first thing we'll learn is the order of the frames. If we go up to filters, down to animation, and we go down to playback, we'll get a pop up window or a new window. And we can always preview the playback of our animation. But before we do so, let's take a look at one of these options out here, one of the particular options, which is the one frame per layer, replace in parentheses. Here we have two options. One is to combine and one is to replace every frame. Let's look at what combined does and press play. The first thing you'll notice is maybe between the fact that the animation is playing backwards and that it's combining each one of the frames as it goes through them. I'll stop this here. This is why we'd go for replace for this particular example, First play, and now we can see that each frame replaces the previous frame. It will ignore the transparency and simply replace every frame with the next frame. Of course, it is still playing backwards. Stop this goes out of this. This is because Yep reads the animation starting from the bottom layer all the way up to the top layer. This at the bottom is frame one. Then we have frame two, frame three, frame four. First, the order right here is since we started on zero, zero. But essentially, this is the first image that we see, the second image that we see, the third image, so on and so forth. Now, to invert the order of the layers, there's actually a very quick way of doing so. We simply have to go up to layer. Stack. And then at the bottom here, we have reverse layer order. Click on it in V. Gimp has already inverted our layer stack order. So if we went back to filters, animation, playback, and we hit play, We now have our animation playing in the right order. All right. Now, we also have the options here to change the speed of our animation, how many frames per second, are such, and the acceleration. In the Zoom level as well. But for now, we're going to leave this as it is. Since this doesn't really affect your final render. This is just to preview it. We'll close out of this. Now, we could export this simply as a file, and this would be all we need to do. But instead, let's go ahead and learn a few more steps. One of them being how we can add a background and combine the background with each one of our layers, unless you want it with transparency. In which case, you can simply export it as it is. But even then, there are certain options, if we go to filters, animation, we have certain options here. That would help us make this file a lot lighter. You can either optimize for give or optimize the difference. We'll learn what each of these does in just a moment. First, let's go ahead and add a background to our image. We could choose a solid background. Let's go ahead and add a new layer, I'll call this background. Move it to the bottom of our layer stack, and let's fill it up with a color. Could choose a contrasting color. I grab the color wheel in the options here. Look at the blue of cat over here. All right, Let's say good enough. I'll go ahead and draw an ais in line. All left click once, hold down shift and control a PC or come in on a mac. The draw a straight line and then left click again. We're still using the same color. Under this. We could always make it a little, drop the The size of it and Val. Have a nice soft line. It is pure black. Let's go ahead and maybe choose a variant of our background color that is much darker as such. Left click, draw. We now have horizon line, if you will. You can always make it higher, but in this case, you would see the inside of the box. This is just a perspective thing. We can draw our line. I crop it, the smaller gift, smaller the file size. Turn off allow growing here. We could use the composition guides as well, so rule of thirds. Here we have our composition. Zoom in a little bit. Now, in order to fuse this background with every other layer, there was a previous method that I would teach, which was to go up to filters, animation, and hit blend. You would get this little pop up window. You would set the interpolation frames to one, turn off loop, press. It would open a new project tab with your additional frames, which are these ghosted layers over here. I'm holding down shift and clicking on the icon so I can isolate the view. But as you can see, we're getting these semi transparent frames. Then the trick would be to go and delete every second frame manually, which was a TDS process if you had too many frames, every number dividable by two at this point, so on and so forth, because each one of them would be would be holding a semi transparent image. I'll close out of this, discard the changes. But instead, with one of the plug ins that we've added in one of the previous lessons, if we were to go to edit preferences, if you remember on MacOS, it will be on the name gp, go inside of the folders, or going inside of the plug ins. I do believe it's a plug in. Open the file manager for this and this right here, the OFN interleave layers. Thanks to this plug in over here, We can now go inside of image. At the bottom here, we have interleave, and we have these three options. We can interleave a stack of layers over the current layer, interleave single layer over stack or interleave single layer under stack. This is the one we're going with, since we're going to merge the background with every other layer. We would choose the bottom layer, the background full opacity. This is referring to the blending mode. We'll leave it on normal. Merge it with every other layer rather than making a duplicate and placing it under every other layer. We're going to say yes to merge, and we hit v. It creates a new project tab as well, except that we no longer have this ghost effect that we had previously. All right. Once that's done, you can always preview the changes, but we're going to move forward. Going to go to filters, animation, and now we can optimize for gift. The only issue with the optimizing for gift is GIP will apply certain changes to your gift that do optimize it for a lighter gift, but it might not be changes that you want. Some of these changes, we can do ourselves manually, and then we're going to do the optimize difference. This is the one that we wouldn't do ourselves. In order to optimize this, we'll go inside of image, we're going inside of mode, and we'll switch to index. Now index, basically just means that it's going to have a limited color palette. Here we can see how many colors are going to be admitted. For this image, if you really look at it, we have one, two, three, four, five, say maybe six, seven, eight, nine. There aren't really that many colors in here. Let's say we drop this to 55. If ever you had gradients in here, you would want to turn on color ditering. This would add a little bit of noise in the gradients, preventing banning. Then we just say convert. But notice that there isn't much that seems to have happened to our image. 55 might have even been a big number for this particular image. We can always control Z or command Z on a Mc, go to mode, dx, and let's say we reduce this to 20 and convert. We still can't tell that anything has happened. Although something did happen. There's a bit more noise, but essentially, there are now less colors in this image and it will create a much lighter file. The 50 would give you some smoother Edges over here, but this is what we'll be working with. Once we're done with this, we'll go to filter, animation, optimized difference. You can see a lot of these options are now graded out, and this is because we're working with the color mode of index. Actually quite a few things will no longer work in side of an index image. Filters, animation, optimized difference. Now, this one might take a moment depending on your image, the amount of frames and the size. Et it run for a moment. Once it's done, you can see it opens a new project tab again, and here we have it. This is our background. We have the box over here. Head of our cat. You can see the green of the wall when the cat's head goes down, cat jumping out, the green of the wall, again, essentially what it's doing, it's eliminating any pixel that is being duplicated from one layer to another, and not just one layer to another, but throughout the layers altogether. By the final image here, you see we have our cat standing with lots of different holes in it, and we have this piece of the wall on top of the cat's head. If we look at the layer right before you'll see that the cat was stretched up. And so when this cat's head goes back down, it leaves the space in the back, which is all Gaby needs to block the layer behind so that this layer can stand alone with these layers right here. This makes your gift even lighter. If we were to go to filters, animation, playback and if we press play, it's going to use combine. Although in the combined, you see there is a bit of a jump. At this point, the first frame won't have the box. What we can do is merge the box with the background. As this is what is causing the jump when we're playing in the playback. Now finally, inside of the layer of names over here, we have a bit of information, and that is the layer name. Then in parentheses, we have these numbers, so 100 milliseconds. 1 second is 1,000 milliseconds. If you want an image or one of your frames to last more than 100 milliseconds. Let's say up to 1 second, you can always change these values here. Yes, you would have to change it manually for each one of these. Unless you want to change all of them. In which case you can do at the moment of exporting or animated gif. Next, we have combined. Combine essentially is saying which blending mode to use per layer. For this particular case, now that we've optimized for difference, combined is the way to go. Let's say, for example, we wanted the last frame to last a couple seconds. All we'd have to do is change this over here, let's say 1 second. The last frame will last a whole second. We can also increase the amount of time that this frame lasts. Let's say 500 milliseconds, so half a second. Let's say for the first frame over here, we want it to last half a second as well. Now, once we're done, satisfied, we simply go to file, Export as, navigate to where you would like to export it, and change the extension over here. I'll change the name, name it how you want to name it. Cat jump animation, V one. And change the extension here to Jif or gif. However you want to pronounce it, but essentially GIF. You can also go in the file extensions down here and locate the Jiff extension right there. Let's see it as Jiff image. Then simply export. We'll get this little pop up window over here. Here is where you want to make sure to check as animation. Otherwise, it will not be animated. You can also leave a comet inside of your if. If you want it to credit yourself, put your name in there or any piece of information you want to put, maybe the name of the f. So Blue cat jumps out of box. Then interlace, essentially, interlace allows the gift to load a lower quality version of itself. Well the full quality loads in the background. This is useful if you're uploading this to a website. Interlace will allow it to load a lower quality. I don't know if it works locally as well. It is possible. If I'm not mistaken, both of these add a little bit of weight to the if, nothing big, but something minute is added. Next, we can choose if we want our gift to loop forever or to simply play once. In this case for the jumping cat, I'll go for a loop forever, then we have the delay between frames where unspecified. Which means if you have some of these layers or frames that do not have the delay, then this is where you can set the delay for them. Next, you have the frame disposal where unspecified. If you didn't choose combine or replace over here, You can choose it here and whichever frame or layer does not have the disposal. It will use the one you enter and here. Then you have these two check boxes, which will override the delay or disposal for all of your frames or layers. Use delay entered above for all frames or use disposal entered above for all frames. This is for the ones that are unmarked and this will override everything. We already modify the timing manually, so we'll leave it as is, and we can press export and voila. Navigate to where you exported your animation. We can double click open, and we now have our animated gift. We can see the file size over here. It is only 47.5 kilobytes, very tiny, and a decent resolution as well. That is it for this lesson. This is how you can create an animated gift. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll learn about preferences. 35. Preferences & Settings - GIMP Essentials: Hey, we're going to dive into each and every one or most of the settings inside of these preferences. I won't be going too technical, but it's always a good idea to at least visit the preferences of the software you're using because you never know there might be some hidden gyms in there, some settings that you wish were activated that you don't know about that are in there, or even the option to disable features that you find annoying. So let's go ahead and take a deep dive into the preferences and see what we find. Let's get to it. Hi. In this lesson, we will be taking a look at GIMS preferences, so we can optimize the performance and customize the experience. All right. So let's get started. I'll close out of this. And to open up preferences, if you are on Windows or Linux, you simply have to go up to edit in your menu bar and go down to preferences. If you are on MacOS, preferences will be located in the name Gimp inside of your menu bar. So let's open up preferences. And this is where we start. Typically, it is on system resources. So how will GM use or make use of the resources available on your system? Now, the first thing we have up here is the minimum number of undo, which is how many steps backward can you go? And what is the minimal that GIMP should try and keep? Then we have the maximum undue memory. This is referring to your RAM, the RAM of your computer. If you hover the cursor over any one of these fields, you'll see you get a little pop up, giving you some information about that field and what it is controlling. Next to these, we have these drop downs that allow you to change the units that you would like to view those values in. So you can go for kilobytes megabytes or gigabytes. D T cache size, which, again, if you hover the cursor over that field will give you some information about that field. We have the maximum new image size, then we have the swap compression. And in this drop down, you get a few options. You can have no swap compression. You can have for best performance, which is what I leave mine on. There's balance, and you have best compression. Now, the number of threads refers to how many threads GIMP has access to on your machine. These really depends on your machine. That is it for the system resources. Next, let's jump into the debugging. Debugging is very straightforward. It is referring simply to if GMP crashes or runs into any bugs, what actions do you want it to take? You have the debug policy here and it drop down, and you can choose from these options. It is up to you. Then we have the color management. Now, the color management is a bit more advanced, we could say. For color management, this really depends on the user. If you're simply working for digital, you might not even really need to go into these settings. But if you are planning on attempting to create certain things for print, or you want some more let's say color accuracy, switching between color profiles, so on and so forth. Then you might want to come here and set these things up. Now, for the monitor profile, it would be best not to set this to anything specific, and simply check on try to use system monitor profile. You'll get again more information simply by hovering your cursor over these fields. Next, we have the image import and export. Now, here, I do recommend that you uncheck all of these up here. We'll jump into this in a moment, but first, know that when you're exporting an image, there is a lot of information that is stored in the metadata. Some of this information can be sensitive information about your system. Now, of course, you can leave the export the image color profile by default. That is fine, it's just a color profile. But as for the rest of this information, You might want to choose when you want to export this information or even create custom metadata information to put on your images, maybe to mark them. But I do recommend unchecking these as these do store a lot of personal information into your images. You see we even get this warning here. Metadata can contain sensitive information. I recommend unchecking these. Now, let's go up to import profile. And here, you get the promote imported images to the floating point precision. If you don't know what this is, leave it unchecked, we have the add Alpha channel to imported images. Now, if you've ever imported an image, if you use GI before, and you tried erasing a part of the image, but it's not erasing. It's not showing you the transparency or the layer behind the image that you're trying to erase, that is most likely because there's no Alpha channel. You can manually add the Alpha channel. But if you want to skip that step, you can simply have GI add an Alpha channel by default to any image that you import into your projects or into GI. Finally, we have the export file type. Now by default, it is set to PNG. When you're exporting, it will try and export your images as PNG unless you change the extension yourself. You can choose from a series of options here. Next, we have the tool options. This is referring to your tools in the toolbox, and how they behave by default, if you will. Now, if you have the allow editing on non visible layers. By default, I leave this unchecked because if I'm hiding a layer, most likely, I do not want to interact with it. Now, it depends on your workflow, but I do think that in most cases, you would not want to interact with an invisible layer. Next, we have the save tool options on exit. And this is simply saying, if I were to grab my paint brush and I change the values of the paint brush here. So I set it up to 40 or 30, and I exit out of GIP. The next time I open up GIP, The brush will be set to 30 or 40 unless you reset it to its default value. And that is essentially what this is saying. Alternatively, you can simply save your tool options like right then and there. And of course, you can always reset everything back to the default value with this button down here. Next, we have the scaling. So if you remember, we've gone through this a few times. None does no effort whatsoever into preserving the quality of your image when you're scaling or doing transforms. Linear does an okay job. Cubic does a good job. No halo and low halo, do a better job in certain circumstances. So I'll leave it to Cubic since Cubic is good. Then we have paint options shared between tools. If I were to switch to a textured brush, right? No matter what the tool I use that uses things like brushes, it will use by default the brush settings that we are using with our paint brush. And finally, we have the move tool. You can set it to set layer or path as active. All this means is when you have the move tool selected, if you remember, you're not limited to moving only the active layer. If you're using the move tool with settings such as pick layer or guide instead of move the active layer. What this would do is whichever layer you actually click on to move it would then automatically become the active layer. Then for a default image. Now, when you go up to file and choose new, you get certain settings by default, and this is where you can set up what you get by default. Now, for the grid, this really depends on you what type of grid works best for you, which units, do you want to see, which your grid, the appearance of your grid, et cetera. Now, for interface, we saw a few of these in the beginning of the course, but let's go ahead and explore the extra ones. We can change the language of g. For the sliders, the size, aspect ratio, et cetera An slider you have, you can use a compact slider or not. So if I uncheck this, you can see the sliders are a bit thicker. Then we have enable layer and channel previews and enable layer group previews. When we were creating layer groups, we would see what is inside of the layer group. In my case, I prefer to see a folder, so I know it's a folder. There is a little plus next to the folders letting you know that it is a folder. Now, of course, you have the sizes. If you remember, we can change the size of the layer previews here, and you can do so for the undo preview, the navigation preview, and of course, the layers and channel. Then we have the keyboard shortcut, of course, and you see here, we have this use dynamic keyboard shortcut. And essentially all this means is, you can change your keyboard shortcuts on the fly. Next, we have, of course, configure keyboard shortcuts, which, again, we can access in the edit menu down here in keyboard shortcuts. Of course, these options are self explanatory. Of course, now we already solve for the themes. We can change between different themes, we can choose icon themes and for the toolbox. Now for the toolbox, you can see here we have Showgm logo Dragon drop target, and this is one of the ways you can create new projects, simply by dragging an image and dropping it on this icon over here on top of our toolbox. If we uncheck this, you can see we'll simply disappear. But I'd rather leave it there as sometimes I do want to open new projects by clicking and dragging, and this is a nice way of doing it to simply drop it over here. You can also choose to toggle on and off the visibility of the foreground and background colors down here as you can see. We can also show the active brush. So here you see we can see which gradient we're using, what's the active brush, and what is the active pattern? Then we have the dialogue defaults. Now dialog default is referring to these pop up windows that you get asking you for certain options or configurations for when you're going to do an action or apply a filter. Essentially, this is where you can change what you see by default. I would say go through these one by one for yourself as going through all of these right now and explaining them would be a long process, but it is very self explanatory, especially since we've been exposed to a few of these already throughout the course. Next, we have the help system. Now, this one again is somewhat self explanatory. So Show to tips here is this thing that allows you to get information or tips, if you will, when hovering your cursor over items. So very useful. Then we have the show help buttons, which is simply referring to the help menu that you can access either by ticking on help or pressing F one with the cursor hovering over a slider or a tool or an option in your menu bar. Now, as for the user manual, you can see on my system currently, I do not have the Help Manual installed. As for the Help browser, you can use either GIMP Help browser or you can jump into a web browser. Next, we have display. Now, display, I'll say, do not really mess with these settings unless you know what you're doing. By default Gim dos a good job at detecting automatically, your displays PPI, if you will. But up here, however, when working with a transparent area, this simply determines what are you seeing in the transparency. So you know how we get this checkerboard or checkboard. Do you want to see a light check? Mid tone or something that's dark, or do you want opaque colors? It's up to you. I'll set mind to light checks. And for the check size, well, again, self explanatory, I'll leave mind to the default, and that is fine. Finally, we have window management inside of the interface. So next, we have the image windows. If you remember, I've gone up to view, and I've checked on Show all a few times so we could see things outside of our Canvas. So you could have the show all set by default. You have the dot for dot by default. And I leave this checked on you would have to read up on this really to understand it, explaining it here and now, I do not know if I would do a great job at explaining it without taking too much time. Now, the marching ants, if you remember when we select or make a selection, the outline that represents the selection has a movement to it, and these are marching ants. The lower this value, the faster the ts seem to move. And this is working in milliseconds. And if you remember, 1,000 millisecond is 1 second. Now, the space bar, if you remember in navigation, we learned that by holding down spacebar, we could pan the view. We could also change these options, and we have the mouse pointer. This is somewhat of an aesthetic preference, if you will. So when you have a brush active, do you want to see the cross hair or not, et cetera? It is up to you. For appearance. Now, these are a few things that show by default. Personally, I like to uncheck the show scroll bar and the ruler. As it gives me a cleaner interface, and whenever I need the rulers, I know the keyboard shircu to bring them forth, simply go to view. And down here, you have show rulers. So you simply hold down shift, plus Control, and press R, and you can see the rulers and I prefer to do this than have the rulers there by default. I left them there for the course, just to just for the sake of the course. You can also hide the Canvas boundaries or the layer boundaries for those of you coming from photoshop. I know that you do not see the layer boundaries by default, and you can also toggle this in the view menu, where there we go. Show selections, show layer boundary, show Canvas boundary, et cetera. Then we have the padding color. By default, it's going to use from your theme, but you can use a custom color or a dark check color. It's up to you. I personally prefer to use the one from my theme. Then we have the keep Canvas padding and show all mode. So instead of seeing a checkerboard outside of the Canvas, we would simply have the same padding from the fe, show up, and still be able to see the parts of our images or layers that extend outside of the Canvas. Now, what is the difference between these two sections? As you can see, they're holding the same information? Well, this is default appearance in normal mode, and this is default appearance in full screen mode. So if ever you were to use GIP in full screen, so not maximize but full screen, you could have different settings than when you open GP normal, like a window. Now, for the title and status is referring to the title bar on top, for GIMP and the status bar all the way at the bottom. This is the information that is showing in these fields. Now, it is a bit hard to understand what this is saying or nearly impossible unless you go to Gibs help page so you can see what these mean and modify them accordingly. Inside of the GIP assets folder, you'll find title status preferences. If we open this up, it is a text file, and it gives you a breakdown of what each one of these symbols actually mean, so you could create custom information for the status bar and the title bar. And for snapping, well, this is very self explanatory, I believe. This is simply, do you want them by default or do you not want them by default? Do you want them by default in normal mode or in full screen mode. And then the general is the distance, and I believe the distance is in pixels. So eight pixels away, does it snap, or you can change this value to snap either closer or further away. I personally also like to have it snap to the convis. So I don't really have to activate it myself, and you can turn it off at any moment by going to view and go down to snap the Cvs edge and uncheck this. All right. Next, for the input devices, for these, we'll be taking a look at them in the next lesson when we learn about how to work with a graphic tablet and setting the brush settings for a graphic tablet. We already saw the folders. There's no real settings here. You can add folders for your resources rather than add the resources inside of the folders. You can also delete some of these removing them from what GIP recognizes as resource folders. All right. That is it for the preferences. Feel free to take your time and explore it a bit more, hover the cursor over the different options so you can learn more about them. All right. That is it for this lesson. And the next lesson, we'll be taking a look at how to work with graphic tablets inside of GIP and setting up your brush settings for the graphic tablet. I'll see you there. 36. How to setup Graphic Tablet - GIMP Essentials: Hi. In today's lesson, we're going to be taking a look at how to work with a graphic tablet using GIMP and a couple of the brush settings for working with the graphic tablet. All right, let's get right into it. So first things first, I'll go ahead and open a new document just so we can see a bit of the results on the Canvas here. Now, when working with a graphic tablet, it is recommended with the current version of GIMP that you plug in the tablet before opening GIMP. All right. And then simply go up to edit your menu bar, go to edit, and go down to input devices. And you'll get this pop up window here. And in here, you can see I have the Wacom intos Bluetooth small pad. I'll give you information about the device that you have connected. Here we have the pad, and we have the stylus. All you have to do is select, for example, the pad, go to mode and switch it to screen, do the same thing with the Pin stylus, switch it to screen, and then save. That's it, then we can simply close out of this in A. It should now recognize our tablet. Now, there is a particular hiccup when it comes to working with the tablet by default. It's not a serious issue, it's a quick fix. Now, for example, right now, I'm using the tablet. If I go ahead and grab the eraser tool, I'm going to touch the track pad on my computer here. And you see it switches automatically to the brush tool, the paint brush tool. And that is because let's go up to edit and go down to preferences on Windows or Linux. And if you're on MacOS, remember, you can always go to the name GIP and you'll find preferences in there. Okay. Now, just a quick troubleshoot. You'll see here I'm clicking, but it's not selecting anything. And that is a weird glitch I've noticed, but if you were to click on the working space, the image area of GIP and then click back on the preferences, it will recognize it. If ever you run into this issue. It's not so common, but it can happen at times. So we want to go down to input devices. And over here at the top here, we have extended input devices, share tool and tool options between input devices. If we check this checkbox here, we no longer will have this issue where the track pad recognizes 12 and the graphic tablet recognizes a different tool. Now they are all going to use the same tool and tool options, you might have to close out of gimp and open up again now that you've toted it to recognize the graphic tablet. So let's go ahead and do that just in case. Hey. So as we're working with the tablet, sometimes we don't always want to go on the slider to change the brush size. A quicker way of doing this is to use the open and closed brackets on your keyboard. And if you hold down shift and use the open or closed brackets, it will accelerate the speed at which the brush size changes. All right. That's about it. Let's get right back into it. All right. Next, when it comes to the brush settings. Now, under the usual brush settings, we have dynamics. Right now, we have the dynamics set to off. We click on this button here, this thumb nail, you could say. We'll get this drop down. Same options. You can zoom in Zoom out. You can search the dynamics by name. You can go from List view to grid view, and you can even open the dynamics menu. All right. I'll stick to the list since we get the names with the list. You can zoom out here to see the entirety of the names, or we can click on the dynamics menu here, and we now have our dynamics as a menu. Although not very necessary to go into this whole menu. So I'll go back to our tool options here. And in this menu, you can choose which everyone works with what you're trying to do. Let's say, for example, pressure size. I start drawing, Se now it recognizes the pin pressure. If I pass it lightly, we get thinner lines, and if I press harder, we get thicker lines. Right? Let me go ahead and clear this page. Make a new layer to work on. So I just call this layer one. All right. That's essentially it. You can simply change the dynamics here. You also have perspective, We have pin generic. They can test these out, see what they do, which settings work best for what you want to do. Of course, we have the option to edit the dynamics. But in reality, what you'll be doing is create new dynamics to add to this menu with custom settings, essentially. Have basic simple. So it's a combination of different settings. Opacity by pin pressure would be one of them. We have basic dynamics, which includes pressure for opacity, speed, for the size. If I do quick strokes, you can see it tapers at the end. And then we have smooth strokes. Now, this also applies for a mouse or track pad. Whereas the dynamics, well, if you don't have a tablet, there's not much pressure to be detected. And over here, this will work with track pad or mouse. Smooth stroke, let's clear out of this verse. You have the quality. So how smooth are your strokes, let me go ahead and choose a different dynamic or simply turn them off. I'll simply go with pressure size. With the smooth strokes, you can see we're getting smooer strokes. And the weight is how much is the stroke going to drag behind the cursor. So you can see here the stroke is dragging behind the cursor. And it's not lacking. This is to help you make smoother strokes, right? Now, of course, you don't ever want to push the weight too high as you get an amazing lag unless you're working with a very big canvas. In which case, let's go ahead and clear this again. So essentially, these are some of the very basic settings that you would work with with a graphic tablet. You would simply choose the dynamics you want to work with and choose the quality of the smoothness and the weight of it. Now, of course, this would be best for your final work. Since I you're simply sketching, best not to have it on that way you can get your quick strokes in, et cetera. There's also the issue of if the weight is too high, trying to fill this in, but because of the drag behind the mouse, it's not following the movements that I'm doing. So the drag behind the cursor, sorry. So you might want to lower the weight that way you can actually fill this in without having to wait for the cursor to catch up with your movements. So adjust these accordingly to the size of your canvas and how zoomed in or zoomed out you are. We zoom in here and push the weight all the way up. You can see we're still able to draw. There's not that much of a lag because there's not that much a travel space, if you will, or travel distance. So do this last stroke. So it's very relative to the size of your vis or how zoomed in you are. So it's the travel distance, if you will, D these two, and the quality, of course, is just for the quality. You also have other settings up here, such as the aspect ratio, the angle, the spacing, hardness, and force. Now, hardness, if I lower it, you can see here we're getting a not so define set of strokes. Push it all the way back up, and the strokes are harder. You can reset this to the default of the brush simply by hitting this little twist button here. Reset hardness to brush native hardness. We also have these chain links here, which we'll get into in just a moment. Now, for the force, you can see if the force is the zero, and I'm drawing, nothing's happening. Push the force all the way up, you might notice these strokes are a little bit more noisy, if you will, than these right here with the 50% force two sets. Now a lot of these settings also depend on which brush you're using, whichever is your active brush will give you different defaults for these. For example, if we grab this soft brush over here, we can see the hardness drops, and even if we hit reset, it stays to 50 because that is the hardness of this brush. All right. Next, these chain links here. For example, the size, if I go ahead and check this chain and I switch brush, so let's go for this over here. You can see the size of the brush changes. That's essentially what's controlling. It is saying to link the size to the brush. Link to brush default. But when you uncheck it, No matter the brush you grab, it will stay on the size that you set yourself manually. The same goes for all of these other settings. I prefer to leave these other ones check, except for the size, because the size is usually the one I do not want to have be affected unless you are working with specific angles and aspect ratio. So if we change the aspect ratio, you can see here, it is no longer doing a circle, but rather a flat line. These are a couple of settings that you can modify for yourself. The spacing. We saw the spacing and what the spacing meant when we were working with the hell tool. And if you remember, let's reset all of these. If we increase the spacing, there will be a gap between each instance of the brush stroke. Lower the spacing, and that gap disappears. The default of tin works just fine for most cases. Essentially, that's about it. There's not too much that you might want to do at this point. Of course, as I mentioned, you can create new dynamics. If I go down to this option here, create a new dynamic. If you press it, you get this menu here, you can name your dynamic however you want. And then you can choose which factors affect what parameter or rather which parameter affects which factor. Basically, opacity, size, angle color, et cetera. Is it controlled by the pressure, the velocity, the direction, tilt, et cetera. So you can create your own custom custom presets. The thing is, we cannot actually edit the dynamics that are already there, only the ones that we create ourselves. So if I double click on this, we switch over to it, we can call this Her one, so I'll call this test. Now, you choose which aspects of the graphic tablet affect which aspects of the paint brush. Let's say the pressure affects the opacity and affects the size. Then you would switch the mapping matrix over to, for example, opacity, and you choose how does it affect the opacity. You can create curves for it. You can see here, as you change these values, it's going to change how the brush behaves. Same thing with the size. Let's say we said the size works like this. Could invert it. No pressure gives us a bigger size. And lots of pressure gives us a smaller size. When I'm pressing harder, I get thinner lines, and when I'm not pressing hard, I get thicker lines. So you can experiment with these and see how it functions as there's no right or wrong, what works for what you're doing. That's really it when it comes to the graphic tablet working inside of give. Choose your dynamic, choose your parameters, choose if you want it to change every time that you change every time you change the brush, the paint brush, and do you want smooth strokes, or are you simply sketching and that's what you're working with? All right. That is it for this lesson. Now, we've learned just enough about GIMP for us to start with our actual project. In the next lesson, we will be diving into our official projects for the course. See you there. 37. Project - GIMP Essentials: Hi. We finally reached the project for this class. Now, inside of the exercise folder, you'll find a project folder. In there you'll see a mushroom picture, and that is the one that I worked on going from this image over here to this image over here. We have the before and we have the after. I've also included the GIP project file that I use, so you can always try and reverse engineer that if you want to or just look at the blend modes that I'm using, et cetera. I've also included a word document giving you a breakdown of how I created this result. Now, I encourage you to find your own image or images and to make the result that you want. You also notice that we don't use all the tools and techniques that we went over throughout this course. That is because you don't always need to use all the tools and techniques to get the best results. Tink about kiss. Kiss stands for. Keep it simple, silly. Keep it simple, silly. And really this applies for a lot of things and especially editing. You only want to keep in mind the result that you are trying to get or the mood or feel that you're going for. And that should be your compass when working on your projects. No which tools, which fancy, new features, can I go ahead and try out? Of course, feel free to experiment. And really just have fun with it. Now, by the end, I do encourage you to share your results with the class. And if you have any questions or doubt, go ahead and leave them below and I'll make sure to get back to you with answers as soon as I can. All right. So that's it and happy editing. 38. Closing Thoughts - GIMP Essentials: Hey, you made it. This is the final video. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did and that you feel confident using gift now, that you really understand that it's not that hard, and you had it in you all along. All right. So I do encourage you to share the results that you got for the final project with the class. If you liked it or so I mean, feel free to give a review. You know, Let me know what was the good, the bad, the ugly. And if you have any questions or doubts, go ahead and lay them out for me. I will get back to you as soon as I can with answers. And really, that's about it. It this was fun. This was fun. All right. Well, see you next time, take care of yourself. Chow.