Transcripts
1. Learn GIMP: Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. And accordingly, give is an imaging software which can be used to work with photos, make illustrations, and even do professional design work. Sadly, GIMP has long been given a questionable reputation when put next to the spotlight of expensive industry standard design softwares. But the truth is that Gim can give us just as much horsepower for most of the common jobs at graphic designers space in today's world. And being a free software that works on almost any operating system, there's really little excuse not to add it to your design arsenal. Whether you'd be a hobbyist and professional designer or even an illustrator, GIMP has what it takes to get the job done. Unfortunately, such as with any dynamic software, learning can be a frustrating uphill struggle. Gip is packed with so many creative tools, scripts, and plug-ins. Beginner might feel daunted to advance their skills. But not to worry, because I've taken care of all that with my instructional video course. Learn. In this course, I'll take you through all of the essential tools, menus, and plug-ins to get you started in your choice of photo manipulation, graphic design, illustration, or maybe even just having fun playing with images or making art. This course includes live demonstration of all practical tools and techniques and includes expert tips which will save you years of trial and error heading. So go ahead and sign up. Now, I look forward to seeing you in class.
2. Introduction: Hello, this is Brendan, and I'd like to welcome you to my drawing course where we will learn the GIMP. And in this course, we will be covering all of the tools and everything that you see here. And again, so that by the time you're done, instead of looking at this and saying, Wow, what are all of these fancy buttons and menus and things, you'll say, Oh, I know exactly what to do with that stuff. And you won't feel so confused and overwhelmed anymore. Even if you already know how to use a few tools in here this lesson, there'll be good for you because we're going to cover a lot of the details and advanced things such as scripts and all of these things that you can see in here. And if you happen to be a programmer will even go so far as to teach you how to make your own scripts and make your own menus up here. So that'll be really cool. One thing I want to get into briefly is who I am and who am I. And that's just too to help you to feel some confidence while you're listening to me that it's not just a madman screaming into the microphone. I actually do know the GIMP very well, have been using it for many years and pretty much learned it the hard way, which is just going through it step-by-step and learning how to use one tool at a time. But that served its purpose for where I am today and got me to where I am. However, they didn't have videos like this back when I started. So for you, luckily, you can skip a lot of the the trial and error that I had to go through. I'll just show you briefly some of these are some illustrations I've done using again, It's not to say that you'll illustrate like this from this lesson, but just to give you an idea that the gap is a very professional software. And I want to bring up the question of a lot of people who seem to look down upon the gap in comparison to something like Photoshop or Illustrator. And there are good reasons to compare these different softwares. They do have differences to them. However, it's not to look down upon the GIMP is that some softwares might be more suitable for certain jobs than other ones. So for example, if I have a screw that I need to take out of a piece of wood, then I would use a screwdriver. And if I want to put a nail into the wood, then I would use a hammer. You use the right tool for the right job. But that's not to say that GIMP is an inferior tool. It is not inferior tool. It's a very good tool that you can do a lot of different things with. Whether it be your goal be illustration, or your goal be to make logos or to be a designer that will get you there. It's a very good tool and it's free. So the best thing to do, of course, would be to use the GIMP first for as long as you can, until the day comes that you realize that you do need photoshop or you just want Photoshop because it's very expensive. So why not start off with again? And then we'll figure out how to use that later. Okay? So that's that in a nutshell. And what we'll do in this course, as I've already briefly mentioned, we're going to go through everything. We're going to go through all of these tools over here. We're going to configure this environment so it looks better right now we have these three window model here, which maybe you like that, maybe you don't. And there's different reasons that different people can appreciate different environments. But you'll be able to make that decision yourself when we're done here because I'm going to tell you how to configure everything here so it'll be comfortable for you. Bring out the tools that you need. And we're going to understand all of these menus up here. What's gone in? What's going on in here one by one, I'll show you how to use all the tools and you might even find some new tips and tricks that you didn't know. You didn't even think of before, because this will give you some inspiration when you realize all this stuff you can do in here. With images. We're going to cover photos and an illustration drawing from your imagination and all of that stuff. So, and if you're interested in illustration, do check out. My other course is called from drawing to illustration by main brand and Schumacher. You can find that in there. And that's it for this one. Welcome you to this course again, and let's get started in the next video.
3. Download and Installation: Okay, And so the first thing we have to do in order to use the GIMP obviously, is to install the correct version of it. And the best way to do that is to go to their official website, which is Gimp.org, and that's GIMP DOT ORG. And you should see a website that looks like this depending on the time that you got at the time of this video, this is what it looks like. And as you can see, you have a nice handy download button right here. I happen to be using the Linux operating system right now. So if I click on this, I'm going to get the download notes here for different types of Linux installations. So if you happen to be using Linux 2, you'll get this same, the same screen here because website actually detects your operating system and gives you, automatically gives you the correct instructions for download according to your operating system. So viewer in Windows and you click the download button here, then it would send you to the page where you'll get instructions to download the Windows installer. I believe it's MSI file, which would be the self and installer, and I'd recommend that it's pretty good. It does the trick. And same for Macintosh. If you happen to be using an Apple computer, then that's what you would do. Now, you are going to need probably a laptop at minimum or a desktop to run this software. And if you're trying to do some really intensive work such as very large files for production, posters and things like that. Then you should have a lot of memory in your computer and have a pretty good GPU and CPU. Probably GPU is more important in this case, but memory will definitely be the most important one. So have a minimum of four gigabytes of memory. I'd say if you're doing big production, however, if you're just playing around with again, you want to have some fun and make some funny photoshop style images, as they say are now we're going to say if you want to GIMP, if you want to give some images to show your friends than two gigabytes of memory, which is standard, would probably be just enough. And whoops, went the wrong way. So yeah, so two gigabytes would be good and just started this page and follow the download instructions. Now if you're having problems after installation, one thing you might want to know is that there were significant changes from Gimp 2.6 up to 2.7. And you can read those notes here. Because of some of these changes. If you're using an older operating system, you might be better off to install Gimp 2.6. It even says that here on this page, GIMP, Gimp 2.7, which is old now, is in no way a final product. A lot of new features are incomplete and some things may even be completely broken. Well, that was actually old news, so you don't have to worry about that now we are now in fact up to 2.8, it should be stable. I've been using it for a long time, quite a few years now, I think I think Kim to point has been out for more than two years. So yeah, Gim to 0.8 is what you want. But what happens is the reason I'm talking about this. If you're operating system is little older and for some reason that GIMP doesn't seem to be working right. Then try and find Gimp 2.6, which you can find on this website some somewhere they'll have maybe to click on Downloads. Here. They'll have older yeah, release notes. And here you have on this page somewhere in here you can find older release notes. This is most people won't have this problem, so I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but you can Google it or, you know, use your favorite search engine and you will find it in there. What happened after 2.6, a lot of significant changes were made to improve the system. They have new text features. The single window mode, which I like a lot. Maybe new types of brushes and things like this. It was just a basically it was a major redo of the system in many ways. So yeah, that's just something to keep in mind. If you're not if you're not having any problems with your installation, everything's working fine, then I would recommend to just go ahead and get the default download, which is 2.8. I just want to make that note in case you do have any problems. And of course, it is important to have a proper computer. I don't think you can use the GIMP very well on a tablet right now unless it's super tablet computer, something like an iPad or a mobile device like that. I do think you're going to need a computer or laptop to run it. And other than that, that's it. Just go ahead download it and install it. Similarly, do any other software and it should work if your system is all up to date. We have a fairly recent computer. Okay, let's move on to the next lesson.
4. Setup Your Environment: Let's take a look into configuring the interface in GIMP, which will enable us to work in a much more comfortable environment. So the first problem that I have with this, and this is my personal feeling is this three window mode where you have these docs, I believe they call them dialogues and docs, as you can see up in the Windows tab here, it says Recently Closed docs and Dr. Bull dialogues. So for example, if I were to open up a dialogue like this or that one's already open. Let's get one that's not open. Dialogue, such as Undo History, okay, that opens up over here. This is, these are your dialogues and then the docs where we don't have any open apparently right now, there would be like if I were to close this one, layers brushes, I can close that. And then if I go back to recently closed docs, There you go. It has that. So, so these things here called docs and you can open up multiple of these. I suppose it's something I don't want to do, so I won't go into detail about that and I don't think anybody does really. You can pull some things out such as this here. I can pull out the brushes. And now I get a new doc here. And I can play with this and move it around. So I mean, that's maybe you do want to do that and I'm not here just to teach everyone had to be like me. So that's one little tip right there. If you do like this type of interface, then that's something you can do. However, I guess I can imagine some people. This could be useful if you want to put this down here. And you can have your drawing space up here. That's what this is. The center area here is drawing space. And excuse me, I have some things running in the background there. So let me move this one down a little. Yeah, maybe you want that one there. And he could choose to have another one over here. Right? So yeah. Well, not like that. This is a problem with my operating system, not the software. Okay? So and then you can just set up things however you want and have a little drawing space over here. And this might be good, especially if you have a very, very big screen, but I find it to be cumbersome. I don't like having all these things. I like to simplify things. So anyway, that's a tip for you. If you do like that, That's how you can do that. You can just pull these and move them out. Or you can go up into the menu and go into Windows. And you can play around with these here. I'll probably cover more of this later. And this will help you to bring up all of the dialogues and docks and different things that you want. But I don't want that. So and this will happen sometimes where you accidentally just from moving around so much pool one of these out. And I've been in this situation before where this thing comes out and I'm like, What now, how do I put that back? And instead of wasting half a day trying to figure that out, lucky you're here taking this lesson, all you have to do is slide it back like that. But not with this top bar around here. It's this little tab you see here, right? So I'm gonna grab that tab that has the word that label on it and the icon and pull that back where I want it to, and that'll slide it right back into place. This happens to me all the time when I'm playing with the tools over here to this day and sometimes I accidentally just rip it out like that because I'm using a tablet and a stylus moving very quickly, so frequently, just pulled this out and I say, I've got, but if you just remember to grab it by the tab and slide it back into place there. Well, that's a useful tip. Maybe you do want to bring that out sometimes too. So the first thing I wanna do here is get out of this mode with all these windows and looking at my desktop, it's distracting. What have you have multiple windows open like your web browser and maybe a chat room or Skype or whatever. And looking at all that stuff in the background is also a little distracting. So I do is go into Windows and go to Single Window mode. And that'll make everything one big window here so that I am no longer distracted by all that. And I can resize things here by placing my mouse right in the middle between these tools and the drawable screen area. This is like our desktop, our workspace here, actually workspace would be the best word. And I can resize this however I want to, so I still have flexibility and do the same thing over here. I can resize it. I so flexibility and lots of flexibility. Like I can pull it over here if I want to see all these brushes over here, different types of brushes you can use. I want to see all of those at once. Then I'll just slide this out. If I don't want to see it, I'll slide it out of the way. So I've more workspace. Having more workspaces usually the preferred option, I think for most people because after all, what you're doing is working right? So that's one tip to configure the interface actually, that's a few tips. You want to get familiar with your windows and the workspace here, how to configure these docs and dialogues. And then another thing to do before you start drawing if you just installed the GIMP, is to hit the edit button and go down to Preferences. Preferences. There is a lot of stuff to do, but we don't want to have to read through all this stuff. Let's just get into this stuff that's really important. The environment number 1, Here's the minimum, minimum number of undue levels. Let me show you very quickly. I'll demonstrate very quickly what that can mean. If I have a brush here and I make a stroke with, I'm just using my mouse now, so it's not going to look real pretty. I'll go 1231234567. So I did seven things. Now, I made a mistake. So I want to undo these. So hold Control key and tap Z, just like any other software, and I'll undo, or you can use the menu up here and say Edit, Undo, right? So let me undo more and more. And there it is, right, so I can undo things. However, what if I did 15, 16, 17? I just kept doing this over and over again. There's going to be a point where it doesn't allow me to undo anymore. Let me see if I can undo all of these in this. Okay? But let's just imagine, for argument's sake that you have a 100 things or 200 things you've done. And you want to go back very far. It will happen sometimes. What happens is it runs out of memory. It stops saving all of your undoes and it runs out of memory to save them because you don't have it configured in here. Right now I have 64 megabytes of memory, which means I can do a lot. However, what if you're using a very large photo and you did a very extensive process, I, you change the color of every pixel or negro bunch of things on it. And it was only two steps. But you realize that there's no more memory to go back to steps because it took that much memory to do that every time you undo something that it needs memory. So what I'm gonna do, I have four, I've actually eight gigabytes of space of RAM. So I'm going to dedicate four gigabytes, which is rarely used anyway by any other software. I'm going to put four gigabytes into that. I'm going do the same thing here. With tile cache size. I'm going to put in four gigabytes and maximum new image size. Also four gigabytes would probably be enough. More than enough. Rarely do you have an image that goes beyond one gigabyte even. So, this is going to cover all of your situations and for maximum number of undue levels. I mean, I just want it to be very high so I never have to worry about it. So I'll just put that up very high. And that's one thing. These other things, size of thumbnail, the file size for thumbnailing, that has to do with your computer's operating system making thumbnails. I don't find it to be very important, so I'll just leave it there. Keep record of used files and the recent document list. Of course, yes, I always want to save everything. So assuming you have enough memory, I'll go ahead and set these numbers as high as you can. Don't use all of your RAM, all of your memory, but use at least half of it. So if you have four gigabytes of RAM on your computer, then I will dedicate to. And that way you can undo as many times as you want and you'll have plenty of, plenty of space to work with. So you can make very large files. So that's like that. And then the interface we have a lot of things to cover in here, such as keyboard shortcuts, which we'll go into the theme you can change, you can use small. As you can see right there changes all of the icons to small if you prefer that or you can make it bigger. That's just your preference. And then Tool Options. This one tool options is, I'm not going to cover right now, not very important. You can live without IT. Toolbox might be important. There is a lot of tools here. All of these tools are going to show over in the left-hand side. If you're new to, you might not want to take away any of these because you want to experiment with as much as you can and learn as much as you can about how everything works. But for me, I know there's a lot of things here that I'm not going to need. So what I'll do is just click this little I eyeball there. They have little I. And that means it's going to hide it when the eye is not showing. So you can see as I click this, they start to disappear from the menu over there. That's good for me because Let's things that I have to dig through every time I'm looking for something. That means there'll be a lot faster when I'm working. I don't use blur, I don't use smudge. These are all good tools. Maybe you'll like to use them, but I'm not going to cover them. And there's a reason for that in this course because I don't really, I don't like the way that they work, but feel free to play with them. I'm going to cover a lot of stuff that'll help you get the basics. But there's some things that I just feel like I don't need. Scissors is unnecessary for me. So I'm just making my own personal adjustments here. And as you can see, I'm narrowing it down to a very small little list of things that I like to use a lot. And so that makes this, that makes life a lot easier for me. You can customize yours wherever you like. And that's pretty much hit one more. Maybe I shouldn't have close that. Yeah. Sorry, Omar, quick glance here. Another thing you wanna do, something I like to do you don't have to do, is every time that I close the gap, I'd like it to save the settings that I've said. Use case. For example, here save keyboard shortcuts on EXXAT. I like to have that check. So if I do change a keyboard exits that will, it'll save every time I change them. Tool Options, Save tool options on. So all those changes I just made if I didn't check this right now, next time I turned on the GIMP, it would be back to the default. So this is important if you do change your toolbox options here, save that. And it will also remember which colors you are using and which brushy reusing. So when he started the GIMP, it'll basically start you right back where you left off. If you're working on something for a long time, that's very useful. All of those things I just covered right there for me have been very, very Important. I could even say essential. Since I've been working with again for almost 10 years now. Every time I start a new image, I don't like to have to set the width and the height of it again, to have a really good workspace which will cover most of your at almost any kind of situation you're working on, you want to get up to over 2000 pixels. So I would give a bare minimum of 2000 pixels. However, be careful if you don't have a very fast or very strong computer, don't set this to high because it might actually cause the gimp to crash when you start it, or it'll just be very, very slow, probably won't crash. It will be just very, very slow because you need a lot of memory to work on very big images. Small images are no problem. But for big images like this to 1000 pixels by, I'll do one hundred and five hundred. That's going to be, it's going to start to slow down the memory if you only have two gigabytes. Now what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to put 4 thousand by 2 thousand. That's my preferred work size. So every time I start a new image, I'll get this nice big canvas to work on. And I set the resolution to 300 because I do professional work which will eventually be printed. So that's 300 pixels per inch. As it says here. Pixels per inch or DPI, I believe would be dots per inch and printing. So I'll set that up to a nice high if you're going for a super professional and you have the best equipment, you might even want to go 600 with it. Some people do recommend that I think 300 is more than good enough with most printers. And that's that. There's more settings here which currently don't affect me too much. You can look at them if you want to. But those ones I just showed you are probably essential and bare minimum. Whenever I see saves something on EXXAT, I always check yes, for input devices will do that. This will become more important later if you're using a tablet. I'll cover that later. And that's about it. I just want from head to toe if all the stuff that I think are important and the preferences here. And of course, we also included how to set up your environment here going into single window mode. This Windows menu here has all the other stuff you might be interested in. And you can have your toolbox here, and that's about it. So I hope that covers everything that you're curious about or could have been curious about how book on regarding the setting up your workspace and we have any questions with that, please do send me a message and let me know. Otherwise, we'll move on to the next lesson. And that's it for now.
5. Keyboard Shortcuts: Hello. In this lesson of learn GIMP, we will cover the keyboard shortcuts and how to configure them and set them up. And also of course what they are. I'm using a tablet now to demonstrate this is a drawing tablet so I can draw different things. And let's just imagine for a minute that I was going to draw something like an I. And if you want to learn how to draw better, you can take my, my other course from drawing to illustration. And here I have a little, I will put some eyelashes on it. But suddenly I realize I want to use the eraser tool, so I'll go back, use the eraser, some of this part here, and then I need the drawing tool again. So I'll go back here to the pool. And I hit that and I say, No, that's not right because we're making art, right? This has to be perfect. So I'll come back here then back, back to the brush. And I think you can start to notice something. This is getting to be a lot of work. I have to keep going back and forth and back and forth. How can I improve upon this? And of course, how could I continue to draw when it's really annoying like that? What I want to do is to be able to hit a hotkey. So I can just hit on things, tap a key on the keyboard and switch from Twitter tool. So in order to do that, what we need to do is go into the keyboard. Shortcuts, which is in under Edit, right, where we have preferences. You can go down to more under that and you see keyboard shortcuts. So if you hit that, and right here, you'll see we have lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts, even these that are displayed by default, you can drop them down and expose even more. So there might be hundreds of different shortcuts. However, to find the one that we're looking for, this search tool I've come to find works very good. So what I'm looking for is the eraser, first of all, eraser. Okay. And without even finishing the word there, you can see it has, well, there's Undo Eraser here and there's an eraser here. What I want is eraser. So when I tap on eraser, when I select that with a mouse or the pen, you can see here it says new accelerator. So I'm going to click on new accelerator. Or while it's saying new accelerator, I'm going to tap the key that I want to use. And for now I'm going to use, let's say for example, the, the G key or no, we'll do the F, the F key. And it says f is already taken, it's being used by, something else is being used by free select. Well, we don't really know what the other key keys are that are being set by default by gamma n. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to say I don't care about that. I'm going to assign my shortcuts how I want them. And we're going to say yes and reassign shortcut, just hit that. So now that that's set, let me go back here. And every time I hit the F key there I can erase. But now I still have to go all the way back to hit the pen. I can hit F and erase very quickly, but I have to go back, hit the pen. And notice I won't go back. Here. I am drawing, drawing and I'll just tap F. And suddenly I can erase without having to go back there. So, but now, you know, I still have to do that for the pen. So let's go back one at a time. And we'll go again to edit and then hit Keyboard Shortcuts. And now it's not the pen actually, it's the brush I was using. So I'm going to say brush. And let's see what we have in here. There's a lot of different configurations are shortcuts we can do for the brush. Actually, this one is called paintbrush with a full word, paintbrush, if I recall correctly, that'll save us some time. Paintbrush. There it is. And right now I can see they have paintbrush. It's already set to p. So if you like what it's set at, then that's fine. But I go back and forth from paintbrush to the eraser a lot when I'm drawing. So I'm gonna do is change that p and two a d. And it's going to ask me if I'm sure I want to reassign it because it's being used. I'll say again, yes, reassign shortcut. Okay, and because the D is right next to the f, Now I can do this. I'll go into our type D and notice I don't have to go all the way back over there, D and F. And D and F. And so I can flip back and forth very quickly from drawing to erasing. Now I can go in and start fine-tuning my eyeball. Actually, I, the way I just instructed you to do that using d and f is a, that that would be good for a right-handed person. I happen to be left-handed. And so this is more difficult for me right now. But yeah, that's, that's just the intro, the very beginning of how to set up your shortcuts there. And if you can use your imagination, you can see how it can get a lot easier. If you, excuse me, I started getting obsessed with Zhuangzi this eye a little bit better. But yeah, you can see how that can become very useful very quickly. Because you don't want to have to go all the way back over to that toolbox when you're doing a lot of work. And this is true not only for this type of hand drawing, if you're drawing with a tablet that freehand drawing. But also it's true if you're doing any kind of work, sometimes you just want to be able to flip between different tools because there's so many of them. And whichever ones you use the most you can set them to your, to your hotkeys. So just remember, go up to the Edit menu, keyboard shortcuts. And whenever you start to feel frustrated that you have to keep on going all the way back here to switch tools. Just remember that this menu is there for you, just for that problem. So you don't have to feel frustrated by the interface here. You can set your own custom tools where you want them on the keyboard. And I will make life a lot easier for you. So I hope that's useful for you and we'll move on to the next lesson.
6. Getting Started: Hello, this is Brendan, and we're gonna do this lesson about opening up a file. There's actually as simple as it may sound and just open a file. There's various ways to do it and do it correctly. So I'll start off by opening a regular file. I'm going to do just have a blank canvas. And so to do that, we're gonna do a new, we're going to go to the File menu. And the very first option there, you can also do, as it says here, Control N. And that'll give us a brand new image to work on. And so we have templates here which you can choose for the sizes. If you want to give you all different printable sizes with 300 pixels per inch, which is good for printing and stuff like that. Or you can just custom set the width and the height of the image that you want. Now if you watched the previous lesson where I did all of my default settings, I actually pre-configured this. So every time I open it, I'll get a nice big landscape of 4000 by 2000 pixels. And you can switch that here in the menu if you want to make it 2000 by 4 thousand, just click the icons here. And in the advanced options underneath that, you can set the resolution and some other detailed things which aren't that important. You have a choice between RGB or grayscale. So it's grayscale, you're only going to be able to work in black and white and your default background color for this time, I'll just do make it white. That usually stays the same and not very, not very important. Unless you're using the GIMP every single day, in which case some of this will be actually important and you should take time to look at it. But for our purposes now just starting up a new image that's good enough. And there we go. Now, what I wanted to point out, what's most important here is that this is a layer and it's our base canvas, right? It's the very beginning of making a new image. And what happens is on this new image, I can just go in here if you're using a tablet and start drawing, whoops, I had to set reset my soul, my shortcuts. So, yeah, and I can start drawing on the canvas here. I'll choose a black color, sorry, drawn right on it, or I can add some texts or whatever it is that I want to do, something like that. And it's all going to go on this layer over here. Now I'm not covering layers in there, so I'm just is setting up the stage here that what we've done is we've opened up a new image. And by default what that does is it does open up a layer over here, which is important to note. I can hide that layer and you'll see it'll make the drawing go away. And when I added new text, that also added another layer and I'm going to hide that one, right? So I hide everything. Here is an image with nothing. It's completely blank. And so I don't even, I'm not a 100 percent sure what we would call this this checker box that we have back here. But I guess you could call it the like a blank canvas. Because what happened when I set up a new image file, new. And it gave us this dialogue, I specifically told it to give me a white background and it automatically gives you one layer. But I can delete all of these layers. And now I have absolutely nothing. So now with nothing here, let me try to go back to the pen tool and I'll try and draw something. And as you can see, nothing is happening because I have nothing to draw on. So it's important to understand that by default, when you make a new image, it also makes a new layer. Now I make a new layer. It still looks the same because this layer is blank. I didn't tell it to make it white. And let's see if I can draw. There we go. Now I can draw something in there and it's doing something. If I want to make a white background, I'll have to fill that entire layer. And then I can go back to my paint tool and start drawing black on top of white. So when you make a new image, it's a little bit more complicated than just bringing out a piece of paper. And excuse me, there's no reason for those circles. I'm just drawing random things. It's a little bit more complicated than just bringing out a piece of paper. We should understand that a new layer was made by default. That's number one. And that we can add more layers. And later on we're going to add more layers for very good reason. And I'll get on that in the next lesson. And also to, to realize the size of the canvas that you're working on. Because if you start off with a very small canvas, let's say something like only a 100 pixels. Well, let's even have a look. What would happen if I only did a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels. First of all, that's very small, right? So that's the actual size, how big it is. Let me zoom in and start drawing. Look at what happens here. See how we're zoomed in so close that you can actually see the pixels. And that brush size is not even a little bit. Let me make it a little bit smaller. Make it a normal size would be like that, like 89 pixels. That's a very, very fine line, but even still. You can see the dots and the pixels of it. So this image would be way too small if you wanted to do some kind of complicated illustration because there's just not enough pixel space. But here, I can draw very, very fine lines. This is the exact same pen size. Whoops. Excuse me. Okay. Yes. I mean, to hit that this is the exact same pen size that I was using. The paint brush. This right here is the exact same size brushes I'm using over here. But look at the difference now I can make nice fine lines. So if you make your Canvas too small, then it's not going to be good. Rule of thumb, I would say the bigger the better normally, but we can't say that because you don't want to use up all of your memory. So like I said in the previous lesson, just make it about 2000 or 4000 pixels wide. If your computer is of average standard strength with a good CPU and then four gigabytes of memory, at least, then you should be able to do some good drawing. And this is true for all types of if you're doing logo design or illustration or playing with photos. So that's that every time I close now, but I do want to save. This is also a part of this lesson is very important. When I go to Save. Is this going to be the image that I'm going to share with my friends. Actually know, saving as the name is untitled here and I'm just going to call this, call it a test, right? So it's saving as a dot exe file and I cannot change that when I'm going to save, just regular Save. When you save this, it's going to save as a gimp document and the extension is x C, F, as you can see here. So it's always good to save one of those, that's fine. So now I have this image save that means I can close the gap and reopen it and all of the information and all of the layers will still be there. But I cannot share GIMP file with my friends if they don't have the GIMP 2 or if I want to share online or send it to a printer. So in order to save it as a common file, which you would know to be a JPEG file or a GIF, or GIF or a PNG. Now we have to go to not save as, but actually go to export the image. So to do that, you can either say export, which is right here, where you can do Control Shift E If you want to export it as something new. And now you can see by default it gives me the PNG extension. And if you don't know PNG, It's basically similar to a JPEG is just a smaller file format which you can share with people. So I could choose to save that there and click the Export button. And that'll give me an image which I can share with people. So let's keep that in mind. Every time you save, you're either going to save it as a gimp file, which is the default save, or you're going to export it into a file which you can share with your friends or sent to a printer or something like that. Okay, so that's important to understand for the next and last part, I will just going to very quickly try opening an existing file. And in this case, we'll do a photo, which I have in my webcam area here is actually a photo of me looking kinda funny. So there's me and the photo. And one thing that you'll notice when you open a photo, this photo, let me see what the skill images, the sizes. It's not going to give you your default size that you had set. It's going to be whatever size the actual image was. So this one, as you can see here, it's one hundred and nine hundred and twenty pixels by 1080. That's actually my desktop size. So it's 1920 by 1080 and the resolution is set to 72 dots per inch. That's good to know when you're opening a photo that you know what size is. It doesn't always say sorry here and you can let me get my mouse wheel. You can zoom in, zoom out, and move around like that. And I'll show you that in the next lesson. I just wanted to see if you're going to open a photo. It's very simple, just going in here. And you can also use this to open existing existing images, such as maybe you had a drawing that somebody else did you found online and you want to open it and I don't know, change the size of it or something. So you can do that in here. That's the just open. It's the third option in the File menu. All right, but now, what if I wanted to open a second image to work with this one? Let me see, let me open another one. Here's another weird picture of me with weird face. But notice now over here, and this is one image over here. And this is a separate one and we have tabs on the top. So the more photos I open, it's just like a web browser. We start to get tabs that we can move back and forth with. Now to move back and forth between these tabs without having to use the mouse, you can hold down the Control key and do page down or page up, and it'll help you to slide back and forth. These hotkeys come in very useful if you're working a lot with the width again. So what if I wanted to somehow play with these two images and merge them? I could copy this here and hit, I'm going to hit Control Copy just like you would with any other software. Move back to this image and do Control Paste. There we go as a separate layer. It's moved on top of this image. So I'm going to have, I'm going to right-click on this layer and say, make a new layer because there's many things you can do after you copy and paste it. So now I have this as a second layer. I can move it around and you will see there we have both images inside the same workspace, right? That's, that's what we're trying to achieve. So basically, the reason I'm going through all this stuff, I want to cover all of the different scenarios that might happen when you're trying to work with images. You might have to open a new image to just draw from scratch. Or you might be opening multiple images and you'll say, Hey, wait, my plan was to, you know, Gimp these together as opposed to Photoshopping used together. I want to get these together and merge them or, you know how to make his face on top of his face do something funny. Well, this is how you do it. You can open both of them and then copy and paste this one over, or this is also in the file menu. I'm going to delete that one I copied over. I'm going to close this and I'm going to close this. So now I only have this image. I can directly go to file open as layers. And now I'm going to open that second image right here, and it will automatically open right on top of this one. So what we have is we're working within one GIMP workspace here, but we have two images as layers basically. And that's important to understand again, every time you open a new image or start a new image, or every time you open an existing photo or any type of image file, it automatically imports as a layer. And there's layers over here. So I can hide over here by hitting the eyeball button, I can hide that top layer or I can hide the bottom layer, right? So you see we have two separate layers to work with. And I can go to the bottom one. I can move it up top, right. And we're going to cover more of that. And I believe very soon the next lesson. But I just wanted to get an idea right there to review very quickly. Basically what we're doing is we're reviewing this whole, the very first many, how to make a new image and create. This is this we're not doing right now. That's something else. How to open an image and existing image and how to add, how to open another image into the same workspace. So you don't have to have multiple tabs going on if you don't want to. And then remember that saving and exporting, which is down here, are completely different. Save only allows you to save this workspace that you're working in so that you can open again in the GIMP. But if you want to start to share the file that you're working on and basically finished the job and send it out to your friends or your workmates or whatever it is you're doing for that, you have to export. So you can go Export As and give it a new name, or you can just hit the control, as it says here, Control E button, I believe will give you just a default export. That's it for now. So that's covers all opening, saving and getting ready. Basically getting ready to set up your workspace and make new image. That's also the end of this section. So by now you should be comfortable with the interface of the GIMP. You set up a nice environment and you're ready to start working on image. We'll do a quick review of that before we finish this section. And the next section is going to be really fun because we're actually going to start playing with the images. That's where the meat and potatoes is. Okay, we'll see you soon. That's the end of this one.
7. Layers and Opacity: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover layers and capacity in the gap. And in this, in the previous lesson, the one before this one, you saw that I opened up multiple layers by using the menu. And I'll do that again quickly. Let me just delete this one because this was actually a little bit of a skip ahead. This lesson is the one that, where you should officially learn how to do that. And so let me start by saying that I open this file already. We covered that in the last one officially. And now I'm going to open layer. We'll go to Open As layer and open another image that I want to have that I'm going to, I'm going to try and play with two images and mix them together. So I'm going to open this one as a layer in the same workspace. Now in contrast, So what would happen if you just did open? And I want to open this image, then you see what it makes a whole new tab, as you can see up here in the top. So we technically would have two separate images open at that point, but I don't want that. I want to have both images open in the same workspace so I can play with them and mix them together. Okay, So what I'm gonna do here, now I have these two different photos together. What can I do too? To show you basically just to show you how Opacity works. And this trick might be useful for you also in the future. So I have one image here, I have another one there. I'm just going to use the Move tool, which is doesn't need. The Move tool by itself doesn't need too much explanation. It's this one right here. As you can see, I have selected right there. Let me get a quick zoom tool out for you. Right? So the zoom tool if I can get this bigger. Yeah. So here is the move tool right there. And it's this one. Not this one, but this one. Yeah. It even says Move tool when I hover over it, Let's see. Yep, there it is. Move tool. And so anyway, Move tool, I can move these different locations. Now you can see when we have separate layers, there's going to be one on top of the other. As I move this one around, it covers up the other one, right? That's because it's on top and you can change that orientation over here in this menu over here. Let me get this zoom tool out again. We're looking at this area right here. You can even see there's a tiny little thumbnail right there of the first image, and here is the second one which I've moved over. I move this back over. Then you can see there's a thumbnail of the top image and a thumbnail at the bottom one. So if I go over here, what happens if I move the bottom one by selecting it, I'm going to select it and slide it up like that. So now the bottom one is on the top. I just move the orientation. And we can prove that by moving this over. And there you can see there's the bottom. So which layer is on top is going to have a huge effect on the overall outcome of the image that you're working on. You need to know which layer is in which order. You know which ones on the top, which ones on the bottom, because the top one is going to cover up the one on the bottom. Now that we've proven that we understand that theory, what happens if I change the opacity, which is this part up here. So here it says opacity right there. What happens if we play with that? What's that going to do? A turn the opacity down. And basically opacity for those who didn't know is another word for transparency. It's the amount of transparency that we have. But transparency is actually the opposite of the word Opacity. So capacity means how solid it is. If we take away the opacity, then we go more towards transparency, which means it's transparent. If I have 0% opacity as I do here, you can see now it's at 0%, then you don't see it at all. If I bring it up to about 50 percent, then you can kind of halfway. That's 53.4% there and you can kinda just halfway see it and the other images underneath of it. So slide it all the way back up and then we go. Now, this might not be an extremely useful example of why that is, but it just goes to show you with a very simple example because everybody understands photos. Of course, that's a very simple example of how a capacity works. And again, very, very quickly, I just make a new layer, fill it in with white. Now I'm going to make two more layers. This one I'll call red, and one more, which I'll call blue. So on the red layer, I'm going to go ahead grab my pen and we'll make blue. A blue what I don't know, just a blue circle. Let me increase the brush size here a little bit or a lot actually. So there is a blue circle. And on the red layer, I'll start to draw a red circle near the same area. Look what happens as I draw it, because the red layer is under the blue layer, it doesn't go over that. If I wanted to draw a blue circle that merged. With a red circle that covered over the blue area than I would have to do it on the same layer, right? So I'm going to undo that. Now. I'm going to go back down to the red layer and all of the red dye draw down here, it's going to go underneath the blue. This can be very, very useful. It's certainly is just mandatory knowledge basically of all digital illustration and graphic design. It, regardless if you're using this software or Illustrator or any other software, I can't emphasize this enough. Understanding your layers. It's not only going to save you tons of time, but it's going to give you, it's just going to give you the tools that you need, the tools that you need, the technique that you need to achieve so many things and make it look a lot better. So what if I put the red on top of the blue now, just to emphasize this example, and we slide it over there. Now while we're talking about layers, that's notice I have the red, it's on top of the blue. Now, what if I want to keep drawing it over around this way? What's going to happen? And we'll point out again, the red is on top of the blue. But what happens because I just moved the red layer with the move tool, I moved it over this way and you can see that border starting to come out there. So a lot of people get frustrated if they didn't understand that they want to draw over here and suddenly it stopped. Why is this happening every time I go to draw every year. And by the way, I'm not trying to draw any particular thing. I'm just doing random shapes. And it just suddenly, suddenly stopped. That's because the layer is not infinite. The layer, the width and the height of the size. When you make a new layer, it's default to be the size of the image that you're working on. So in order to fix this problem, I can go over to the menu here and right-click it. Let me see if I can. Yep. Okay. I'll just have to you can see here, as I move my mouse up and down here, and I select the red layer, I'm going to right-click on it and go down to the menu item that says Layer to image size loops. Do that again. And now I'm still in the red layer. Now I can draw all the way over because I set that layer to be as big as the image. Or we could also go into this menu, go to the Layer menu and say scale layer and make it whatever size you want it to be. But for this situation where we just want to make sure that we had to draw draw a bowl space. I'm not sure if that's an actual English word. Draw bowl, draw, able section was covering the whole canvas here. Just go over to the Layer menu, right-click on it and say layer to image size. That way the layer will fill up the whole image size. There might be times when you don't wanna do that. So I can select just a part of the layer I want to work on here. And we'll say go to Layer and crop to selection. So now the layer is only going to be as big as that selection that I just made. But I did it on the blue one instead of the red one. Let me go back. Okay. That's why it didn't work. Go to Layer, crop to selection, right? And now you'll see if we move that layer around, it's only as big as that little section that I have. And we can move it around here over there. This could be very useful. Imagine if you had a face of somebody in a photo and you wanted to move it somewhere, or if you have a body of someone, you're gonna move it around. Okay? So understanding that layers can have different sizes, understanding that they can be on top and underneath of each other like this. We move it on the top and move it on the bottom. These are all very, very important fundamental tools which are going to help you do all kinds of tricks with photos and illustration. Whether it be separating your background from your foreground and illustration. Or maybe if you're working with photos and you want to people and things around, this is the fundamental thing to understand is layers over here. To make a new layer, we tap this button and say Create New Layer. You can give it a name. And if you don't like your layers, you can delete them with this button here and then make other layers, or as we did before, get rid of all your layers. Now I have no layers and I can't even draw. So that's pretty much everything you need to know about layers. The most important thing, if you can, if you understood how they work on top of an underneath each other and the way that you can move them around, then you're good to go. The following lessons. If not, please review this again until you understand that. And that's it for this lesson. Hope you enjoyed.
8. Moving Around: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover moving around in the GIMP, which is basically to say how do we zoom in and out and move things around as well as move the canvas around. So I'm gonna make a new image right here with my default template, which happens to have a black background this time. And what I want is a white background. So one minute, please. Okay. And Let me see how the best way to get this point across, as I had it planned, is to first show you that perhaps I'm drawing something and I want to draw something very simple so it doesn't take too long. Do sort of a head here. And now there's somebody's head. And I start drawing their eyes. And here and a nose and the mouth, just very, very simple and eyebrows. But I need to zoom in in order to start working on the hair and other things like this, right? And even the eyes. Now I get everything symmetrical. So what I wanted to do is zoom in like this. Well, how can I do that comfortably? Because sometimes I need to zoom in quickly, maybe do a little work and then zoom out again and then start adding the neck from a distance so I can see where everything is. You want to be able to just go in and out and in and out like this. So what I do is I set my hotkeys, which as we covered in previous lesson, is up here and go to keyboard shortcuts and just look for Zoom and put the Zoom in, which I have here. I can actually type it in. Zoom and there you go. And currently I have it set to the keypad number eight, which is convenient for me. And you can put it to whatever you think is convenient. And here I have Zoom Out set to five. So if you imagine that on the keypad that eight is right above the 50. And so I can just go up and down and up and down, zoom in and out like that. Now sometimes and say if I were to draw something else over here and start drawing something, let's just have that circle for now, for example. And I zoom in a little bit. Now I want to slide over to see where the other thing is, that circle that I'm drawing over there without having to zoom out and then go zoom back in like this again. So for that we use the move tool that'll help us to slide around like this. Now if you're using a mouse, I'll use the mouse right now to demonstrate. What I can do is hold down the middle mouse button. And I'll even draw that for you real quick. And say this is not a very good one. Mouse is kinda shaped like this. Yeah, the button on the left and a button on the right. And then you have this button in the middle, it's the wheel, right? The scroll wheel. You can actually push that button down. And what it'll do, it'll, it'll put you into move mode so that you can slide around. So first you push down, make sure that your little hand icon comes up and then start sliding around like this. So if you're using a tablet, like I am now I'm using a webcam tablet. I just set the pen on the wagon pen. I set the button on the pen to be the middle mouse button. And now I can slide around, draw, draw, slide, draw, and just move around very quickly like that. And since my hand is always on the keyboard with my hotkey setup as I like them, I can go in, out, draw little move over, move out, draw a little bit more, move in and out. Okay? So that's basically all we want to cover in this lesson is to make sure that you are aware that we have this dragging ability. Sometimes you might just start to zoom in and then you slide your bar over here and, and let's say you're working on something, you're Zhuangzi, something that's right here in this area. And you want that to be in the center so you can really focus on it. We see these slider bars here. They only go so far, the only go to the edge. So if you want to pull it pass that, you have to use that middle mouse button and slide it over like this. Now I can get that in a center and start working on it more comfortably. Then zoom out and zoom in and go do whatever I need. Also, you can use the Move tool over here. Now the move tool is actually going to physically grab the layer and it's moving it over here. Let's zoom out and see how that happens. So you can see my whole canvas there. Let me actually make the canvas black. So you can see this better. And the layer, I will invert the color. So all that stuff I drew is it's white now. Now if I use the move tool, this is going to physically move the layer. See that the drawing, the actual canvas that we're drawing on that stays in place, but the layer is moving around and that's handy. For example, if I were to draw a person, I'll just hit the Delete key to get rid of that stuff. I drew it. Let's say if I were, maybe we're drawing like there's, let's imagine this is a mountain back here. And I drew a little stick figure person on a separate layer. I'll draw a little stick figure version just like that. And so now that person, because they're on a separate layer, I can go to the Move tool, which I have on my hotkey and grab the person and move them over. Maybe actually wanted him to be over here, right? And then as we did before, we can right-click on the layer, set it to image size. And there you go, we move the person. So that's the difference between moving the whole canvas around so that you can go zoom in and get to the place where you want to be or actually moving a layer, which is fundamentally it. The layer is like an object. Now I can go to the second layer here. What if I wanted to move this? I can move this the mountain around even right. You can move anything. I can even go down to the background color and move that move that out of the way if I want. So there's a difference between moving actual canvas around and moving objects around, moving the camera surroundings for comfort. You can also use when you want to zoom in. If you don't find the hotkey is convenient, or if you don't want to bother your time with that, you can use this tool down here. It'll just tell you what percentage you want to zoom in. So I can go to a 100 percent here and bring it back to 50 percent. It's like that or go back to 12.5, just whatever numbers they have here. I think they set these numbers to certain default so that it'll fit into the screen and things like that. That's basically all I have to cover in this lesson. And although it's very simple, short, and sweet, but these are very important, very useful things to know while you're working in the workspace here and GIP, okay, and we'll see you in the next lesson.
9. Common Tools: Hi, this is Brennan, and we're going to cover very quickly the toolbox, which is over here. And the toolbox is pretty self-explanatory. As you can see here. I'm just using a zoom tool to make this a little bit bigger for people with smaller screens. And as you hover your mouse over each tool, It's pretty self-explanatory. It'll tell you what it does, but you just want to get familiar with the names of all the tools, right? And so we have here is the rectangle, select the oval or ellipse, select the free select tool. Let me just show you very quickly. One potential example of what we can do with these. Using, I guess just a simple line here or maybe I'll even use the Select tool first. And we use Select tool, the square select tool and make a box. And now I'm going to fill that box with color. So that's very fundamental thing that you'll need to do. I could also, while it's selected, I could cut it out of there and paste it onto a new layer like this. And now I can use the Move tool and move that box around. All right, so these are all very fundamental things that need to be done. Something else, what are we moving on to the Ellipse tool? Pretty much the same thing as the and these are all select tools, by the way. That's the same as the rectangle select, but now we're doing circles, right? And I can use this to fill in a circle or they're not working on the correct tool? Yes. Sorry. Let me do that again. Oh, that layer won't work. That's why that layer that I just cut out, this is good for you to notice while I'm at it. This when I cut out a cut out a very small layer so I can't draw outside of that space. Okay, so now on this layer, I can draw and fill it in, fill in a circle. Little bit slow because this is very big canvas I'm working on. And I could also cut that out and move it around, same as I did with that. And that's the Ellipse select tool. Now we have this one that's the Lasso tool or the Lasso tool is similar. It can select things, but you can basically draw the area that you want to select. So if I were to, let me do that again, zoom into this part here. If I can, let me just draw a funny shape in there. Yeah, and now I can select that part. I can actually cut out that part or paste it back in or whatever. I wanna do, something like that. So it's the same as, and there's many other things that can be done with the Select tool. We won't cover that now. This magic wand tool up here and help us to select things as well. If I'm on the right layer, I can just yes, Cellectis, a particular size or a shape that has the same color. So if I had read over here, for example, and yeah, sorry about that. Got stuck in that mode that I've read over here. I just want to select everything that's red. Then I'll use that magic wand and select that. There you go. Okay, So, yeah, I'm gonna go through all of these later. But the color picker tool, this one here, that's good to select a particular color. It'll select all of them on a Canvas. The path tool is very, very important for design. We'll get into that color picker, measuring tool and scaling tool. All of these here are going to help on this row here they all help to change the size and shape and perspective of the layer. So you can choose a layer and Nina stretch it and pull it and twist it. This one here, the cage tool is also for that. Here's texts. So obviously for illustration, you need to put reading and writing into effect many cases. And then obviously the brush and eraser and other painting tools. So we're going to go into detail on all of those in the following lessons. This is just a quick overview. So thanks for that and move on to the next lesson.
10. Brush Tool: Okay, In this lesson we're going to cover using the brush tool in GIMP, which if you're using a tablet, you can draw lines with very easily like this. Or it can use the mouse as well. Usually with the mouse you're not going to get as good of a smooth lines as you can with your hand because the mouse is just not designed for that, right? So, yeah, if you want to draw a free hand like this, you can do that, but you don't really have to if all you're worried about is making straight lines. Because you can hold down the Shift key. And I'll zoom in a little bit. Let me make the brush very, very big. So you can see that ball moving around there. Now if I want to, I can just start drawing like this. But if I just make a dot first, I'll make it one little dot here. And I want to draw a straight line from there to here. What I'll do is, well, while the mouse is hovering around there, I'll hold down the Shift key. So I'm holding it down and you see that straight line that comes out there. It's waiting for me to tap this again. So here I'm going to hit it again right there. And you see I get a straight line. Now this looks like a big fuzzy line, right? And I can hold the Shift key down. This is one thing I've found that some other softwares do not have, which is much better in the GIMP. I like this feature. I can just hold down the Shift key forever and just make continuous lines like that. So let's zoom out a little so we can see how I can just make lines, triangles. If I wanted to make a box over here, right? But what about making a perfect box? So now, and you can remember, you can, I'm not sure of you can configure your hotkeys for this one. As a matter of fact, changing shift and control might be difficult. But shifting controller right next to each other. It only takes two fingers. I actually do it with one finger. It what you have to do here is while you're moving around, if I hold down the Control key now, look at how. And again, let me zoom in. You'll get how as I move it around, it jumps from spot to spot, what it's doing. It's helped me to find some, some perfect angles to make my line. And this is by first, I'll demonstrate again, I tap up my start point, hold down shift first. Now, see you and I'm moving only holding down Shift, it moves around freely. But now I'm going to also hold down the Control button. So I have shift and control held down at the same time. And I actually do that with one finger. And now it gives me these perfect angles. So now if I want to go and make a perfect box like this, then we're good to go, right? You can make a nice perfect little box or rectangle, long rectangle. And using that trick, since it keeps us that perfect angles, it's a lot easier to try and make something like a perfect triangle. I'm going to do this, right? If I didn't have control. And I tried here to get the perfect angle, it might come up a little unsymmetrical. But when you have those guides, that, that angle tool to help you, you can get more perfect seed and that one was wrong. You still gotta use, use your eye a little bit. Let's see this angle here. So I should come down at that angle and you see, you can see is that here? Is it here or there? And it looks like I think it's this one, right? Yeah. And then you get a nice symmetrical triangle. So that's basically using the brush tool. I took away the pencil tool. The only difference, I took that off my toolbox and preferences. The only difference between the brush and the pencil is that the pencil doesn't do anti-aliasing. In other words, it doesn't make these smooth lines like this, which when you're going to make professional illustrations is usually not a desirable quality. It's nice that we get the smooth edges. And you'll learn more about that with practice. If I were to take this off now and go to a perfectly hard edge, See, you might think it looks kind of cool how it's perfect and sharp. And I guess there are situations where you want that. But I can do that with this brush too. And it come in imagined. See even here we have a little bit of a blur when you zoom in, imagine that it was just perfect zigzag with pure white on this side and pure blue and that side, even when you zoom out, it would look like it. It just doesn't look natural. You can try it if you want to, but I think we'll all agree that it's rare that you need the pencil tool and usually just the brush tool. We'll cover all of your situations. And while we're on that topic, this is important. Here's all your brushes in here. You can also choose to open a tab on this side so you can see all of your brushes on this side. And let me see I have my zoom tool might help us out a little bit. Set this to stay on top. And so if you see over here, we have a wide selection of brushes. Some of them are weird, like Louis, this bird, right? So now that I have a bird and I'll make the brush size very big. All I have to do is touch the canvas and it makes a bird everywhere I go. So even if I draw around like this, it just draws birds everywhere, right? In addition to that, we have many, many tools here which will be useful for artists when you're doing illustration. This gives you a chalk effect, right? And I can change my color in this palette here very quickly. Here it'll tell you the name if you hover over it. This one is supposed to tell me the name, whereas this one well, the name is in there somewhere. Maybe I double-click on it. Oh, it's actually called cell to I guess that's, that's the name that this one is called cloth. So we want to do sort of a cloth pattern. You can use this brush. And I'll zoom in so you can see that a little better. And there you have sort of a fabric, cloth, the pattern. So you have all your brushes here and the brushes all have settings as well. You can notice the settings over here. In this area where you can change the opacity. First of all, all right, so I'll go back to normal brush with a red color. And notice if I draw with the opacity down, how do I get the black? Red? Okay, Yeah, there we go. Now when I have the opacity down as we saw in the layer and opacity section of this course. The capacity will make it sort of like see-through, like a ghost, right? We turn it all the way up, then you get a sharp solid line. So that's the amount of transparency that you have. And that'll make a big difference in when you're doing like painting painterly style things. You can blend colors together and mix things around. And you can choose your brush over here as well. The size of the brush, which is very important if I wanted to do small lines. Let me get back to layers real quick and actually delete some of this, right? So going down to change the size of a small lines, or I get my Pasi backup where I make very, very big lines like this. There'll be good for filling in very large areas. And I have my hotkey sets, so watch without moving my mouse, I can actually change the size of that. I can make it bigger or smaller because I used a brush so much, it's convenient to be able to go from big to small with both the brush and the eraser. So I go to eraser right now and I get very big. And I can just erase everything very quickly. Or you can hit the Delete key and applied jitter. Very interesting. Let's make this smaller again and make a little bit of jitter so as as I draw them. Okay. Applied jitter. Yeah. And as I draw, it should make some shaky. Kinda. Yeah, there we go. So you'd like draw stars. All right, let's see if we wanted to make the whole background layer black. And then we'll take a minute or did I hit it? There we go. Then I'll go up to this layer and select white color. Go back to this. And let's apply a lot of jitter and make the brush very small. So when I, okay, I want even more jitter. Jitter, you add, That's a weird word. Jitter, but more jitter you add, the more it will space out all the dots as it draws them, right? So I make this brush very, very small. I make the jitter very big. And you can see it makes kind of like you could do a starry night, but you gotta be careful with it. Let's see. I have the right colors here. Right? You know, I do too much. If I do the dot here, dot there, yeah, then it actually starts to look like stars, right? And of course stars have different colors and stuff. You can make the red ones and blue ones. And it was, eventually you play with it enough. It'll start to look like a starry night. Something like that. From a distance maybe. Okay. So you'd have to work on that for awhile for it to look like stars. But I guess you get the point. Yeah, anyway, it looks kinda cool, right? It's kinda fun just to play with that. No more applying jitter. How about smooth stroke? What does that do? Well, if I want to basically make a smooth stroke, my hand is not so perfect and we zoom in. I'm trying to draw, let's say for example, perfect circle. Look at that doesn't come out so, so smooth all the time, right, little bumpy. But let me put on the smooth stroke weight. Actually that was when I was with a smooth stroke. Say here's me without this minister. Yeah. So whether it's minister, you notice it's a little bit better. But I can make it even better. But playing with the configurations here. And even if I try, let me try and be very sloppy here. Without, without any settings on, I go like this and move it around. Now we've put smooth stroke on and try and do the same thing and see how it makes all the lines much smoother. It takes out all the jagged edges, no matter how hard you try to make jagged edges, it kinda smooth them out. So I turned it off. I can make a very jagged like that. So if you're doing like some cartoons or illustration or designing a logo or you need all perfect edges and lines. Smooth stroke is very, very useful. Incremental. Actually haven't used this in a long time. I think incremental is supposed to change the amount of AB Dynamics off. It's the most make it bigger as it goes along. I haven't had this working. I haven't used that in while nor had it working, so yeah, apologies. I won't be going over that one. But these everything I've showed you so far should get young. Another one in the dynamics here. There's, these are basically see pressure, Pasi, random color. You can do all kinds of tricks. It's supposed to give you a random color as you go through it, but as you can see, its dynamics options, reverse. Does it work or not? I don't know. Sometimes I don't know exactly how these work because there's so many of them in there. I'm just experimenting as, as we talk here, speed opacity, okay, this one works. So if you go faster, notice that as I go slow, this would be good to zoom in on speedup passive I go, if I draw slowly, there'll be very faint, but if I go fast, then suddenly it gets very thick and harsh. So you go slow and then speed up and then slow. And it'll give you different levels of opacity depending on your speed. There's really a lot of stuff in here. I'm not going to cover all of it, but and basically go in there and play with it. If you're bored and have your studying and see what's available to you. Most importantly, should be to cover. Number one, it turned dynamics off. That's in there. It's actually called Yes, sorry, that wasn't highlighted. Dynamics off. If you notice weird things happening, then just turn it off. And I made my own pressure size, which I'll go into later. That's good for when you're doing hand-drawn freehand drawing. Because misspelt that, it's supposed to say pressure size. Imagine that if I want to have a pen techniques, so if I touch very lightly and then go very hard, should be like this. Brush lightly and make small lines or push hard and make big lines, right? So you do all kinds of special effects and stuff like that. That's obviously with a very big brush. So you have something like this. See how it tapers off into small lines like that. So yeah, that's that that pretty much covers everything that you have in here. You also have a mode. This gets complicated to the extent that don't want to cover it and a lot of people misuse this area. But you can do tricks with, for example, burn. See how it's drawn over the other layer. It's just burning into it. So I mean, yeah, it's kinda hard to explain all of the different things. Multiply is another one. And the drawing mode or overlay difference in some of these are very useful. But in most cases I would avoid playing with this too much. It's sort of an expert tip and you can pick that up in later lessons for now just to know that. And here you have your, your opacity. The brush size, the hardness is basically choosing which type of brush you want. And there is a wide selection in there. As you can see in this section over here, with many different types of brushes they can use. And and that's pretty much it. And then loops pulled that out again. Maybe. So my earlier lesson, this, I told you this happens all the time. I always accidentally pull that out of their aspect ratio and angle do not need to be played with unless you're doing some, some tricks with the brush. And again, leave that for some later lessons on expert tips. This I think you'll agree. Do you see yourself with pretty much covered everything you could possibly do, making straight lines and having different types of dynamics. If you're doing these kinda lines, make sure dynamics are all off if you want to make normal straight lines like that. And that pretty much covers the introduction to the brush. So hope you enjoyed that. Learn something from it and we'll see you in the next lesson. All right, Have a good one.
11. Color Tools: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we'll just go over very quickly colors using colors. And as you've seen in previous lessons, I like to keep this color palette open over here. That's not the default setting. But it's, I believe it's there. It's there by default as one of these tabs. If not, let me check very quickly, right here. Yeah, You can open right here. Go to Add tab. And let me get the the zoom tool open here. And if I get this area of an always on top, okay? So on this part here, see we have add tab into my code there. It opens another selection which I have to move this over a little bit for you to see, probably come up about there. You go to Add Tab and it gives you all of the different types of tabs that you can open here. You can only see some of them in the Zoom window, but layers, channels, paths. And you will be able to find the, I guess this is the color palette or yeah, colors and have colors isn't there. So if you don't have that added already, you can basically for a lot of people just getting started with the things you're going to want to use the most are the Brush tool. When you're playing with photos, even you're going to need the brush tool. And you're gonna have to choose colors. And you want to go in and want to play with layers and lots, kind of layers, color's brushes. And also the airbrush tool comes in. We'll go over that later in our photo touch ups. But the color palette for me is pretty useful thing to have open all the time and to have it in a nice big display like this is nice. So what we have here is we have all the hues you can select on this. Excuse me, the where's that other window? I closed it yet. Let me just open that real quick. Okay. So over here to stretch this down a little bit, sorry for that. And you'll see over in this section, on the left side is where you can actually choose the color that you're currently working. With. An over here where you see this rainbow over there. That rainbow is where you can basically get a start color. So if I were to tap on the blue part over here, there is, it's going to give me all the hues of that blue. All of the values actually, not huge, but the values of that blue, so I can get a darker blue. And let me do this with my brush and palate. You go to a darker blue here or here. So I got a regular blue and start painting with that. Or if I want to jump to a darker blue there, is that a lighter blue would be up here obviously. And then you can just scroll up and down or, or tap on the part where you want. Here's yellow and go for a dark yellow. Light yellow. Oops, hit the wrong spot. Light yellow. And that's pretty self-explanatory, I think after that, if you just notice that your chapter in your color and there's different views here. As you see I just hit, there's a, you can see the HSV. I guess h is probably for hue, which we're looking at here. S might be by saturation. I'm not sure exactly what all of these are because yeah, I'm not trying to get a scientific degree in color, but I just want to be able to choose the colors that I want. There's different views and the default one should probably be just like this, in my opinion, that's the easiest way to go about selecting your colors. So that's one thing is color selection. Another thing outside of choosing a color would be to pick a color. So let's say I'm drawing something over here. And I realize I want this to have the same color as that thing over there. What would I do? Well, we'll go to the color picker, which I have set to a hotkey. It's this tool you can see right up there, color picker. And so the color picker enables me to hit this color. And you'll see it comes up over here. The actual color that I'm using, lost the window again, sorry. The x window. Yeah. This area right here, right underneath here is the toolbox and right underneath that, this is the actual active color that I'm using. That's important to note. I guess a lot of people might have taken that for granted, but some people who are new to using the GIMP, they might not have realized that. So I wanted to point it out when I click on this color, that the act of color that's being used there. It'll give me that same color selector window that we had over here that I, that I opened up my tab. It's pretty much the same thing, but it gives you more options. You can play with the numbers and stuff. Again, I'm not going for a degree in color, just trying to get my colors. So for me, pretty much this part and this here, which enables me to select colors is good enough. Sometimes these parts, these parts do come in useful doing web design or programming and you know the exact color values of what you need. But for the best part, for me playing around with this as enough. And so while that's open, you can also see the color picker tool. Is also right here and that part, it's this little icon right here. I don't even know if you can make it out, but it's supposed to look like an eyedropper, right? You can definitely see it clearly over here on this icon. It's an eyedropper, which means we're going to pick the color. It's their way of saying it's a color picker. So good a color picker. Now I can choose any part of the canvas I want, and I can choose here, and it'll give me that blue. So I'm gonna start drawing with it again. Or I can choose from here and do that. And I have a hotkey sets so I can switch right into color picker real quick because it's very, very important. Any kind of art with any color that you're in. Whether it be a photo, if you're making color illustration, obviously, selecting, choosing colors is going to be very important part of that process, right? So I'd like to have my color picker always available so I can choose a color and draw it again. So that's picking color, choosing color. And there's another thing we need to do sometimes. One more neat little trick is the color selector, I think it's called, actually I forget the name. I see select recolor tool. Well it has a weird name, select by color tool. So nice long name. So I want to see, I want to show you why this is very useful. What it enables us to do is, let's say for example, I have some of this color over here. That color is a little too bright for me. And this color over here. And it also happens over there, and maybe down here. And then I'm drawing something in-between there, right? And I have all this around here. Now I suddenly realized that these three items, which are that light blue color, I want to select all of them at once so that I can do something. For example, change them all to be the same color without having to draw over them all again and be so perfect. So what I wanna do is I can choose this tool over here and let me give you a zoom view of it. It's this hand pointing at the three colors there, that little icon. And if we get that icon, turn that tool on. What I can do now is just choose the color that I want to select, and it automatically selects all of those spaces. So now I can turn all of those, Let's say, for example, into another color such as green. And I'm going to fill that in with the whole selection. And now all I have to do is tap it once and look at that. It changed all of those right? And get a more obvious color to change it to. There we go. And it changes all of those. Now that might seem like a strange thing to need to do, but it's actually very useful. And I wanted to demonstrate that just very quickly. With I have to change this background. Let's say, for example, we had a blue sky like that. And make a super quick oil painting sort of thing. And often a distance. We have some green mountains. This is not going to be realistic at all. Very much off in the distance. We have these mountains here. And I actually want to draw them on this layer because sometimes we draw everything on the same layer, right? So I'm gonna just draw all this on the same layer. And I can fill this in. Oops, I want to fill in the similar colors. Getting a slow reaction with this. Today, I don't know why. I have my threshold. Might not be too good. I make sure I have this all. Fill it in, right? That should work. Yep, there we go. So let's imagine I have some green mountains and the background. And then in the foreground, I'll have, let's say something like a brown tree coming up and it's going to block the view. There's mountains, right? And so this is going up. We have our tree branches like this. And then we have Just make it look like a little bit like a tree. Again, very laughable drawing. I know this is not a Van Gogh or anything right here. Little tree right there. Now, suddenly I realize, wait, I don't want this guy to be that color blue. So how am I going to change that? Let's say if I choose another color, blue, a lighter blue like this. And now I have to paint all around here and go inside here and get all the details. It's very difficult, but even more so, what if I want the sky to have a gradient so that it tapers off from blue to white. Because if you really look at the sky, in fact, it usually has a gradient to it kinda looks like that. But look what happens when I draw that. It fills the whole page, right? So what I'm going to do, I'll use this color picker, which i'm, I keep raving about here. I use the color selector tool and it's going to choose all of that blue color. And now I can go to my Gradient tool and add that gradient sky. So you see just like a real sky, it goes from blue and fades off into another color depending on what time of day it is, of course. And that's that. So. What if I wanted to do that same effect after I had already drawn the tree and there'd be no other way to do it, right? I'd have to go in and like slowly do blue and then slowly change it to white until it faded off to white. But using the color selector tool, I can select all of this color that I want to change and just change it all in one lump sum like that, right? Okay. So to review their very quickly, we've figured out how to we can choose a color and start drawing with it like such any color we want. We have the darker values and then lighter values by, by moving this around. We can also select a color with the color picker and start drawing very quickly with it, that, that color pixel Picker will go directly to your brush. So it'll be your foreground color. So you can choose any color and then directly start drawing with it. And then you have your color selection tool, which will help you to select all of the same color. And that comes in useful in ways that I can't even begin to, to tell you that there's all types of situations where that tool becomes very, very useful. But I'll just leave that there for now. We have that. One other thing would be the bucket tool, which you're probably familiar with by now because he keeps seeing me, is grab a bucket and keep seeing the use this throughout all the lessons and choose a brown color. Let's say it's fall or autumn now, fall. And the, the leaves of this tree are going to start turning brown or orange. So I want to fill just those. Let's see if this works. Nope, it fill the whole page because my I'm on the wrong layer. Back this layer. Okay. Right now I just feel that it's what it's doing. It's choosing. It's automatically finding the same colors. The similar color of that point, which I either click the mouse on the tablet with. And it's going to fill that whole section with that particular color. So what if I want to fill the whole selection? And I just wanted to erase this and cover it. Well then we go over here. And in our options for this tool. And right here it says either fill whole selection or fill similar colors. I want to switch that to fill whole selection. And then what happens is it fills the whole selection, right? It'll just ignore whatever else is going on and there. And by the way, if I didn't make this clear before, do notice that whatever tool I happen to be using, all of the options for are always going to be underneath this tool section. Every tool has options were, and so I might not have emphasize that enough earlier, but hopefully it just came as second nature because it seems pretty self-explanatory. Anyway. Yeah, that's it for choosing colors, various ways to choose and fill and draw with different colors and hope that was useful for you. And look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
12. Selection Tools: Though this is Brendan, and in this lesson we'll be covering the selection tools. So for this one, probably the most practical example would be to open a file, a photo. And so I'll go into my pictures here, webcam and find a funny photo of me making a funny face. There's no reason for that really. So as you can see here, this is a zoom tool That's just helping to enlarge the toolbox there so that you can see better what I'm doing in the toolbox area. So I'll leave that over there for those of you with smaller screens. And what I'm gonna do first is use this selection, this rectangle as it's called the Rectangle Select tool. And the rectangle select tool can do so many things. But let's see what a few of those things are. So what I'll do first with this is, as you can see in the Select menu, we can do different things with it like shrink this selection or grow it or border it. I'm going to choose border. And I'll give it five pixels. So I get, if you zoom in there, you'll see I get a little bit of a border. And I can emphasize up border by filling it in with white color. Now you see that white color that fills in it only fills in the selected area that I, first, I made a square selection and I turned it into a border. So it's only going to fill in that area, right? Let me go back. I'm going to undo, undo. So now just an irregular square selection. And if I fill that area in, obviously it fills in that whole area, whatever, so whatever areas selected, this is just very basic beginners observation in case some, you know, some of you are new and he didn't know it. I just wanted to point out that whatever area is selected as the area that you can draw or fill in. Now if I take this pen here and again using white color and I start to draw over here, what happens? See how it just stops drawing when I go past the selection. So selection is basically a great way to isolate an area, right? You just want to isolate that area. There's all different types of tricks you can do with it. It's limitless. You really got to use your creativity. That's why, yeah, this, this lesson, particular lesson, I decide to use a photo. We're going to spice things up. So I'm sorry of previous lessons are little boring. This one obviously with my stupid face in there. Not that my face is stupid, but maybe it is who knows? Who's two judges smart phase from a stupid one. But I'm making a stupid face there. And the whole point is to just show you a more practical example of where this can be used. So another thing we can do with this, so I'll go into, while I have that area selected. And notice we have this whole photo here with a whole bunch of stuff that I might not want to share with the world. That's my background is like my room or something people don't need to know about that. It's my office space or something, right. Maybe I just want to zone in and crop off this area, the close-up of my face. So while that area is selected, I'll go up to the this area here we have the, the Edit menu up top. And not to edit the image menu, we're going to Imagenet and go down to crop to selection, right? So I hit that button once, and there you go. Boom. The rest of it is gone. The entire image now is automatically sized just to fit that that area that I had selected. Or what else can we do? That's one thing that would be useful while I have it selected, I'll go up to the selection menu, which has a whole bunch of different options we can do in here. And I'll go to invert and invert the selection. So now when I go to draw, notice what happens. It's selected everything but the center because I inverted the selection. So now it's basically selecting the opposite of what it had selected before. And I'm trying to get back to where was I might have run out of undue spaces or something like this. Run out of memory. Okay, well anyway, put that back where it was. Undo, undo, undo. All right, well it's not important for this lesson. Let me go and make another selection. Here. We're going to invert that selection again. Select Invert. And now I'm going to fill in that whole space. So you see I inverted it. That's the whole space that was selected after I inverted the selection. So if you ever want to select everything, but then what you do is first select the but the thing that you're looking to not select, and then go up to the menu and go select Inverse and it will invert your selection. So invert basically means to select the opposite of what you're selecting. Now. Now I did this on a separate layer. I can turn the opacity down like this. I don't know why this layer. You know, there are bugs that happens some times where it might have been my fault, sometimes a moving so quickly that i'll I'll do something unintentionally that will break things. So yeah, now you can see I basically selected everything but that area of the window around me. It's not something that I necessarily need to do for any project right now. But just another tip to help you to understand how the, how the tool works and all the various things you can do. So let's go into other selection mode. So that's just a brief intro to the selection menu. Now what if I wanna to do something such as select only my face? We can use the circle tool, right? And I could, while I'm in select mode, I could copy the face by holding Control and tapping the C key. And then I'll do a Control V, and that will paste. But now that it's pasted, I need to bring it to new layer. So right-click on that, bring it to a new layer. Now you can see there's a box around it. And the reason for that is because I've made a new layer with that section that I copied. Now we have two stupid faces, which is obviously a lot of fun. Now do Control V again. And you'll see it comes up in this area here. At first. It's just there, It's floating selection because there's different things you can do with it. You can double-click on it. I believe that'll change the name. What else can I do? Yeah, it'll ask you to make a new layer out of it or you can right-click on it, you can anchor it or delete it. For whatever reason. I don't know why. This is one thing I've never understood about the GIMP, but it doesn't just automatically turn it into a new layer. So you can either double-click on it and click okay, and that'll make it into, actually that didn't even make it into a new layer. Well, what I normally do is I right-click on it and just say new layer. Now it's a new layer. And now I can go in there and move it around. That's one thing I've never quite understood. I did look it up. I don't know why they do that, but that's just how it is. So there's software is perfect. Now I have three crazy faces of me on separate layers. And so I've demonstrated at this point using the circle tool. And notice how that gave me the selection as it came out and gave me a nice circle or an oval actually around the head. And the background of it is, the background of that layer is still transparent so I can move it around here. So you'll get that perfect kind of oval circle kind of thing. So what we're doing is recovering basically this top row so far of tools. And other one is the Lasso Tool. Now, I want to get a more perfect. Let's say for example, not a circle, not a square. But I just want to get his eye right. So I can use this and draw around like this with the Lasso. And then you've got a tap is where you finish it. And that will give me if I do Control X, that'll cut out his eye, right? To do that, maybe I'll do it again on the other eye. And having a little bit of a problem here with the software. Probably because I've been using it too much. We're just not showing me where my selection is, but I'm just going to keep going right now. For the sake of there, I pasted it there. Now he has no eyes. It looks kinda of actually kinda scary. I can go in there and maybe give him some black pupils with a brush. On which layer? On a new layer that work with up here. Because I have that still selected. So I have to de-select. It. Makes some weird crazy eyes are making like cross-side, something like that. Okay. So now I have some crazy eyes on this guy. And that's the lasso tool. And then we have this selection tool is the magic wand. If I want to, this probably won't work perfectly, but if I wanted to just select an area, for example, all of this dark part of his shirt. I'll just tap it with a magic wand. And actually, because that selection is not showing, I have to restart the semi-open. I'm gonna close this one and see see if I can fix that very quickly without restarting the software. Okay. And then do magic wand to select that. Yeah, there we go. There's someone that particular image it was marking. But as you can see there, when I just hit, I'm going to just hit the whitespace here. And that will select everything besides the black area. And since it's a very big canvas, it takes a little while. And just to show, I have it selected, I'll choose this color and fill that space. And so you see it's selected everything but that area right there. So let me go back to my photo which was open as layer. This one. Yeah. And I can zoom in here. Let's imagine. I just wanted to select this dark part of a Sure. I'll try to tap on it. And as you can see, it does a pretty good job at acknowledging that that whole area is one color, but you can't blame it for not selecting it perfectly because technically speaking, if you zoom in and I'll do Control Shift and the a key to make that selection go away. Then you can see this area up here is actually a different color. So I'll select this first. I want to make sure I get that whole part. So now I'm going to hold down the Shift key and I can add another selection, which would be that part. Now hold the Shift key again, and I want to get these other parts here. I want to add this, all of that. This, this, I'll just tap around here until I have all that stuff selected with a, with a magic wand. And it does a pretty good job as long as the colors, as long as there isn't too much of the variance and colors. Now what would I do with that spot? I don't know. Maybe I wanted to make his shirt pink. So just fill it in pink like that obviously doesn't look very natural. It's not something we're normally trying to do. But it goes to show you how that tool can select an area. Even though the colors are a little bit different, with just a few clicks, you can pretty much select the whole area. Here you go again because he has light coming from the back. Well, this is me because I have light coming from behind. So it's lighter. The color of the shirt is lighter, red up here then is down there. So if I want to select this whole half of the shirt, I'll hold down the Shift key and get that light part 2. Then hit the in-between part and all these parts here and there you go, pretty much has it all selected. So that's another way that you can basically select an area that you're trying to manipulate. And that's all I'm really trying to cover in this lesson is just to show you there's, I have three or four different ways and there's even more selection tools. I believe in the settings which in the preferences, which I might have turned off. I think there's another one where you can paint the area that you want to use. But these are enough for me to keep me going and I recommend these. You can also turn on the other ones and they're self-explanatory. As long as you understand these, the most important thing to understand is, you know how to grab a section holding. Now, let's say if I, if I grab too much sometimes as black area, maybe I want that and then I realize, you know what, I don't want to have that area. So now I'm going to hold the Control key. And that's going to subtract that part of this selection, right? And what if I don't want this part selected? I'll hold the dark wrinkle area, so hold down the Control key again. I'll tap that. And while it took out more than I wanted, but you get the idea if you hold the control key, it'll take away apart. And another thing, a reason why it might have selected too much there is because I have this threshold in the settings for all selections are now mostly the magic wand, which is what we're using here, is one is called the Magic Wand, and it just selects the whole area based on its color. And if you change the threshold or the magic wand is turn it down a little. Let's turn down a lot and see what happens. And I'll go to select this area again. See there's a threshold at what do we have it set up? And I said I ate the threshold set to eight. Let me try setting it up much higher. Now it's at a 101. And I'll try selecting this area again. And it'll go happen. It's selected almost everything. Alright, so I go to fill that in with a paint bucket now. Notice everything that it fills. Yeah, it's selected all of that stuff, which is not what we wanted. So that goes to show you what the threshold means. If you love someone the wrong tool. If you want to loosen the ability of this selection, such as to say to make it select more colors in the surrounding area that have slight similarity to it. Then you can turn a threshold up a little. So I'm gonna change it to, let's see, we can try and get this whole red area here, whether it be light red or dark red, maybe I'll set it to 32. We'll see what happens. Nope, it actually just went out that way. Whatever it is, it just this threshold helps to define the boundary. There. It's a little bit better, right? When I have it set to 14 like that, it will only select this bottom part up to about where that line is there. What do I put it up a little bit higher. Do it again. Now it's selecting more of that shirt area, so we put it up higher. Then it's just going to go crazy and go all over the place. So the threshold to help to keep in the boundaries of how much color it selects based on what color, what color it was that you selected. Right? So yeah, that's kinda hard to put into words, but I think with combination of my speaking and demonstrating here, you probably get the idea. And that's it for this one, we had many ways to select things to review. There was the box selection, which we call the rectangle selector. And we have the ellipse selector such as making ovals and circles selections. And then we have the lasso, which will both. You can draw with the Lasso, such as this and just pick out an area or so without drawing, let me just demonstrate it. So I last heard that area. Or another thing you can do with the lasso is you can tap once, twice, three, and just come back to that area like that. So basically you can draw shapes with it. It's basically like kinda of like a line drawing tool. So I can tap here, here, maybe do a little oval, then tap here and it just keeps following you until you go back to where you started at and fill it to close the gap. And once you close the gap, that area is selected, it's done. Okay. So yeah, that's another I just wanted to add that detail to the lasso tool. And then we have the magic one, which is basically choosing by color, but within certain threshold. So you have to play with that threshold and see what is the best settings to select the area that you're going for. And with those tools together and maybe some of the others in the toolbox, which you can turn on if you want to. You can definitely, you should be able to select whatever it is you're looking for. And that's it for our selection tutorial and lesson here. And hope to see you in the next lesson. I hope you enjoyed this one. Have a good day.
13. Drawing Shapes and Stroke Selection: Hi, this is Brennan, and in this lesson we're going to cover how to make, how to draw shapes, basically perfect shapes with selections. This is actually a downfall in the gambit. My opinion is that it doesn't have any tools for drawing shapes directly. Which seems kind of weird. But maybe actually it's kind of a bonus if you look at it in the right way, the thing is to draw shapes. You just use all of the selection tools, which kinda makes sense if you think about it, instead of having a tool to select a circle and another tool to draw a circle. How about just one tool to do both? Which is, uh, you know, it's worth consideration. Maybe it's a minimalist kind of design. The more tools or are the more confusing it gets, right? So this is, it might be a good thing. I've always just found it weird though that like other softwares, the first thing that most people expect to be able to do with computer generated drawing is to have the ability to draw perfect shapes and lines and all that. So to not have a jaw circle tool and draw a square tool is kinda weird. What we're gonna do though, to make a long story short is to use our selection tools to basically draw whatever kinda line we want to. In this case, I have a circle. Then I'll go to the Edit menu and hit stroke selection. Now a stroke selection, I can go right to the Paint tool just like that and hit Stroke. And there you go. It uses the same active color that I have right now, which is green. And it, basically, it follows all of the brush dynamics that I've set up. So you see over here I have it set to 20 pixels and it's full opacity. So what if I turn the opacity down and changed it to opportunities to 10 pixels. And then we'll try and draw a square again with edit and stroke selection. And we'll just use those settings here. Now I can't see it because it's very small and very faint. It has, but it did work. It has low opacity, as you can see. And it's smaller, thinner line with only 10 pixels. So let's see the obvious, very, very obvious that would be noticed. I'll change my color here for demonstration purposes. The very obvious problem with this at first is you're going to say, Wait, why do I have to go all the way up to the menu to do this? And basically, I think that is a situation. I'm not sure if there's a tool option for this, but I use this so much. You can see if there's a toolbox button for it. Values is so much and I use hotkeys, which I highly recommend that I have it set to a hotkey. So in order to do that, let's go into keyboard shortcuts. And in here we'll just go type in strip. And you want to use this second one here, which as you can see, I already have set to the period key. And we do this one, stroke selection. If you can pull this menu over for me, it's not working right now, but what it is, it's a stroke selection with last values. So the last set values, I believe what they're saying with that is that the values that come up on the dialogue when I hit this key. Instead of having to go look at these values here and have to, I do all these settings again and hit the stroke button. It just automatically strokes it without me having to do anything. So look here, I can just go like this, tap the key, good, like that. Tap the key. And there you go, you can draw any kind of shape. Now, as I said, there's good news and bad news. You have to do that configuration. But after that's done, then it's really nice. And you can very quickly change your colors here and go in and do circles and squares and whatever you want. And go ahead and feel free to use this Lasso tool and draw whatever kind of shape you want. And then go ahead and give it a stroke. And that will work just fine. Also, let's say for example, if there was something in here that I wanted to select, I'm going to select this area here and draw another line into it. So I selected that circle. And then I'll just hit the key and it's strokes it with another red line. So if I were to select that again, giving a little bit more. And we could continuously changed the color and continuously add more and more lines and make designs just like that. Or if you had a person's face you're trying to select and you want to outline the face or whatever it was, you know, you can do all kinds of tricks with it. So it's actually kind of a handy tool if you think about it. It's even better than Photoshop because, well, they might have a more long winded way of achieving that same goal. Whereas we thought photoshops method was more natural, but is it better? I don't know. I'll let you be the judge of that and I hope you enjoyed this lesson, find it very useful and we'll see you in the next one.
14. Bucket Fill and Gradient Tools: Hi, this is Brendan. And continuing in this series with the overview of the bucket tool and gradient tool. And so just in the last lesson, which if you watched it before, this one would make more sense. We were playing with this photo here. And so just go ahead and continue with that or do a rough outline this here, try and catch this guy's head. And 2, 1 capitalized area. And then if we want to fill in that area with the lighter color, for example, white, men use the bucket tool. But what if I just want to make is his whole face area just a little bit whiter, right on this area. Well, we have a choice. We're going to have the colors over here, which we went over before. This is the foreground color. And we also have the background color, which is black. So if I hit this tool to swap it, now the background colors and in front, so now the foreground color is black and the background color is white. Well, I'm going to flip it back again so the foreground color is white. Now when we choose this, there's different ways that you can fill in. Those are right over here. Let me use the zoom tool so we can see that better. And we have the weight you need to configure this, okay? So you can choose to fill with the foreground color, the background color, or pattern fill, and it's pretty self-explanatory, I think so I have my bucket tool selected now. I can fill that whole area I selected with the foreground color. Or I can go to the background color, which is black, or I can switch it to pattern fill. At which point we'll be able to choose a pattern and fill it with that. And we have lots and lots of different patterns here already for us. Or you can probably a, choose your own pattern or add a new pattern in there. So that part is pretty self-explanatory. We're just going to select an area and then fill it. That's what the paint bucket does. However, there are different situations where even while I have this selected, let me go back a few steps. Even while I have this selected, what if I didn't want to fill over his whole face? What if I wanted to? I don't know. That's for this situation. Say his his beard or something or just like fill in some of the lighting area that the lighter part of his face over here. In this situation, we're not going to do fill whole selection as we had it before. We're going to say fill similar colors. So while it's on fills similar color mode. So let's see what happens. I'll just tap over here in this part. And threshold needs to go down a little bit. For my example. Still not working, fills similar colors 0 because we're not on the layer. I was on a separate layer. Let me show you that I was actually on this layer. This is important to this blank layer. So if I hit fill, if I want it to fill the similar colors and the whole layer is blank, then what's going to happen? So I need to go down to the layer that has the colors which I'm trying to work with and highlight, select that layer before we start working on it. Okay, so now we'll go to Fill similar colors. Again, we're in white. I'm just going to tap this area over here. And actually now we can throw, put a threshold up a little bit more. Normal is about ten, I think is a normal starting place with a threshold. Tap this area here and now you see it only fills in that area of his face that has the same color tone. Do it over here. The same thing, right? It's only going to do that that little part that the light is reflecting on right there on his face. Okay. So you can see there's a difference there between fill whole selection or fill colors. And this can be, obviously, it can make a huge difference in what it is that you're doing. This situation with the face is not a very common one. But let's say for example, I just wanted to fill his shirt. Now, there's a lot of different colors on it. But instead of taking a paintbrush and starting to go like this and try and get all the details and making a small brush and zooming in making it perfect. What I could do is go into the bucket tool and just hit it a couple times in the right spots at once here. Once there. Alright, that's 1234567. And I just saved myself a lot of brush strokes by hitting it a few times like that. And as you can see, it almost filled up that whole area of a shirt with just five or six strokes, right? And so that'll be useful in many, many different situations. Knowing the difference between filling similar colors and filling the whole selection. And again, the threshold as we learned in last lesson. Now filling the whole selection, obviously if I hit that here, it's just going to fill the whole thing. So let's see what the gradient does. Gradient. Is going to go by default. It will usually go from foreground color to background color. And what happens with a gradient tool is that first I pushed down or atop the mouse once, and I hold the mouse down and I drag it, and then I let go. And it does this, right? I haven't set to bi-linear. Let me go to linear. This is the default print. So I drag it out and it goes like that. And the angle that it does, the gradient from this color to that color is going to be depending on which way you drag it. So you can drag it this way. I drag it that way. And if you've looked at any kind of illustration before, obviously you can do all kinds of background effects and such with this technique. Important things to notice with the with the gradient menu is that you can choose the type of gradient that you're doing. Either you go from foreground and background color or background and foreground, or they have a lot of presets which you can choose, such as this one here, called abstract. And I'll just make those particular preset colors for you. Or if you go down further, they have like wood textures and here's a, here's a metal or horizon kind of texture also looks kinda like metallic, right? And so you can pull these UTI or pull it really far like that, or you do it very short and it will give you different effects. The most important effects that I usually find with this is going from foreground to transparent. And the reason that's important, Let's imagine if we fill it in, you know, this whole area here. There's so many cases where this becomes important, such as like if I'm doing the blue sky and there's always a gradient and the blue sky, and I want to pull it down like that. So I can do that first. Having a soft gradient like that and then come in and start to do it with a paint brush. Go to the green as I did in a, in a previous lesson. And I start to fill in these. Make this real quick. You know that green mountains will come in like this. This might be just like 11 mountain here. So that gradient and the background gives us kind of a sky effect, right? And then, I don't know, let's say for example, what if you had like a stick or something or a tree? Let's make it real quick tree to show how these tools can be used. As I did multiple times, usually drawing, I don't know for what reason, but if you draw a tree and a mountain and the sky, it, it seems to cover so many different things. There's a very bright, and I'm doing this on purpose. Very bright tree. Here's a branch is coming up and then we'll go to a green like this, right? So that's going to represent all the leaves up here. And put a little bit in the back, just like that. So very, very simple. But what if I select this area with a magic one as we did last time? And don't worry about these settings right now. Just use the magic wand to select this tree area. Mean, use a gradient. And let's say that the foreground color is black. So we're gonna go from black to nothing. And I'll just pull that down slightly. I pull it down a little bit here. So I'll show you that there's shade coming from under the tree because I selected just that area. And that looks like the tree leaves. Yeah, the the bush part of the tree is casting a shadow down onto, onto the upper branches and also maybe the light is coming from the other direction. So you can just do sort of slow, subtle like gradient shade effect here. Not a perfect example of the way to use this, but it just gives you a general idea. Now that I have that in there, I can go and do some color selection. Bring the opacity down on my brush. These are all things we covered in previous lessons. And just start to fill in, you know, based on the color that I need because I have a whole spectrum here of gradient colors. So I can just pull out the ones that I need and start drawing. And it starts to look more and more like a tree. Get a darker shade of the green, go around here and give it some depth and texture and stuff like that. Then a cache shadow comes out over here. And it almost looks like a cartoon tree. Little shadow, right? So that's obviously not a great tree, but I hope you get the general idea is that there's just many, many uses for the gradient tool. I didn't find the best one right here, just trying to do something very quickly. And more importantly, that sky effect is a very good example. And also the, the bucket fill tool when you have different types of selection. So there's different things you can do with it. Now, also with the gradient tool that was only for linear, we can do radial, right? Such as this. So now if I fill this whole area, we can even start with a black canvas. Now just fill the whole selection with black. Now make the foreground color or some kind of neon blue or something. And we'll make the gradient tool we'll set at radial. So now it's at radial is going to make a circle pattern like that, right? And you start to make little stars like this. And change the color. Again, I'll make it like greenish, a little, little stars, big stars. And this could be more than just making random background effects. You could also make, this could be very useful for some type of designer or a particular pattern or illustration you're doing. Sometimes you need that soft edge just coming in a circle. Whatever you're doing. Like I wanted to show that the sun was very strong. If we were looking at the blue sky again, I wanted to have a very strong yellow kind of sunlight coming from over this way. Then I can use a radial effect. And also with square effects in here, conical these, I don't use too much. Even that right there. It looks pretty cool, right? You could do all kinds of stuff with that. Here is a square effect. Let's see what that does. So it just makes sort of a diamond sort of shaped like that. I have rarely found that to be very useful. But the linear and the radial are very useful. And bi-linear often comes in very useful. Bi-linear means it'll be just in a line, but it'll go out both ways because let's compare it to linear first, linear just goes from one color to the other, or, you know, depending on your settings, I have it going from the foreground color to nothing, right? So it's just going to start off. Wherever I started even I start halfway down here. It's going to start off with a color that I have selected and go off into nothing. Which in this case the Nothing is the black background. But if I put it on bi-linear, then depending on where I start, it's going to go in both directions into nothing, right? That's why they call it bi-linear because it's linear but on both sides. So you could do like, you could start off with the horizon like this and then start doing all kinds of crazy science fiction stuff in the middle there that could be like the sun rising in the background. I could do a sudden like that, go into a red color and turn the transparency down on this layer as a red stronger read like that. Yeah. And do another bi-linear one of these. And it might look like some kind of sunset effect or something like that. And then you say, Oh, I need some blue on the top. Okay. We'll switch over to blue to make it look like a sky, lighter blue. And then we'll go to just what you can to stay in bi-linear and bring the blue down on the top. Just like that, right? And you start to get a sunset effect. And then you do the same on the bottom where you're going to draw into the ocean waves and stuff like this. So I'm not actually drawing that out, but just to give you a quick example, if you use your imagination, you can see many uses there of the bi-linear and the linear tools. I think that's it for this one we had the, we were in a gradient. I'm only trying to cover the bucket and gradient tools, which are both for filling in color. Bucket obviously is to fill in solid color and gradient gives you these nice gradient flows which can be used. And I use it mostly for background, skies and horizons and stuff like that. But it comes in useful for a lot of other things to the tree example might have been a little weird, but yeah, I was just trying to stretch it to see how far I could get with it. Okay, so that's it for this lesson and we'll see you in the next one. Hope you enjoyed this. If you have any questions, please send me a message and have a good day.
15. Transforming and Crop Tools: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson, we're going to cover the transform tools. I'm referring to them as Transform tools. There are a set of tools which basically helped to transform shapes and sizes. And with the zoom tool here that I have, this does not come with a gift by the way, I'm only using this for for our purposes here. It's a software specific to Linux and Windows. You'd have to get a different one. So what I have here is to zoom in and look at the palate here, what I'm going to refer to now as this tool here where you can rotate. You see by the icon there, this one here, you can scale and you see this icon has small to big kind of look to it. This one is called the shear tool. And this one you can do perspective called Perspective tool. And with this one you can flip, right? And we also have the cage tool down here, which allows you to do more random Free Transform basically in the software Photoshop, I believe that call that free transform. Like basically it looks like a cage and you can just bend things around and shape them however you want to. So that's how that tool is going to go over. And very quickly it shouldn't be too complicated to try and make it simple. So here we get a photo of me again and I'm going to cut out my head as I usually do. I guess it's a habit, something I enjoy. So chop off that head. Go lasso this head around here. And you can see I have had headphones on, which I actually have them on right now I did this wrong, didn't come out right? Actually let me use this tool. Yeah, easier. Okay. So chop off the hair a little bit there. And what we're gonna do here is I'm just going to cut with Control X and then I'm going to paste it with Control V. Now remember when ever you paste in the GIMP, you have to go over to the layer section here and set it to new layer. Let me get the Zoom tool out for that to make sure that we're, we're being clear on this and this area here. You can see after I hit Paste, it says there's a pasted layer there and it's always up at the top. And I'm going to right-click on it. And let me see. I gotta sit that. The tool there, zoom tool. To whoops, where they go. No. Okay, there it is. Set to always stay on top. Now if I right-click here, this will come out this way. Right-click here, you can see, it'll say to new layer. Underneath it. It has a couple of options. We'll say new layer or new from visible new layer group. I don't it's a really weird thing. I don't know why it does this. When you pay something, it's just automatically go to inner layer. But alas, this is what they do. So love to just say to new layer, we'll click that and now I have a pasted layer. Okay, So don't need this for now. So now we have that painted layer where I cut the head out of me. You can see if I hide the layer with the eye here. And hide the layer and you can see there my head disappears, it comes back. Now let's use these tools to play with that real quick and see what we can do with it. One thing we can do is to the first one, the rotate tool. First I will click on that tool over here. And then I will select the layer that I want to rotate. Now I have it in rotate mode. You see there's kind of a cage effect there. And I can rotate it this way, rotated that way, or to wherever I want. So let me make it a go. I don't know, just be zany. Let's go completely upside down. Now my head is completely upside down. And that's basically what the role to the Rotate tool does is just rotating around. You can go by angles up here. You can use this sliding bar to move it around. Or you can go in with the mouse and just put it where you want to. And you can also decide where the center is by using this here. Let's see what happens if we move the center to a different pixel location. Now, when we spin it around, notice it's spinning. The center x is in a different location. Let's see if we can select that center. Yeah, here it is right here. So if I were to put this center up by the chin right here, now that has become the center. Look at how it spins. It is going to spin around the chin area so the chin will be the center. So that'll help you in certain situations where it gets very well. You have to be precise and mathematical. You can move the center where it needs to be in rotate around. So that's just the rotate tool. Basically. Next one is a scale tool. Not too hard to understand. It's the same process with each one of these tools. First he selected tool, you'll get a little dialogue that you can use to change it, such as this. I can make the width wider, right? So now I have a big fat head mu that in a central. Try doing that 20 or friends heads and see how they like it. Or, you know, what else? We have, the width and the height and give me a long head like that, and then move it up with the move tool. So it looks like a long crazy alien head. Or I get back to where it was again. Or we can lock it together with this part here and it'll, it'll add both width and height to it at the same time. Now, you don't have to do it like that. What you can do is also, as usual with the other tool, is you can just grab it down here. I'm going to take away that lock tool. Just grab it down here and stretch it and pull it moved around however you want. But while you're in this mode, similar to previous lessons where we learned, you can use the Shift and Control key. While I'm in this mode, I'm going to hit the Shift key now and see what that does. Well, it does nothing. Hit the Control key. Okay, there we go. See the Control key. No matter where I move my mouse, it's going to keep it at an equal scale so it doesn't stretch. Or Zhan to Lee or pull it vertically. Once I hold down the Control key is going to keep it at a good scale so you can make it bigger without losing proportions. So that's a good tip to have when playing with that tool. A lot of these tools have that trick tumor either hold down Shift or hold down control to see what happens. Now don't remember everything perfectly myself, but as what happened, shear tool, what does it do? This is what it does. It shears, things like that, right? So you can stretch that box in an odd way as to where you wanted to share if you wanted to go this way, right? You have to grab it on the bottom and you're going to go the other way. Let me go reset it. Then you grab it on the right side or left side and you can make it shear like this. That could be good to help you to make sort of like a perspective effect or let's say, for example, I wanted to say that my face was on a piece of paper or it was like a poster on the wall, then you shear it like this. And I can see it kinda looks like it's leaning sideways on you looking at it sideways as if it were on a cover of a book or something like that. You can do a lot of tricks for that perspective tool. Similar situation to the shear tool, where we can just move things around. Let me even hide some of these other layers now so it can see what's happening. So you can stretch things and put them into perspective. That's why they're called Perspective tossing. Make your studying illustration. Let me make it look like that. So it looks like my head is slowly zooming off into the distance. Boy, that looks funny. Yeah. But you know, there, if you study perspective, that makes more sense, using this tool on a head is just plain old, funny. That looks like Conan O'Brien. But yeah, if you were to make a checkerboard design or something like this and then use a prospective tool. You can make it look like it was going off into the distance. Otherwise, you can just do whatever you want with it. You can stretch it around like this and that, it's not necessarily perfect perspective or anything like that. But you can just do some stretching effects. Flip tool, pretty self-explanatory. Let me flip it this way. Flip it that way. You can flip it. You should be able to flip it over. Yeah, here it is. Flip it vertically with the settings over here. And then all I do is tap it with the mouse and it just flips it for me. That's very handy. And I don't even use that too much. I normally use. Actually, I should use up more often. It's more convenient. I normally go up to here. And once you have a layer selected and go to Layer menu, go to transform and do flip vertically. And it'll do that. I use that a lot just for to check if things are symmetrical when I'm drawing. And then we have the cage tool. The cage tool is interesting. I think it's New. I'm not sure. I think it's one of the newer features. And again, I save, I make you draw a box or draw shape with this first. That's how this one works. And then it's going to compute. It usually takes a little bit at a time and it makes, it makes a matrix around it so that you can stretch things around, right? And the detail of this matrix depends on how much work you put into it with your, with your cage. So if I make more lines here, I'm going to make more dots as I go around it. So we can have more detail. And we'll see what happens. Now. It's making the cage and it's doing something. Okay, now I can start playing with these lines. Let me, let me try and just zoom in or squishing the eyes using using this part here. But that one in there. And this one in here. Yeah, and you see how it squeezes. It only transforms those specific parts which I'm working on. And then the top of the head, maybe I'll try and stretch it up. With these parts here. Yeah. And as you can see, it just focuses on on those parts. Although this is it's stretching it outside of the layer so I can't really see it. That's what the cage tool does. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. Let me try and select a bunch of nodes around my eyes here. Right? And I don't know why it's doing that. And I'll just stretch my eyes up like this. And then hit the Enter key, right? See, this tool is very strange. Anyway. It's supposed to do. That's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to move things, stretch things in a certain way, depending on where you where you put the cage. So I think this tool is relatively new and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work exactly how it's supposed to anyway. So that's all the transform tools. And then the only other one that we've, technically speaking I've already covered is the crop tool. And we're going to cover in this lesson. So go back to opening up another or the same, same image. Maybe this one or that one? Similar yeah. Crop tool. I'd actually closed it. It's not it's not very complicated. It's not mind-bending, but basically you just crop the image. It is necessary to, to go through it at least once. Where am I going? I need to go into preferences. And actually not even are, Yeah, that's right. Toolbox because I took it out of my toolbox because they don't use it. Just to show you how important I think it is. I actually took it out of here. Did I? Oh, no, wait. According to this, it's in there. It should be corrupt. Should be that knife tool. But I don't know There it is. Yeah. It actually isn't there. I probably will take it out to. So the crop tool, what you do is you select a box, right? And then you just click on it and it crops that box. And that's just the thing to be careful of with that and understand what that is. Actually cropping the whole entire image, not just the layer. So if you had many layers and you went in and just cropped it off like this, then all of those layers would get chopped off and, you know, into that area. Obviously this crop tool is very useful for photos and whether it be landscape or whatever. What if, for example, I wanted to make this photo, I can stretch it out and make it into sort of a, a widescreen effect, right? So I can crop it like this and you could do that if it were a look kind of like landscape photo, a beautiful scenery and make a nice long effect like that. Or yeah, I can make a super skinny artistic kind of thing like this. Why would you do that? Well, there's a million and one reasons depending on what you're doing. You can even be drawing and illustration and you just want some special kind of effect, some of some kind of special kind of scale to your image. So aspect ratio and all that. So that's your crop tool and that's it. So all those tools that help you to stretch, pool, and move around individual layers. And then finally, you can crop the image. I just thought that those tools kind of fit together. And so I would show them all at once and not too hard to understand, but I had to go through a review, a definite recommend playing around with those. Just have some fun with him. Play with photos or whatever you can do. And that's it. We'll move on to the next lesson. Hope you enjoyed this one and see you.
16. Path Tool: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go over the path tool, which is probably one of the most important tools you ever use if you want to draw with a mouse or if you want to do some design work and really make it perfect. There's a lot of things with a path tool that can be done. The path tool. Firstly, let me get this zoom tool out here so you can see what we're looking at. The path tool is this icon right here. And let me see if I hover the mouse there, you can see it says Path tool. And it's, it looks like sort of a pen and old-fashioned pen With these nodes over here, which at first glance, if you don't know what it is, you probably won't understand it. But once you start to play with it, you'll know exactly what that means and you won't forget exactly what it means. Yeah. Excuse me on that last part. Got a little confused myself with what I was trying to say. It's just little complicated to explain until you just get in there and start doing it in. I have to start working with this tool. Let's say, for example, would be a perfect example of something you wanna do with a path tool. Maybe I want to draw a, an apple. We're going to have a company and we're going to make a logo for it. And they're called, you know, Apple's incorporated. So if I were to go to the brush tool and let's just say do something like this. I'll get a black pen for starters. And I'll try and do. The opacity is down. So try and do a nice little apple here. And maybe I even have a somewhat steady hand. And I can make a nice apple just like that, right? Fill it in red, it'll be good. But there's going to come a time in a situation where you want to reuse their shape. And you also want to just make sure that you have really, really perfect corners and edges. Because imagine we're doing something for a big company like, let's say Nike shoes or McDonald's. You know, not that these are my favorite companies or anything, but just that size of company and international like Walmart size or something where everything just has to be perfect. All right, So I'm trying to use really obvious examples that everybody can understand. Well in that situation. If you don't have a perfectly steady hand, you can take out this path tool and start to draw things with the tool. And it'll help you to draw these, these perfectly smooth lines, right? So let's have a look at this. First of all. And you can always come back to the Path tool and rework it and reshape it and, and make it better and better. So I'm going to try and do that. The top half of that apple, just like we're doing a minute ago, as he saw, an apple is usually a little bigger on the top. And I'll do is move these lines around. And as I zoom in here, let's focus on one of these nodes here. And notice that it has two lines to a better one to look at actually to really get the idea is look at this one that's in the middle and look at how when I select it, I highlight it. It has these little markers that come up, these little nodes. These will help you to control the angle of the line as it's bending around. As I pull it back, the line comes with me and I pull it down. The line, just going to follow that. But it follows, it follows a certain sort of arc that works together with this one over here. So if I were to pull this one back towards it, and also this one pool. Oops. And also pull this one back, we start to get more and more of a straighter line. But if I pull it up and out like that and do the same with this one over here. Then we'll get a nice round line like that. So it's not easy to put into words exactly how to get the right angles using this technique. But I think by looking at what I'm doing here, have you just play with it? I don't know how long. Maybe some people would need to fiddle around with it for a week or two and others, they'll pick it up very quickly. But if you just play with it a little bit, then you can see that it's not too hard to understand it. You'll get sort of just a natural understanding port. So I'm gonna do here is I'm going to draw half of the apple because I don't want to, I want it to be perfectly symmetrical anyway. And I don't want to have to draw that much. And also, that's always An important thing that I have. This one come down here. And important trick to remember if you want to make a straight line because I'm only drawing half the apple, is to just pull this thing over directly in the direction that you want the next line to go. And this one to go straight up there. And make my last line. So that'll make a nice perfect line like that. Now I'm going to bring it up to where I started at. So it'll finish itself off and make completed. A complete Actually, you know what, I'm not, I'm gonna do this differently. I'm just going to draw the line. There's, there's actually two things that I wanted to show you with this. So now. I'll show you this 1 first. What we're gonna do is we're going to draw a line around that because right now it's just a path tool. We didn't actually paint anything. See, now if I switch into paint brush mode, there, that would be drawing a line on a canvas, but we haven't done anything with it. Now when I just switched the paintbrush mode, you'll notice the path that just disappeared, but don't panic because you have to go up here into the path dialog here, the path tab. And there it is, right there. Now and I highlight it, you can still see it's there. I'll go back into a Path Tool mode and click on it. And there's all my notes. I can still play with the shape and the size. And I can notice here it's a little bit out of whack in certain areas doesn't look as smooth as I'd like to see this part right here. If you zoom in, you can see it looks a little as a little dent right there. I don't want that to look like nice smooth curves. And the reason that can happen is particularly if these lines are pulled out too far, see what happens. It goes, if it goes beyond the point of the other node, then that's obviously going to make it bend and twist like that. So we want to pull it back and not let it hang out too far. Same with this one here. So it should make nice smooth curves. Right? And now I have that selected. I have it drawn up exactly where I want it to be. I'm going to go into this one right here. Let me zoom in. And this is, this is, you know, it's an unnamed path That's the one that we're working on right now. And on the bottom part here, we have some options, right? You can copy this path. You can turn it into a selection so that you could color it in, such as using a paint bucket. And this one right here where you have that little brush, that's what I'm interested in right now. That's going to allow us to draw a line along that path. And we'll see what it says. Even when I hover the mouse over, it should give you a tip, says, I paint along the path, right? So that's the tool we're going to use. I'm going to click on that tool. And we have choices here of I can either just use the default option here. I'm going to do that now just see what happens. I'm gonna click the stroke button and see what happens. This should have pain it. Let me close the path so I can see, you know, why we didn't see anything is because we're in the color white and we have a white background. So let's do that again. I'm just going to click that tool and use the default options with the black color selected here and hit Stroke. And there you go. It gave us a nice perfect line right there. I could have never drawn that so perfectly with my hand. And I've been drawing for a long time too. So that's something. Look at how just robotically perfect it is. You just can't do that almost looks like a year though. Keep in mind, this is a half of an apple. So I'm going to leave that there. I'm gonna leave that path tool there. And what I'm gonna do is just copy this real quick. I'm going to copy and paste it. I believe this should make I could be wrong even I'm hoping this will look like half of an apple. When I'm done, I made it into a new layer. Let's use our flip tool which we recently just reviewed. Then we use Move tool. I'm going to tap it once with the move tool on. And then I'm going to use my arrow key to slide it over perfectly. The reason I'm doing that is because what if I were to grab it and move it around? Well then it starts to get hard to see where is the perfect pixel to put it in. You got to zoom in and find the perfect place. Sometimes that can be very hard to do. So instead of that, I'm going to go back a few steps here. I'll just tap it once, make sure I have the layer selected and then slide it over, CL, it slides over perfectly now with the, with the arrow keys and I can move it up one pixel at a time, down one pixel at a time, get it right into place. That kind of looks like an apple. Well, it depends what kind of apples you're used to. The apples, I look like this. And now I have, I have basically two layers because I copied and pasted half of the right and the other ones down here. So I'm going to go up to the top layer. I'm going to right-click on it and say merge down. So now it's merged in one layer, right? You can't undo that. So make sure that you have everything exactly how you want it before you do that. Now, go into the Apple. Choose a red color, of course, reddish color. And use our paint bucket with Phil, similar colors as we studied before and fill it in. It's not very red, is it? It's not the kind of red, apple red. Bring it down a little. There we go. Now as you can see, while we're at this, you might notice these lessons get a little bit more complicated as we go along, because I'm assuming that you learned everything from the previous lessons. So we'll build upon that as we go. I'm going to select this red part because see how there's little spots in their white spots where it didn't fill in perfect. There's different ways of dealing with that. One is that let me undo this and get back to this. But one is that I can play with the threshold here. As we saw before, a threshold is going to define where, where our selections break through the barriers. And there we go. I got the threshold. I had to bring it all the way up to a 100 and it starts to break through that little white line barrier, so it fills it in perfectly. But an even better way for this situation is to make another layer under this line layer, right where the line and underneath that layer. Remember if run the underneath layer it'll, everything we draw is going to go behind it, right? So we can do here is this is a little bit tricky. First we gotta go up to the line layer. Make sure on that layer and I'm going to select it with the magic wand. So I have everything selected there. But I'm going to go up too, the select area and grow this selection by maybe four pixels right? Now you can see the selection has gone all the way into the black line area. So when we fill it in, it's going to fill in into that area. But if I do it now, it's going to cover up because we're on this layer. Oh yeah. It's still just going to fill in where you wanted to. So let's say if I did fill the whole selection right, and fill it like that now it's covered up our black line and we didn't want that to happen. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go down to that new layer we made underneath and fill that in. So now what we have is a perfect red fill in where it's going underneath the black lines. And that way we couldn't possibly have any whitespace leftover on the top there. Something even better to do would be to go to this black layer and turn it in to multiply layer. And that'll really, yeah, that'll really fix it up. Anyway, there's Apple. Of course. It still doesn't look completely like an apple unless you make a stem. And so we have to do something like this. Right now it's an apple. Actually that stem should be thicker, I think. Don't you? Something like this. Now it's too thick. I just can't get the right size. Let me go up to about 10 pixels. There we go. Now it's an apple. And we did that using the Path Tool. Now another thing we can do with the Patch Tool is let's make another shape like a moon. Again, this is something if you're using your hand, would be very hard to do perfectly. Do sort of a moon-shaped like this, a crescent moon. Notice when I come in here, now, this line as the outer circle, and I want the inner circle to come in and real sharpest way. So I gotta pull this one over down like this. And notice, just kind of notice the angle. It's really hard to, to put into words easily so that everyone can understand it. But notice where I drag these lines and I move this around. And you just sort of get a feel for it. Certainly no easy way to put that into words and move this one up there. And the great thing about this is, even if it's not perfect when he started off, but you can always go back and tweak it. You play with these little lines, little bit in the back, move it forward, get it to where it needs to be. And I think your brain will figure it out. Nine times out of 10, you don't have to force yourself to think too much. It just happens if you want it to work and then it will eventually work. Play with these two that gets right, trial and error. Okay? So it's not a perfect crescent moon and there's better ways to do that. I couldn't use the circle tool, but this is just a good example of The other thing I want to do when to show you how to use here, and that is if we go into, back into this area where the menu is, right, you can see first we use that path tool are now this is the brush on the path tool and now we're going to use this one. It's that red box there and we're going to turn the path into a selection. So let's see what happens when we hit that. There you go. Any should be able to see that the path actually got turned into a selection. So that can fill it in now with whatever I want. I can fill it in with the brush or, you know, will use yellow Mooney kind of color. And I can go ahead and fill it in with a brush like this, because it's a selection now where I could fill it in with a bucket or the gradient tool. What if we use foreground and background gradient? And I told you I do that all the time. We'll make the other color to be orange kind of tint. And then we do a gradient. And we'll get kind of a smooth effect like that. There we go. That's pretty cool. Something like that. And of course it would be better if we had a black background. So you can do a real quick rectangle. Black fill in. And that is not good. Where did that? I already painted it on the other layer. So we'll make I'll just put it on this there. Yeah, there we go. Why is that like to have to undo that? Where did I oh, I actually painted it on the bottom layer. Okay. Well, in that case there's nothing I can do because I've painted that on the bottom layer. What or what could I do? Let me see if I go back a few steps. Yeah, I'll just paint on this layer. There we go. And we'll do the same thing with yellow. Make it look Mooney. Now, I'll put the square on this layer. Go to black and try and fill that in. Now we have a moon looking kinda thing, right? Nothing too fancy, nothing so professional, but it's just showing basic usage of the tools here. How you can make something a little bit better, a little bit smoother, a bit more professional. And yeah, if you, if you want to get into more illustration, keep in mind I've the other course, it's called from drawing to illustration. And you can find my other course, I go a lot more deeper into detail with about illustration and stuff like that. But this is just all about tools and how to use them. So that's how you use the path tool, various uses that you can do with it. And it's one of the most useful tools if you're trying to make logos and, and other kinds of professional illustrations for business and stuff. And of course, it can be useful in many different ways. You could even make cartoons and children's books with that kind of tool. Might be a little bit slower than freehand drawing, but it's fun to play with if you have the time. So that's the end of this lesson and this section. I might do a summary in the next one, but for now that's it and we'll see you in the next section.
17. Basic Menu Navigation: This is Brendan, and in this section we're going to be going over the menu. I'm actually going to try and go through it from head to toe. We did already cover file, and I think we covered the picker file and edit is, which is pretty clear. Yeah, we did preferences and add it. And I think everybody can understand cut, copy and paste. That would be like a fundamental computer course. Not gonna do that one. But I'll go through select and view a lot of other things in here that are very useful. And after this lesson, we'll really be getting into some drawing with the gap. We're gonna do some more professional style stuff, playing with photos and stuff like that. So, but you really gotta get this foundational stuff in your head, at least vaguely, briefly, understand a lot of stuff before you start going to work. So all I want to really deal in this particular lesson, there's going to be following lessons where I go point-by-point through these menus. But for this one, I just want you to notice that if I right-click anywhere on the canvas, basically, I get that whole menu is the same menu that's up here. It's the same exact menu. And there's, there's nothing different about it whatsoever. So if you're playing with the mouse and you feel lazy, and you're drawing around here like this, feel free to right-click and go look for your options in here. For example, that thing I just did, maybe I want to blur it right now with the Gaussian Blur. I'm just using one hand. And there we go. Give it a blur. I didn't have to go up there to the menu. I didn't have to move around here. There. It's all right there with Right-click of the mouse. And if you're using a tablet, a stylus or Wacom tablet or something, and you could configure it accordingly to have that available to you. It's very, very convenient. So yeah, there's the two things I want to go over is just you have the menu up here, you have it down here. And then the only other place that I find myself right-clicking and using the menu is over here in the layers. If you right-click on, if you select a layer and right-click on it, then you will actually get the Layers menu, which fundamentally, I believe if we go up here or I'll just right-click they're saying and go to, here's the Layer menu. We have new layer, New from visible, a layer group, et cetera, et cetera. And over here, it's pretty much the same. You have new layer, new from visible layer group and all these things. And I will cover what a, what a lot of those mean. Unfortunately, I probably cannot cover each and every single thing that you can do in the GIMP because there are quite a few things, but I'll try and cover the important stuff in the basics here. So that's it for this one. Just a real quick introduction to show you how flexible and easy to use the menu is. It's all over the place. One more thing I could turn this into a dock as you see as a little dotted line right there. I can grab that. I can click on it. There we go and turn it into a movable Doc, which, and now I can click and select all the different menus. I don't know why it's like that, but it's just a cool feature. It comes with, comes with a software. And so that's it for this particular lesson. We'll move on to the next one where we're going to start going through each and every one of these. I think we'll start off with the select menu. And so we have available to us there. Okay? And we'll see you soon.
18. Select Menu: Though this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go through using the select menu. And select menu is one of my favorite menus. Because you can do a lot of very important tricks with it. What I might do, the, I'll just start off with a blank canvas here now. And of course, the first thing we can do is select what we do at the Select menu. It's not about using it to select something. It's what you do with a selection that you already have. So as you can see, if you can see clearly, I have a selection here. And to make it more clear, I'll go ahead and just fill it in. So I know it's hard to see some of the detail of the selections when, by the time this video gets processed, it doesn't come up so clearly. But now that I have a selection there, and you can see it's selected in that and that Squarespace. I can go ahead and open the Select menu here and maybe actually use the right mouse button to demonstrate this better. Excuse me having mouse difficulties here. Okay. Yeah. So I'll go ahead and go on to the Select menu here, and we can see the options here. Maybe a bit better. I'm going to bring out the zoom tool here. And I'll have it zoom right about over here. And then we go down a bit further, right? And I'll do it over this spot. Okay. So, whoops, I got to set that to stay on top. Okay. So with the or is it over here? Okay. Yeah. And we have this open. Actually, I need to get to select right there we are. And you can see we have select all, which is a common option. In this case, that would select the entire canvas, which would be the entire image. And you say select None Dutch just to stop your selections. So I don't want to have anything selected anymore. I'll just say select None. Invert selection is going to select the opposite of whatever we're selecting now. So to demonstrate that, I'll click that now and we'll get rid of this one. And now that I have done the invert selection, that means it's selecting everything but the square that it was selecting previously. So let's go into a red color and fill that in with a bucket to see what's selected. And there you have it, it's selected or the opposite of what was selected. And there you can see selection much better with the zoom tool there. I'm sure you'll see that. It's now is go back into the menu. Here's my Select menu. We have all none we did invert. Float is what happens if we float the selection. Now we get basically a new, a floating selection where it's holding that in a selection in a new layer. And there's the various things that you can do with that. If you see now, it's basically the same as copying and pasting as you see now we have that layer, that red layer that was selected moved up into its own layer. So it's no longer down there. You might as well have said copy and paste as far as I know at this point and it's the same thing. I'm not sure exactly why they have that. As I've said a couple of times, as much as you can know about this software. It's sometimes it's a little confusing and sometimes I don't, I have the answer to everything. But let's go back to that Select menu and I can get that in view. Where exactly is this? So I'm gonna put this, put it right there so I should be able to navigate it better. There we go. And we did float by color, select by color. What happens if I do that? Now I get the color picker is giving me and I can click the color that I want to select, which in this case is the red. And as you can see, it has selected all of that all of that red area so that I could change the color to green and fill it in. And that's what we have selected. Okay. Again, select menu, but do we have from path? This means if I had used a path, we actually went over this in a previous lesson, just two lessons back. If I had used the path tool to make a path, and I could turn that into a selection using this as well as using the button that we did over there. And the selection editor, something I haven't used here it is over here. It's opened up this area over here. And I, you know, I don't know what you would use this for. Basically, it seems here you can turn the selection into a path. You can paint along the outline that, that can be very useful. And you have, well basically have a series of tools here. You can save the selection. Different things like that. That one I'm not very interested in right now. Let me see. The one I do take interest in is from here down basically, we have a feather sharpened. Let me just move up a little bit here. Feather sharpen, shrink, grow, border, distort and rounded rectangle. These are ones that I use all the time. So let me just focus on those real quick. And I'll make another square, or this time I'll make a circle. Right over here. I like to keep my layers open so I can see what I'm working on. Now let's go ahead and make black circle as opposed to the black square with the bucket tool here. And you see we get a regular filled-in circle. That's the behavior that we expect. But what happens if I go into the selection menu and use the first one which is two feather. Now we're going to get a little dialogue and I'll ask is how much do you want to feather it by what's set to five pixels by default, but I'm going to move it up to 30 pixels. And now we'll try and fill it in again and see what happens. Now you can see as I zoom in there or even without zooming in, you see how it has a nice soft edge to it. That's called a feathered edge. So when you use a feather on your selection, it'll give it a nice soft glow like that on the outside. And that can be useful for many situations. I'll do an example of a sudden we can do with that in just a minute. The next one we have here is to shrink the selection. So here we have a big circle. What if I were to shrink it by 12 pixels? Well, now it's smaller. Let me do something with that. So first I'll fill it, I'll fill it with black. And as you can see, the feathers still on. Let me undo the feather. Select and do not feather. 0 pixels without work. Nope. I think you'd have to make a new selection must be because I used the back key. So to make a new selection, there we go. Okay, and so we'll go into select again and we're looking to shrink. I already made a black circle there. Now I'm going to shrink that circle by, I'm gonna go bigger than 12 and go 27 pixels. Now I have a smaller selection inside that. So if I choose another color, this picks some random orangeish color here and fill that in. Now you can see it's smaller because we shrank the selection and doing this, you can make perfect circles. You can make a wheel. You know, I'll, I'll types of things that you can do with this because but not just for this. Let's say for example, you had a person and you're trying to manipulate the way the person looks. You can select that whole person and then grow this selection or shrink it and do different glowing effects or some weird thing like that. And it's just very useful to shrink or grow the selection. I'll actually show you a couple examples of that in a minute. But just understand the basics. That's what it does. You can shrink that the selection now I can grow it. I'll grow it by four pixels. And maybe I'll make a little white line in there with similar colors. So I can get in there and hit that little spot right there. And then we have a white circle going around there because I grew this selection. Another thing is to border this selection. So what if I want to make a perfect circle? First of all, hold down the Shift key and it helped me to make a perfect circle as opposed to an ellipse like that. Now I have a circle, but if I go to fill it in with red, for example, it'll just fill in the whole circle, but I want to make an empty circle with a certain type of radius to it. I want to have a border around there, so that's where the border selection comes in. I'll go to Select and we'll border the selection. And we'll use five pixels of a border. That'll give us a big thick ring like that. And we fill that in. And that's how I can make an empty circle. Going back to our original selection. Or actually I'll just leave that one there and make another one. And I think we need a square for this one. Are we there yet? It's an idea we still have, we did border. Now this one distort. This one. I'll actually distort the selection. So that'll have rough edges to it. Let's see what happens when we click it. Now we're going to zoom in here, I'll fill it in so you can see what happened. Fill it in with a gray color and you see what it did is it just distorted the edges. I've used this to make like rough, burnt old looking paper kind of effect. And you know, maybe if you're making bubbles, comic balloons, and you want it to look like somebody is saying something very scary, then you can use this distortion effect around the edges there. There's a lot of uses for that if you're getting creative. And one more, I believe, which is also very useful for squares, is the rounded rectangle. So obviously, if you want to make a rectangle that has nice smooth edges like that, I use this one all the time to make the comic balloons, such as will fill it in with white. Now let's go back and select the width border. And we'll make it just a few pixels, two pixels wide. And then we'll change the color to black. Fill that area in with fill the whole selection, actually. Yeah. And there you go. That's the beginning of what could be a little comic book balloon where somebody's talking there. So if I go into brush mode and just draw here, how many pixels do I need? This is actually rather small canvas. To make. One of these switch to the white. Take out that line there. Fill in the similar colors here, the extra space. There you have a comic balloon and say, well with red color and the black text. And say, hello. And there you go. You have a little comic balloon. Oops. Go back here. Not perfectly aligned. But anyway, that wasn't the point. But I have to be a perfectionist and move that, don't I? Okay. So here's a bunch of random things and my ugly page we made here. But that just goes to show you what you can do with the selection menu is what we're reviewing here and all these different things. We also have saved a channel and toggle quick mask, something that I just don't use or haven't used frequently. So at the moment, I don't know what those are. All of these are the ones I've shown you so far, are tools that I use frequently and are very useful. As I said, I was going to show you a quick example. Let me open a photo here. And let's say for example, we have this weird character here. And we want to make him look like he's glowing or something like this, right? So they'll go in and I'll use the lasso tool. There'll be a little bit easier. You just wrap around here. And around the head. I'm using the webcam with a stylus pen here, so it's still easier, bit easier to draw. And go back over here and finish my selection. Now on a new layer, Let's say, for example, I wanted to make him glow. I'll use white because it's very bright. And again, I'll go to selection and I'm going to feather this selection with a whole bunch of pixels, about 29, 30 pixels should give me a nice feather effect, is fill that in on a separate layer and see what happens, right? You get a nice glow there, right? I actually wanted to make it glow even more. So I'm going to do feather again with the same amount of pixels and I'll probably just do a double. I don't know if I'm satisfied with that. Let me see if I can do it even more. Oh, no, You know what? I think if you do this twice, the tap it, if you feel it more than once, then I'll start to feather out like that. Yeah. So fill it in multiple times. When you go into feather. Let me see if I make this higher and get even more of a glow effect of, yeah, there starts to go. And now I'm going to take that layer and bring the opacity down like this. So it really looks like, it actually looks like he's glowing in that room. And for more fun, we could go into Select and invert it. And all of the area that is not filled in by him is going to be filled in with black space, right? So now he's really glowing. And we can leave the room and they're the background a little, but just have it like that, right? So there you have a sharp contrast between the whitespace that we covered him with and a black space behind them. And it makes him look like he's just glowing. They're in, Zoom in, crop them. And if you wanted to make a very strange image, this menu to image, and crop to selection. I have a strange glowing man. Okay, so yeah, that's just some examples, stuff that you can do with the Select menu. You can, my favorite one is to the top ones here. Invert is actually very important on, to de-select df to use this all the time. Because once you get into selection, Let's say if I were to make a selection right here and start drawing something with US, more obvious color, start drawing with red. And maybe I wanted it to be selected like that, so I draw something here, but then I'm done with this selection. Now I want to start drawing over here. Well, it's really annoying because how do I get out of that selection? A lot of the time you have to go all the way back. You can go over to the selection tool and just tap it somewhere in a blank space and it'll make the selection go away. So I can do this. But another thing you can do is go into this selection menu and say select None. So that'll remove the selection and I can start drawing again. But even still, that's kind of annoying in comparison to having a hotkey setup. And the default hotkey here is to do Control Shift and a, and that'll make it go. But even that is three fingers that you have to put an action. So you might want to go up until your preferences menu and see if there's a way to set it to your favorite hotkey if you use that frequently, I actually just use control shift and a to get rid of that to make this selection go away. And that works good enough for me. So don't do it too often. And I think that's all I said I was going to cover. I showed you an example of the feather with a glowing guy here and shrink and grow. Well, basically same thing. Imagine if I wanted to glow, I said I wanted to give him more glove, right? So if we were to go back to this layer and make him have more of a glowing radiation. We've just do the same selection, then grow the selection to make it a bigger around him, and then continue like that. So yeah, that's pretty much that in a nutshell. I keep laughing when I look at myself like this. So I hope you enjoyed that and hope you learned something. I cannot teach you each and every little single thing with all of these menus, of course, you're going to have to play with it and see what they do. And the most important part with all of these lessons I hope you understand is that you really got to use your creativity. My job here I feel is to just give you some pointers and show you how things work. Guide you through all of these things just so you know what they are and you don't have to waste five-years doing trial and error. But after that, it's all up to your creativity. So yeah, the selection menu is really fun. You can do a lot of different stuff with it. That's why it's one of my favorites. And we'll move on to the next menu in the next lesson. Hope you enjoyed this one and we'll see you soon.
19. View Menu: Though this is Brendan, and in this lesson we'll review the View menu in the GIMP. And I just noticed I can actually be very careful with this if I showed you this in a previous lesson, if I click on this part up here, it'll make the menu pop out into a window mode. But you might not wanna do that because I tried it twice and it locked up twice. If I hit this one. Now, I'm doing it for the view window here now, and this seems to be okay, I can do it on this one, but don't do it on that top one. As a matter of fact, just don't do it at all. I'm only doing this for demonstration purposes or go ahead and try it on your other softwares all closed and not to worry. And everything's backed up and save because you don't want your computer to lock up. Okay, so for now we'll just have a look at this in the View menu. We have a new view, which actually I'm not even sure what that means. Some of these things. Click on New View. I'm not sure what they, what they intend with that. Let me have a look because I haven't some of the things I never really had the need for. Okay. So basically it just gives me another window. Let me see if I if I draw in this and go back here. Oh yeah, it's the same one that's kind of interesting, that could be useful. I even learned something myself this time. Okay, So, but for now, that wasn't something I was intending to go into. Dot for dot. Turn it on, turn it off, see what happens. A lot of stuff in the View menu is just going to show you. Yeah, it's just going to give you a different views, basically what's going to happen. And let me see. You can zoom in here. Dot for dot is probably referring to the exact size that you're, that you're at with it. Again, if anything here is important, then I will let you know about that. But some of these things I just don't even know. There's a few things that I don't know and the ones I don't know, there's usually a reason for it because it's tied. Very important. So this one, you can zoom in here. I'm trying to get back to where I was. Excuse me in from like doing two things at once. Full-screen shrink wrap, these are user view modes here and see what happens if we go in to shrink wrap mode that just lines it up perfectly. Full screen, obviously as full-screen is, these are all just different modes of view that you can go into some ECM in full-screen now. And I can go and either check that offer, uncheck it. So I think you can use the Tab key, F11. Tab key also is another view which they don't show you here. And let me see if I can go do that now. You have to do the Tab key you go, it closes all the docs and dialogue so you can focus on not just your art. And that's really good if you're drawing. So you can move all that stuff by the way and just play with a pencil and stuff. Navigation window. Well, let's click it, see what happens. That's over here. So you can use that window to navigate. See, that's why things like this. I just don't use them OK. If I find a completely unnecessary. So yeah, I'm not going to continue to tell you about things that are unnecessary, but I just want to go through this and make sure there isn't anything that's That's important that, you know, I'm catching it. Yeah. But most of these up to this point, pretty self-explanatory. It's just helping you to have a customize your view experience so that you can have everything, how you need it. Now something down here that is very important. From this point forward, it gets very important. Show selection, you want to have that checked because if it's not checked when he selects something, it won't show it to you. You won't be able to see there's B lines that they call them that are buzzing around the selected area show layer boundary. This is also important. I would say, for example, if I were to make a new layer right here, let me move this out of the way temporarily. How to make a new small layer? And let's get back to the layer section there. So here I have the little layer. I can move it over here and you can actually see the boundary. There's like lines around it there, right? So what if I go into that, the View menu and say Take layer boundary now I can't see it. So it depends. If you're if you're just showing something to somebody and you don't have to have to deal with those lines. I guess it's okay, but if you forget that it's a layer that could complicate things for you later. So I would suggest keeping that on Show Guides. This is where things get important. And I have to jump out of the menu for a little bit. Let me just close this one. If I were to, let me just delete this layer. If I were to want to draw something and make it very, very symmetrical, very perfect and have things aligned well and stuff like that. That's where you got to use these guidelines. And let me make sure that you can see these here, these lines here, right? As I can pull them out, they're like little rulers and I can pull them out from the side. So let's say, for example, if I want to say sum, this is a list, making a list of text and you know, how about this list item, right? So we're going to have multiple things in a list and we're going to have row 3 in the list. I have all of these things, these random texts, but we want them to be lined up and excuse my spelling there. So if I select this and what's going to happen when I bring it over, I want to, I want them to all be aligned. Notice how it kind of snaps to the edge here. And you get the zoom tool out here. And bring that out right over, right over here. Okay, so notice when I grab this, whoops, not that one. I'm gonna try and grab this item here. This is a list, this text here, and look at how it just kind of snaps. I go over a little bit with this. Notice how as I can move it around here very freely. But then when I come over here, kinda like snaps into place, just snaps right in there. It's actually, it's like gravity is pulling it away from a just snaps in there. So I don't have to worry too much about alignment because anything that I tried to move around, It's just going to snap right right on there. And now we get a nice well, it's not even, but at least it's lined. Because of this font to whoever. Is there an extra space in there? Yeah, This fonts little weird. What if this first now there's something weird about the extra space. Oh, I know why because I pulled this one over and it's, it's actually it's centered. So I have to left align this one. Yeah. And if I go to select this one, left align it and this one. So they're all left aligned and they're all snapped onto the edge of that border there. So now if we go over to the bottom layer and you can see they're not perfectly spaced vertically speaking, but yeah, they're all snapped up and lined up there. And that's an example of one thing you can do with these guidelines. The list of things you can do just goes on forever. You see a very, very professional drawing or not drawing but a illustration being done. You'll almost always see, especially for graphic design, you'll always see tons and tons of these lines all over the page because a graphic designer is going to want to make sure that everything is aligned perfectly. Alignment is so critically important when it comes to things like graphic design, if you're designing a webpage or a menu or something like that. So that's what these guides are for reason, I'm going through all of this obviously it's very important for the view. And also and to this menu here where it says snap, snap to guides. If I take that off, if I take that feature off than I move around here, whoops. Let me zoom in a little. Move around here and grab this. See now it's not going to snap to the guide anymore. I'd have to zoom all the way in and get it to the perfect pixel, which is kind of hard to do with a mouse. Because it's no longer going to snap to the guides. Even more so if you're drawing, it becomes, it's both a blessing and a curse. So redrawing sometimes. If you want to draw straight line. How did I get into this brush? And it's a very strange brush. Okay. Yeah, back to normal. Okay, Well, here I am drawing a line. Right now I have it set so it won't snap to guides. So let's look what happens when I draw the line here. See it's a little shaky right? Now if I go back to the view menu and say that it should snap to the guides. Now when I draw the line in that general area, it's always going to keep it perfectly lined up along that line. So that can also be useful in many drawing situations, although you could also just draw a perfect line. And so usually if I'm using guides to show me where the edge of the page should be for a comic book or something like that. I actually find it to be annoying because I tried to draw and it keeps snapping to that part right there from trying to draw something. So it's both important to remember to turn off the guides. You want to be able to turn them off as well as turn them on. So go into here and actually right now just take that off. Snap to guide. Okay, so I'm not going to zoom in because it's getting to be a hassle. But I'll just go through here. Snap to guides, snap to grid. You can show the grid and that is that right there. But you actually see is there's a grid in here that goes not pixel by pixel, but maybe it seems to be like every five pixels or so. And I assume you can probably customize that in here somewhere. But I don't know where at the moment. I personally don't find it to be important. Very important, but as you can see, you have very, it's very detailed. If I were to say snap to guide now, we're not going to snap to an a that's not snap to guides and snap to grid. Right? Because that's the grid we have. Snap to grid. Every little line I draw is going to snap to one of those grid lines are not perfectly if I actually try to force it to go into middle like this, it'll, it'll skip it. But it'll, it'll gravitate towards see how straight that line is I'm drawn. Normally. If I were to turn off now if I turn off the snap to grid, if I turn it off and try and do the same thing, you see the difference That's very wavy. I do not have a perfectly steady hand. So that can also be useful if you're being creative. There's all types of things you can do with that. And then the same thing you can snap to Canvas edges. That means everything that goes near the canvas edge, which is the Canvas edge, is referring to this, you know, the basically the sides, the top, the bottom, and the left and the right, the edge of the image. So if I had, I'll go back to this text. If I want this to all snap perfectly to the edge and get it line up and snap right into place there. Then we could do that with the snap to edge. And that's pretty much it. This is going to get really boring if I keep going on like this. But the View menu, basically, it's probably the most used menu by graphic designers if you're trying to just have things aligned perfectly and snap into place. And you know, these grid lines and stuff, it's really good for graphic design and getting everything perfectly aligned for user interfaces or webpage. You could do a webpage design, a mock-up of a design and stuff like that. Also just to customize your view in a way that you find most comfortable for yourself. Obviously doesn't look too good the way that I had this looking right now. But yeah, you get the point. Okay, so that's it for this one. And the next menu we'll do in the next lesson is going to be the image that should be short and sweet. And hopefully soon we'll be moving on to playing with photos. So we'll see you soon.
20. Image and Layer Menus: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go over the image and layer menus. And I'm not going to use the zoom tool for this one because it's actually getting a little annoying and cumbersome to deal with that. But these menus are not very long anyway. And if you can't read it clearly from your screen, I'll just read it out to you. And I assume you'll be playing with a software yourself too. So yeah, shouldn't be too hard to figure out. So what we're gonna do with the image and Layer menu usually mostly has to do with the actual image itself, the shape, the size, and the rotation of it. So what I'm doing here is just showing you this is the draw, draw a bowl area, the area which you can draw on. It goes from top to bottom. It's this long and from left to right. So vertical and horizontal. So that's the only amount of space that we can draw on there. And it's basically what we call the full canvas. Even if I take this layer here, which we had here. And this layer, I can move it over here, right? And what we'll see is it gets cropped off at this edge. And even if I draw over here, for example, if I draw off the canvas up here, you can't see it. Now when I move it back into the viewable area of the canvas, now I can see what I drew over there. I see it goes out and then in. So this area which is viewable and draw a bowl, that's what we call the canvas. So what would happen if I were, for example, doing, let me get this back where it belongs for our drawing, an evening scene. And maybe you had a mountain here and, and little castle and in the background, something like that. That looks more like a cactus and then a castle. But use your imagination, is a castle far away there. And we have, maybe there's the moon over here. And then I decide that actually I want the castle to be in the middle, but I also have something else over here, like little buildings or something. So I don't want to move everything over because then there's buildings I drew will disappear, right? So what I can do is make it longer, try and make it longer over this way. Well, of course, if you're on using piece of paper, this situation, you'd be in trouble unless you're willing to take on another piece of paper to extend it. But luckily here in GIMP, we can go to the Canvas size. And as you'll see in this dialogue here, we can change the width and the height of the canvas. Now it's set to 100, 920, which is almost 2000. Now let me make it up to 2200 wide and we'll click the center button. Now actually undo that. I don't want to center it. I want to keep it over to the left. But just to show you in the cases where you do want to center it, you can do that or you can grab it and slide it to the left, slider to the right. And that'll keep the canvas, you know, the the original drawing will be wherever you light it up there. So if I keep it slid all the way to the left here, you'll see this drawing stays over to the left over here, but I get my extra Canvas space. So now we have the extra space I can Tune, go ahead and continue to draw my mountains over here, right? Nope, we'll get what happens is I draw it this way. It's still stops here because we change the canvas size, but we didn't change the layer size. This is maybe not the greatest feature of GIMP, but the canvas ended layer are completely separate entities and you do have to realize that and deal with them as such. So what I'm gonna do first is get that bottom layer because you can see all the blank space here. Blank space, excuse me. The blank space here. I want that to be filled up with white to right. So I'm going to right-click on the layer, or we can go up to the Layer menu, which is what we're doing. It's the same menu, whether you right-click on the layer over here, as I said before, or if you go up here and we'll say layer to image size. Now the layer is to image size, but it's still blank because we didn't fill it in with anything. So I'm going to put my weight on and just fill in that space with Phil similar, similar colors. Now I'll do the same thing for the layer that I was drawing on. I'll go into Layer, Layer to image size. Now let's see if we can draw in that space. And there you go. Now we can draw on there. And we can add the little stars or, or whatever it was we wanted to add to our scene. Right? So that's with that little lesson right there. I think that pretty much, if you can understand that, that should give you a good understanding of the difference between a layer and the canvas and what happens when you're dealing with the Image menu, it's pretty much the whole Canvas. So if I want to go in here and scale the image, so this means the image is 2200 pixels wide. Well, if I'm going to share this on, I don't know, Facebook or Twitter or something that's bigger than I need, right? So I can scale it down to one hundred, ten hundred pixels wide. And it should automatically set. Height to keep it to scale for me at 491 pixels. And let's see what happens. And there it goes. It just made it smaller basically, but that made the entire image smaller. Just to give you an idea of why have to be careful with this. What if I scale the image and make it really, really small? Let me make it down to 200 pixels. And it'll automatically go to 98 high. Now it's very small, but what happens when we zoom in? It'll be that we made it so small that it doesn't really have enough pixels within this small area to show the detail. So you want to be careful when you're making it too small. It we're doing professional illustration or graphic design. You always want it to be much, much bigger. And then S, such as 4000 pixels wide by another for 1000 or 2000, depending on whatever it is that you're doing. I rarely go up to 10000, but yeah, three or 4 thousand, rarely 5000 even it's it's usually enough to, even if you're making posts, I've printed out big like prints for art shows and stuff that did find the, you know, they're like wall-sized poster art. And I got by fine with 4000 pixels. No problem whatsoever, made really beautiful colorful prints. So yeah, this is actually cool. I'm starting to like this drawing. Very primitive but just very fun. So yeah, that was one thing with the image. The other thing is transforming the image. We can flip the entire image horizontally, vertically, like that. These are all available in the image menu. So the canvas size, we can change it from black and white to gray scale and a higher part there. There's print skies, print size, which I mean, I don't print too much. So you might be on your end with that one, but I think we all pretty much know what that means is it's asking you for the width and inches and the resolution. So actually I think you can skip that. That's why I don't use that much. What I use is the doo-doo printing, but normally I would just go into scale image and that's the same thing. It's a little redundant. There are some funny things like that. Okay, so we can auto crop the image, something I would never do. Zealous crop. I've no idea why you would wanna do that either. It's basically just cutting out whitespace. But usually if I have whitespace, there's a reason for it. You know, it, that might be good though. If, let's say if I was drawing a logo here and I wanted to crop it perfectly and there was just whitespace around it. That would be actually be a good tool. I just learned something myself. And then we can merge all the layers, et cetera, et cetera. There's nothing in here outside of that. It's very complicated. So now at the layers, Let's go back a little bit. What if we experiment with resizing the canvas? But what happens if we resize a layer? I just want to make sure you can probably guess if you don't know already, but it's scaled to layer. Let's make it layer. We set it to a 1000 last time. Let's just bring it down to about how does use the arrow here and see where it lands 825. So when I make this layer 825 wide and it automatically goes to 400. Now you see what happened there is the layer got smaller, but the canvas is still the same size. I'm not sure if you can see that very clearly, cuz the white background is very, Yeah. It's just how it is. It doesn't stand out very much. So I try and change the color of the background here real quick. With this gray. There we go. So you see what happened to the layer got smaller. But the canvas is, is still the same size. So this is only in cases where you want the layer to be smaller. If you're going to scale the layer or bigger even and but keep the Canvas at the same size. When does that situation come up? Actually, all the time. There's a lot of times where I'll want to shrink one layer but not another one. Maybe because I'm copying and pasting a certain object and resizing it, right? So that happens all the time as layer. And then there's a lot of other things in here that I'm going to cover later. But basically, we have all the same tools with the layer. Now I can flip it horizontally and I can go in there and flip it vertically just like we did. But in this case, and it's only, it's only flipping that one layer and not the whole image. So yeah, whenever that situation comes up, Layer Mask I'm going to go into later. And that's, that's about it. There's nothing else very, very important here. So that's the image and layer menus. In a nutshell. Very, very important to understand the differences. Not complicated, but very important to understand that the canvas is a canvas and the layer is a layer. And whenever you want to re-size either of them or flip them or scale them, then that's the place to do it. You can also rotate, sorry, that's one other thing we have transformed, can rotate 90 degrees clockwise and that can be useful just to, you know, perhaps you want to rotate it temporarily just to draw in a, in a certain direction or for something like this. Or maybe permanently. What if you take some times you take a photo with your camera and you take it and landscape view, and it comes out sideways on your computer so you can flip it real quick in there and start working, you know, doing some other work on it. Yeah, that's image and layer. In a nutshell. Hope that was easy enough to understand. And if you have any questions, just send me a message and have a good day. We'll move on to the next lesson.
21. Colors Menu: This is Brennan, and in this lesson we're gonna go over the color menu. Now the color menu is very long, and I'm not going to begin to pretend that I understand everything in this menu because this stuff is complicated. Color is really fancy thing that people seem to care about a lot. And yeah, that's, you know, it's pretty much everybody who knows anything about the the color wheel and how digital files work with color? There's a lot of argument and people argue about color. What's their favorite color? What looks better? You know, how much balance or brightness d like this and that, and the argument I guess is part of what makes it so complicated. In my mind, I don't think it's complicated, but people make it complicated. So I'm not going to waste too much time talking about it because it's very opinionated thing. But I'll go over the essentials of what you should know and at least what I know with many years of playing with this, going to mess around with photos a bit. You definitely want to know some of these, these top ones here, such as the color balance. Now, going back to regular art class, most people know that there's a couple of different ways to make color happen. And when it comes to print or digital, and that's either with the red RGB or red blue green. Here we have yellow, red, green, blue RGB. And we also have the CMYK, cyan magenta. Now, that works purely in RGB. And they have the words with cyan and magenta here. But I don't know. No, I don't understand the science behind that. I only know that in this little tool that I'm playing with here, I can play with this and make those colors change. Okay, That's about as scientific as it gets. And whether or not you need to know the science to that in order to be a designer or anything like this. I don't know. I'm not going to claim to know what I think as an illustrator and an artist is that you can use these tools when you need to, to do different effects and have fun with it. You should understand that they're there trying to touch up photos. That obviously these can be very useful if you know what you're, what you're doing with them. And they can also be very dangerous and make really ugly, weird pictures like this. So be careful. That's as far as I'm going to get into that. But there is some interesting buttons on this little dialogue. And click this one, it says shadows. This one says midtones, and this one says highlights, and it seems to automatically play with the levels, but I'm not really noticing a difference. Okay, So you can, you can play around with that. They're supposed to be some presets in here. There aren't. But apparently you can add some and save your favorite presets if you, if you do know how to play with these, I don't play with that. I normally draw directly and I'm choosing my own colors. So that's not too much of a problem. This Everybody's going to use a no, not this one will move into another one. This one also, it's pretty much the same as the last one. But you're doing it on a sliding scale. See there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, six colors that we have up here. And when you play with the hue, it's going to change those colors. It's kind of interesting what it does. Let me get back to the beginning of that hue saturation. What we're doing here, if I choose nothing up here, then it goes through all of the rainbow of colors. So here's blue, there's green. Ever get into yellow, brown, and then here's a purple. And back to or that's blue. So that wasn't blue over there. What was that? That was greener or yellow. Right. So it goes through the whole spectrum such as you have over here on the color wheel. And you can, you know, so if you wanted to put a certain type of color, overall color to an image, you could put this on the, Choose the hue that you want. And then you can choose the amount of the lightness here and the saturation of that color. So you can choose to make it less saturated, such as less saturation means less color. So here it is. If I pulled the saturation all the way down, it basically goes black and white. And then as I slowly move it up, it'll allow the color to come in. So that's one way if you wanted to go black and white, you could go into here and your slide that saturation down, right? And you just go black and white. Or if you just want it to be a little bit more. If you didn't want it to be so intense, the color to be so intense and you bring that saturation down a little bit. Like that and you get a certain kind of effect. The easiest way to go straight into black and white will be go and use the D saturate option in the color menu. And they have different options here for lightness, luminosity, or average. And that will give you different, different effects depending. I usually just leave that lightness. Where were we again? So the hue saturation, That's basically what you can do. And let me go back a few steps. Whoops, wrong button. Yet There's my color again. And so with this one here, the hue saturation. What I thought was interesting is you can select a particular color. So I select, and this says here, select primary color to adjust. So I'm going to select the red. And then what happens if we take down the saturation, right? Notice it's leaving some color, so it's working on that one particular color. So bring down the lightness while red is selected. And basically it's sucking, sucking the red out of the image and leaving it like that. Which is kind of interesting. And then if we play with the hue while red is selected, it'll do, oh yeah, it's changing everything but the red or something like this. Yeah. It's rather complicated and to be honest, I don't understand. But there are some things in there. I have used this tool before when I wanted to change the overall color of a scene. For example, I had a, you know, a nighttime rainy scene and I wanted to make it all blue. So I played with the hue until I found that that bluish color. And of course it looks much better at that time because it was an illustration. This is a photo, so it looks weird. So after that one, colorize here, this does exactly the same thing as less when we're looking at. You can add the color to it, but it has less options. And I'm sure just different in some reason, but on the surface it's pretty much the same. Now here's brightness contrast. This is the beginners tool for touching up a photo. And we'll get more into that later. But basically, if you make it brighter, then guess what? It looks brighter. You make it darker, it looks darker. That's what brightness does. But the contrast level, there's very important to bring up the level of contrast. It just makes things not necessarily sharper, but it makes the delighters light and the darker, dark. So to give you more contrast, if I bring the contrast all the way up, the best way to understand contrast, let me, let me do this first. I'm going to desaturate it. So we're going black and white, right? And then we'll go into the brightness contrast. Now what's going to happen when I slide the contrast up and you slide it all the way up, liquid it does, it makes the lighters. It makes all the light more light, and it makes all the dark more dark. So that's how you can get that kind of, that French film noir kind of thing. I don't know if it's French or they call it film noir. I think the word noir is a French word. But yeah, film noir or, you know, that old detective comic book style kind of look where you bring that contrast all the way up. And that's for me, that's the easiest way to understand what contrast is. It just makes all the lighters more light and all the brights and all the darks more dark. Excuse me, I keep stumbling on that word or that phrase. And so you can see now I have an even balance of there's some gray, there's some white and it's very smooth. But when you raise that contrast up, then it just, it flattens all the whites. So all the white becomes very white and all the dark becomes very dark. Now if we do that with color, it's a different phenomenon because here's adding contrast to the color because we have color, right? So all of the reds, if it's a little bit read, it becomes super red. It was little bit blue, it becomes super blue. It just flattens everything out. And that can make a huge difference. When we lower the contrast to look at what happens there, everything becomes more muted. It just balances out into that gray color. So by playing with brightness and contrast, you can in fact improve the overall quality. Not quality, but just, I guess You can bring more life to it, bring more color to it, or it can deaden it a little bit. It's, like I said in the beginning to beginners guide to Photo Touch Up and it is important things to understand. So you've got your hue saturation that we played with, playing with the colors and the first few and then you've got your brightness, contrast and contrast threshold. I'm not gonna go anywhere near this. I have no idea how it works. It looks like it's again, playing with the lights and the darks and giving you, you know, uh, different things, different, different ways of letting the light through. And we already said I'm going to skip a couple of these because again, they're just out of my league. D saturate, we already said is going to turn it black and white. If you invert it, it's going to give me the opposite of everything. So it'd be like your, your film kind of look. Undo that value. Okay, that's interesting. So that does that. I don't know if that would be of any use to anybody for any reason. If you're just doing regular design. But it's there if you need it. And you wanna make that creepy look, you can do that. Interesting. And yeah, I don't wanna make it sound like I'm just going through here experiencing this with you. I'm supposed to be teaching. So I'm only going to basically leave it at that. Those are the things that I understand. And we have a lot of auto things here. So auto equalize this I have used before and what it does is it tries to do some automatic functions that you would normally want to apply to something like a photo. And so that one there to equalize, it's supposed to balance out the colors here we have white balance. So by applying that, it's trying to basically fix the photo and fix the color quality. Here's color enhance. These are automatic things and I have, what I can teach you is I've never found any of these to be useful whatsoever. Normalized. Yeah, that didn't didn't even make a difference as you can see. So I I'd never spend any time using this at all. I would recommend using the top three color balance, hue, saturation and colorize, and brightness contrast. If you can master those three, I think you're pretty much good to go. Color phi. We already did. It can make it all yellow. It's basically just playing with colors. It's like a kid's toy here. And this list is so long of things, I'm not going to cover all of them. You can play with them yourself. It's basically just messing around with color. And it has some weird things in here. There's alien map thing I've done before. It just, it's, it's just a weird effect, right? Like that. That's all you can make an album cover. Just like that actually looks like That's a good album cover there. If you want to use that, just give me a message and it can give you the copyrights to it. So that's the color menu. In a nutshell. The important things to note in this or color balance, colorize, brightness, contrast, and desaturated. Black and white is used a lot. And that's about it. The other ones, in my opinion, they're just toys. Or if you're very professional and you know all these things about Alpha and Gamma channels and stuff like that. This is where to find it. And if that's the kind of person you are, then you'll know what to do. They're better than I do. So I hope you enjoy that. Next one. I think we have one more lesson where we'll cover. We don't need a cover tools because that's basically just a mirror of everything that's in the toolbox over here. This will just help you to open up different tools. And so we're gonna do is just do a quick review of the filters in the next lesson. And then we'll be done this section, I believe in moving on to more fun stuff where we actually make something. Okay. So we'll see you soon.
22. Filters Menu: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson, we're going to cover the last menu I'm going to cover as a filters. And as I said previously, sorry, I don't have the zoom tool on. This one is getting very cumbersome to deal with. But well, I guess I might want to zoom in here real quick. And just show you. Here's one thing up here. And I get this setup right on always on top. So I'd ever, okay. The one thing that I wanted to say up here is let's look at what we have up here starting from the beginning and just review. See that we have everything where the File Edit Select, we went through all that. Select is some of these are like utilities and some of them are like tools, right? File and edit and view. They're more like utilities, in my opinion, is what I'm trying to say because Tool is something more like you can use in the toolbox to work in the workspace, right? Whereas like file and edit, that's about opening files and editing, going, going back and redoing and undoing things. And the same thing with view. View is more about setting up your environment in many ways. Whereas the Select menu enables you to do a lot of things to the image. Same thing is true with the image and the Layer menu. The Layer menu and the image menu both allow you to actually transform the image and change the way that it is. This is also true for colors. We can play obviously with colors. I like the fact that the GIMP is so simple like this. You have images, image layers, layer color, it's broken down. So could almost say it's too simple where it's methodical, but it's just I don't know. Do you want things to be more complicated? I know sometimes other softwares, because of the complexity, they seem somewhat mysterious and more interesting and more intelligent and stuff. But aren't they just over complicating things? So I like it when things are simple. That way I can save my intelligence to be creative. And instead of wasting time trying to figure out what these people were trying to accomplish with their software. So that's another reason to choose the camp, of course. And so moving on, we have layers, colors, tools. As we said before, these are actually just the, the, all the tools that you can find in the toolbox, but they give you a menu form too, so it's a bit more convenient. You can choose whether you want to select your tool through here. And it's also a nice handy place to remind you of what the hotkeys are. As you can see, the hotkeys are all listed next to the next to the menu. Let me see if I can get back up there to Tools. Yeah. I'm just a little bit off. The zoom tool isn't the best thing. Now you can see, for example, a rectangle select R is the hotkey for that ellipse is e. So all those little letters you see on the right-hand side of the menu that sexually what the hotkey is on the keyboard to choose that. So that's a good reminder or a good place and go to double-check on that without having to open up too many, many. Now the last one, I just want to show you these ones here. The FX foundry and script through. I think they don't come with a default version of GIP. I installed them extra that they were the was called the data extras or something like this. Extra scripts and stuff. And so I'm not going to go over there because it's there's just too many of them. There's tons and tons of different plugins that enable you to do all different types of tricks. And my scripts here, these are actually my scripts that I wrote those, I made those and installed them here. So we'll go over that later if you're interested in that kind of stuff. And windows and help windows we already did in the beginning of the lesson of this course. And help. Well, if you need help there it is. Also a plugin browsers in here and we'll cover that later. So the only thing I'm gonna do now is the filters. And we're just going to go through this very quickly, much like a lot of the other menus. There's tons and tons of stuff in here and I don't claim to know all of it. It would be weird if I did know all of it. I'd be a strange robotic person and not a creative person. So I don't have a photographic memory. If I did, I wouldn't be doing this. What I'd probably be, I don't know, somewhere else doing some math or something. So yeah, I'm not going to continue to work with the zoom tool here because it's confusing. But you can play with the software yourself as we're going through it. Or or just listen to me and I'll tell you what I'm doing. So. One of the, there's, there are two key things I want to do here. First of all, let me just go do some random thing like edge detect or noise. And just to show you how this is, I'm just going to select it and hit Okay, and see what it does. And it does a bunch of processes and there you go. Now the photo has all this static noise to it. So if I undo it, you see there it's cleaner now. And when I redo it, if I can, I'll have to redo a whole bunch of things. I can't redo it. I'm going to undo it. That's more clear and well, I guess I'll just do it again where it was at one edge, detect noise, yeah, add film grain, and I just click this one. So I want to zoom in so you can see that better. It does all this processing. I would just gives it that style. A lot of these are just that, a lot of these filters that we have in here are basically just, just that much effect. That's what they do. They, they just add some kind of weird effects. You can go in here, enhance. And we have a red eye removal refocus. You can sharpen it. Just regular photo upgrades, blinds. What does that do? I don't even know. Yeah, it makes blinds to add thick lines like this. I don't know why would you want to do that is just weird effect. But if you go through and study all of these, you might actually come to find some of them are very useful in certain situations where you're being artistic and just playing around with things, you can do a gradient flare. I don't think that does anything. Lightened shadow and we had like sparkle. No idea what this does. I'm just randomly hitting some things just to show you. This is actually how, how I learned a lot of stuff. And then I'm going to show you the ones I do think are important. See that sparkle, sparkles come out of light. That could be, that could be interesting when used in the and the right situation. Okay? So some of the ones I do find very useful tell you is the blur and what he uses usually Gaussian Blur. And I'll show you an example of why that can be used or how it can be useful. What I'm trying to enhance, or actually d, Hence the opposite of enhance whatever where you might use to describe that. So let me select myself here in this photo roughly. And they go around here like this. And there we go. Then I'll invert that selection. So I have the background, the background, this photo is not very important, right? So what I'm gonna do is select that whole area and go into tools or the filter. I've gone to blur. And I use a Gaussian Blur. And since this is a pretty big photo, will have it, yeah, like 35, both horizontal and vertical. And we'll just let a blur that background up. So now you see, I mean, we're not talking about some really fascinating, amazing thing, but I just blurred out the background, which in turn brings my person much more into focus In the front. This can be used in all types of situations for, you know, for that, it just basically adds a very interesting effect to the photo. And in this case, I didn't even do it very well. If you can zoom in, you can see, you know, the, the line between the blurred and not blurred area. There's better ways to do that. But it's just to say that the blur, in my opinion is a useful tool in many situations. Another thing we could do is let me see what other ones we have distorts like the blinds emboss. People use this sometimes. It's still kind of effect. We get out of that. It makes the emboss. It's just, that's just a weird effect. Again, these things I don't use too much. So from there to here, blur, I use lightened shadow. I rarely use sometimes when I'm playing with text or you're making a logo or something like that, you can do some, some effects with that. Oops, I got to take that selection off. Okay. So what if I were to put some text here very quickly, put it in black. I'm going to say, well that didn't help much. Hello with the text. Make it a lot bigger. And we'll not that big. Yeah. Were problematic around here sometimes. Okay. But I finally get the texture I want it to be. Yes, Sorry, I have a, just a little hello. And I'm going to cut it and paste it just to make it so it's not a text layer anymore, it's a flat layer. And then we can go and I'm going to make that layer fill the whole page layer to image size. Now we go into our filters and go to lightened shadow and try to add a drop shadow. Let's see what happens. There you go and get a little, little shadow effect, right? So that's pretty good for design, for text design. You see there it is without the shadow. And then there it is with the shadow. It just adds a little shadow. I've always thought that was a pretty useful trick that would probably is commonly used by a lot of people. And we have lighting effects and this NADH, There's many lightened shadow effects. Now again, I'm not going to go through everything, just this stuff I use. Sometimes. When you're lucky, you can apply some of these artistic effects and the filters, and it's called artistic and you can do something like cubism and sometimes get a nice effect out of it just to make it kind of like that. Why you would use that? When I don't know. Maybe make a little background or something. It just makes it look like a painting basically. And there's a lot of the really gimmicky, they're just gimmicky things that you have in here. It's not great, but the important one, so definitely blur for me. You can play with enhanced to see if you can prove the quality of the photo. And there's just so much stuff in here I could play with the ripples and waves and let's see, a lot of it's just fun to play with, but the other important one is render there. This one is actually very important. You go into clouds. I use this a lot. Or not Cloud, sorry, actually, clouds can be useful too. It's very useful, but it's a little complicated. Fog. The choose a color and fog and just let it rip, and there it goes, it makes fog. I know that seems very simple, but I use this a lot just to separate the foreground and the background some times to add some texture to the overall thing. So I added that when it adds the fog, for example, in this case, it makes it as a new layer. So now I can go to my erase tool. And whoops, it's on jitter and smooth stroke. And I can erase out myself out of that area. And the rest of it, there'll be fogged in. These are just a 101 stupid effects that you can do to bring the person into focus in an image and add some effects to it. So there I am popping out and the fog is in the background. That's only one of many, many things you can do with that fog. Let's say for example, you had like a big monster and you're drawing skin on it. And instead of drawing like some scaly, maybe it's a big lizard. And you're trying to make it like scaly skin and you just draw like green color. Well that's not very scaly and it's not very interesting. But if you put the green to put it under some cloud effect and then add some other effects. That combination of effects, you might start to get some scaly skin. But I'm not gonna go into that right now because it's not art class, so we're just going through these tools. All right, so that's a render. And this whole area I find very, very useful. The, a lot of this stuff appear like I said, it's just gimmicky. I like Blurb, that's useful. Lightened shadow can be useful. And then I skip a bunch of this stuff and I just come down to Render where we have these clouds and the fog can be very useful. Plasma. If you want to get some random color. Watch how this one works and set that layer and it gives you some random color which you can add. Obviously it's not going to do anything special to this photo, but that can be very useful sometimes, believe it or not. And back to the menu here. We want to render clouds, That's enough of that. And then patterns. This stuff can also be very, very useful if you want to make a checkerboard or make a grid. Let's say for example, the need lines to go across. I can do make thick lines here. If I just want to make blinds sort of effect, I need to take off which one vertical lines, right? So I just have horizontal lines coming in. You can choose a color, I'll choose black, and that'll basically draw lines. So now I have that, you can use that to make a grid. There's many artistic reasons why you might need that. And also just for random design effects and stuff like that. That's in render. Renders where you're actually like drawing things. It's almost like mechanical. And you can draw a checkerboard like this. Again, that can become useful for various reasons. So that's what my favorite part of filters is. This render area because you're actually using it to draw things which can be used for various effects. And the rest of stuff here I don't have a taste for, I don't like it. There's there are some tools in here to enhance photos and stuff like that. And there is a Python and script foo, which will help you to where you can play with programming and do some of your own custom. Maybe even make your own scripts in your own little distorts and stuff like that. And we'll get into that in the later lessons, a couple lessons later, few lessons later, we'll get into that. For now. That's it for the filters many I didn't want to spend all day in here, as you can see, it's way too much to cover. But I just hit the highlights and stuff I do like and stuff I don't like. And you can go in there and play with it yourself. I'm sure you'll find something new. And if you give it a chance, maybe something you didn't like to begin with, you might actually find to be useful later on. If you're creative enough, you can always make something useful, right? So that's it for this lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. That was the filter menu. And I believe that's it for this section. Next two will be getting into playing with photos a bit more actually doing things with photos. As you can see, we're already slowly, gradually getting into that. And then we'll be drawing from our imagination and doing a little bit of illustration and stuff. I'm not going to get deepen that. It's not an art class. It's just, this is a software class. But I will it all for the sake of learning some tips and tricks to use to get better. I'll just dig in a couple of photos and do a couple of illustrations so you can see how I do it. All right, great. And we'll see you soon. That's it for this lesson and hope to see you soon in the next one.
23. Colorizing a Black and White Photo: Hi, This is Brandon, and in this lesson we're going to cover colorizing a black and white photo, which in today's day and age is not an extremely important tool or technique to use, but it can come in very useful. And there are actually still many people out there. I've seen others actually groups of people on Reddit who request help and getting black and white photos colorized and it is a useful thing and there's a lot of black and white, old black and white photos out there that can be brought to life with color. Aside from that, it also teaches us very useful technique for painting, which is still used in illustration. I use it myself, where I start off making the drawing in black and white, and then I start to color it using this technique. So that's all very useful. What we do basically is we start off with the black and white layer. And this photo came from Wikipedia. If, if you're interested in getting it. And it was originally a color photo which I just set to black and white with this desaturate, a tool in the color menu. So what we're gonna do is we're going to leave this layer as it is. We're going to add another layer on top of it. And let's imagine what happens here. If we start off by choosing only get kind of a lion, orange kinda color. And if we were to just start drawing on top of it, you see that's going to cover up the photo and we obviously don't want that. Another thing that we could do is lower the opacity on this layer. So we can draw the orange and it'll still kinda go over the lion so we can still see the lion. However, this technique is not desirable because it's going to desaturate a lot of the values in the original image. So the blacks won't be as black and whites won't be as white anymore because we're covering over them slightly with this, with this layer. So what we're gonna do with that, the layer that we're coloring on is we're gonna go up to the mode here. And I'll bring out the zoom tool so you can see where we're at. Here's my layers. I have the Tigris and that's the image by Jim core bet photographer, which I found on Wikipedia if you're interested. And I added the layer here above that we have the capacity and right above there we have this little mode drop-down menu, and by default it's set to normal. So that means the mode of this layer which I'm currently on, which is called layer with the orange on it that's set to the normal mode, which means it's basically just normal. If you draw or paint on it, it'll cover up whatever is underneath it. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select that. And there's a big drop-down menu here with all types of different effects which I'm not going to cover besides the multiply effect. So watch what happens when I set this to multiply. Boom, just like that. Suddenly, now you can see all of the darks are still darker. And it's just blending into the values with that perfectly. Now if we go back and compare, set it back to normal and just lower the opacity. Now you can see what I was talking about, how this seems kind of ghostly. It's just like it's all fading off into that one color of orange. We don't want that to happen. So we're just gonna take this layer and set it to multiply. And I don't know why they chose to call it multiply. I think that could have called it anything. But that's the word they use and this is what it does. It makes it so that whatever you color above or whatever you color on this to the layer below it will simply accept this layer as a multiplication to it, I guess is the only way of putting it. So I'm going to go ahead and just start coloring this line. And in this situation, obviously, I have a huge advantage by using a webcam tablet. So while we're on that topic, if you don't have one, it's a bamboo. They have different versions of this. There's the 2is and there's, I don't even know if the bamboo is. I think they're selling it, but they seem to like not marketed as much as they do the other ones that into us, stuff like that. And we use a light gray color here and go for the spots that are supposed to be white. And at this point, I don't even know exactly what the colors are that I'm supposed to be drawing in here. I think these areas here look like they're supposed to be white. This area is definitely white. There's not going be incredibly realistic because they don't know exactly what colors it is I'm looking for. But then again, this is art, so you can do whatever we want with it. One thing I can do because you can see these areas here and the point of doing these, these photos and stuff, by the way, is not just to show you how to do one trick. I'm going to be doing various tricks throughout this and this. So, you know, whether or not it comes out like a perfect item. That's not the point. The point is just to look at the tools that I'm using and notice some of the tricks that I'm doing here. So I'm going to turn down the opacity of this brush so that when it paints, paints a little bit lighter. And that way, you can see how we can slowly fade off into some of these orange areas because it's not like there's the stark orange areas that just go up to a line and suddenly it turns into orange. It, in some places it kinda of like slowly, gradually fades off like that. Let me bring the opacity down even a little bit more around the edge here might be a little gray. His ears, these parts, I do believe are supposed to be white, including the inside of the year. It would be better if I had reference for this. But even just like that, you can see already we have a pretty realistic version of the, you know, it's coming to life, it's coming to color and make long story short. Now, I, I lost my color. I want to go back to that orange. I lost it. Remember if you recently used a color, just tap over here to open up this color dialogue. And there's this color palette here, which it saves all of the colors that you recently used as starting off with this one, this is the last one. This is the second to last, third to last. So it goes from left to right and top to bottom in that order. So this is a second and last color I used it, it must have been this orange that was using. And again, with lower opacity, I can just slowly color that orange in there. Like that. I don't know why. It seems a little bit different now. I guess because of the capacity. Okay. And what happens if I erase in this area? Yeah, that'll be fine. So let me hide this layer. And if we hide this photo layer here, you can see that's basically the color that I've put in. And it looks like absolutely nothing left by itself. But when put together with the image and having that multiply effect put onto that layer. Then we start to get a pretty good effect and put this pesky all the way up. You know? Yeah, I think that's not the same color I had before. Let me get my color picker out. Yeah, That is actually a different orange. I don't know why it should have been the same. But anyway, now I have it. We're back in action, that's it. And it will bring the opacity back down again and slowly fade that orange into their spots right there. And that'll be good enough. And that, this is a nice and easy one. Imagine if it was a person, we'd have to pay a lot of detail to different color in their eye color and stuff. I don't know exactly what color a Tigers did. I say lion before? This is a tiger. If I said lie and please forgive me. And since we're doing this, we can take advantage. Also, you can use this as a technique to do abstract colors or abstract art. You can take what was an original color photo, make it black and white, and then start adding your own color so you're making a cartoony, but it still looks like it's real, right? So it's almost like making art, making color art with an original photo. So take any photo you want, make it black and white, and then start using this technique to add your own crazy colors in there. And that would also be very, very useful technique. I think that looks pretty cool, doesn't it? Pretty interesting. So that's just one little tip. Using that multiply layer there, there's a lot of things you can do with these modes. But I don't, I don't go too deep into this burn is another one. See what happens there. The burn, it just has this burning effect. As you can see, it really intensifies the color of whatever you have in there. And it usually takes, there's overlay. Alright, they all do different things. Soft, light, hard light, right? Look at that. So you can play with this and go through the manual and find all these different things that you can do. Others divide, we have multiply, we also have divided. Okay? So yeah, I just wanted to show you that tip though, using Multiply is probably the most commonly used effect when it comes to adding a mode to a layer. And it's used for this coloring technique both in illustration and enhancing photos and stuff like that. So I hope that's useful for you. And we'll see you in the next lesson.
24. Superimposing: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go over moving things around in photos. Basically what I'm talking about and this is to be able to superimpose things. I wanted to find a simple, easy, simple language way to say it. And so I called it moving and resizing things. But actually what most people call Photoshopping in, right? But of course, Photoshop is not really a burp on, it's just something that happened. We turned it into a verb and the actual verb would be to super-impose, I believe is, is the correct thing. And so what we're gonna do is, I'm going to try and take a picture of me, which you've seen if you follow these courses, you've seen too many times. I'm going to try and take this one and just take out the me of this and put me into this scene over here. Now, of course, this is absolutely ridiculous. There's no reason for me sitting in this position with headphones on to be in a beach scene whatsoever. But I will do it. That's what we're gonna do. And we'll learn the techniques of how we do things like this appropriately and make it look good while we're doing that, I'm going to do my best. But it's going to be hard. One thing to note is that this wasn't meant to be to begin with. And you should notice that if you want to do this well, that you have to pay attention to the lighting. You can't just take an image of somebody if you wanted to still look like a photo and do things like move, lighting angles and stuff. And it's very clear in this photo by my head and body here that the light is coming from this side. There, shade on this side. And all of these things that basically would not be apparent in if I was actually standing on a beach on a sunny day like this, that would not be the case. So it's not going to look realistic, but we can still go through the motions, still do the process of moving me into that photo. And there's many ways to do this. Well, I'm going to do is choose this relatively simple way of using. For starters, I'm going to leave my headphones in there. I'm going to cut myself out. And you can do this many different ways based on previous lessons I showed you. They're going to cut myself out and notice I'm leaving a lot of extra space around the edges here. I'm doing that on purpose. I don't want to, you don't have to kill yourself and zoom in and go pixel by pixel. That's not the way to do it. It's just too hard that way and it's unnecessary. Now I open these in two separate images. That's why we have different tabs. I can flip back in here. But you could just as easily do the same thing. You know, like I showed you earlier, just import as layer and have them both within the same workspace. But all I'm going to do for this situation because it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to copy that area which I just selected around him. And I'm going to paste it in over here. We can see already how ridiculous this is going to be. But it's all in good fun. Okay, so we're going to make that to a new layer and we're going to position it someplace appropriate, such as down here. Here I am at the beach ready to take your call. I look like a what do you call them? Like a teller marketer. Now, we know this isn't going to look very realistic to begin with, but let's do our best. The first thing that we need to do is take away all that extra stuff that we have on the sides there. This is not difficult at all, as you can see, when I copy and paste all of the the extra area around me here that's under that layer. It's all transparent. So I've already uses black back here. You can see that some, I have a pretty good starting place right there to work with. So all I wanted to do, one thing I can do to make this a little bit easier is that a very strange color? Another layer such as this bright blue here, I'll just fill the whole layer up in between, in between the background and me. And now I can zoom in to me and just go into eraser mode with a nice soft brush and just take that out like that. Notice how it has a soft edge. So yeah, because it has a soft edge, it's going to be easy to get around the edges right there. So this won't take too long. Since the finished result. I don't want to leave the black line around me. But the finished result is going to be much further out, zoomed out like this. We don't have to worry too much about being perfect. At this point. There are other ways of going about this too. And I can go in there and numinous like, you know, start to Nick away at the shirt. Want to really be perfect? Because we have a soft edge, so it's doing a look relatively natural. One thing I cannot have is these dark lines here because that's going to stand out. And there is here. And the same thing up here. Even this might be a little bit too much work. I think there's an easier way of going about this, but for now, this is one. We'll just call it a beginner's technique. I have a couple other techniques in mind. I'm thinking of while I do this, if I could simplify it, but this isn't, this isn't too bad. I'm going to zoom in there and take out some of this suite. We did take out most of it. To begin with. When we cut it out. There we go. Now take this layer away. And we can still see some white spots around there. Don't really want that stuff to happen. So do this. And that's, you know, that's not too bad right there. And zoom in and clean it up a little. If you see any colors that really stand out, it's especially on the edges that you don't want things to stand out too much and have that right there. Now one thing we could do is also notice while we're here, the difference in color values. This is a in the background we have this bright sunny day going on. And then me in the foreground, I have the sharp contrasts of like, you know, you can obviously tell that I'm sitting inside. Reason for that has lot to do with the values. And the values of either somebody or some thing sitting inside is going to be very different from outside where you have this brilliant sunlight shining are very thick. So we can go to this layer of Maine and use the colors, color, balance or one of these things in here, I'll go to brightness contrast. First of all, and see if this, playing with this a little bit might help me. Just raise the brightness a little bit. You don't want to go up like that. It's obviously it'll look like a ghost or something. Just kind of make it look like I blend in with the scene, right? Play with the contrast too. Obviously it would go up here, stand out too much. Down here, I look like a ghost. So you want to find the place where it just fits right in the middle. Now it looks like I fit into that scene a little bit more naturally. Actually, if we shrunk it down a bit, you might think that he was there and Alice squatting down on the beach right there looking at yeah. So, yeah, that's not a real perfect technique. I wonder if we add multiply to this. That would help. That makes it we're just thinking one of these one of these I suspect might be able to know that because it's going to do too much work with the layer beneath it. Yeah. But yeah, that's one simple technique. It only took a few steps, we cut it out, we moved it, and then we erase the edges. Very, very simple and got the job done. You could continue to work on it if you wanted to with more detailed brush tricks. And for now that's the best technique I have. This type of situation looks pretty good to me. If you have any questions or better advice, go ahead and send me a message. And that's it for this lesson. Hope you learned something and we'll see you in the next one.
25. Using Layer Mask on Photos: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're gonna go over the layer mask. Layer mask. Layer mask is a tool intended to use four layers, as the name suggests. And what you do with layer masks, you can help the two different layers to merge together. Or at least this is what I do with it. There's probably, you know, such as with all the other tools in the GIMP, It's all a matter of your mat. Your imagination is going to determine what you can ultimately do with this. But the point of this lesson, the goal of this lesson is to understand the ability that the layer mask has, or at least one or two of it because I don't know all of them. It gets a little bit over my head even sometimes. So yeah, let's just dive into it and I'm going to show you a real obvious example. Try make it clear and simple as to what we're doing here with this. What I have here is a zoom tool, which is going to help us to zoom into the menu here for those of you with smaller screens, and also even on larger screens, the font sizes and stuff with even with the best video quality that I can provide here, it gets, gets a little hard to read. So here's the layers, as you can see over here. And I already imported a few layers to experiment with. Now if I right-click on one of these layers, layers, I'll get the menu here. Or I believe we can also, if you want to go up to the probably right-click on the layer while it's active and go to let me see, I could be wrong about this. Yeah, in this case, it actually another it is mask, Yeah, Add Layer Mask, singular here, mask, Add Layer Mask. Or you can directly right-click in the layers panel and go to Add Layer Mask. And let me bring that over a little bit more. Yeah, Add Layer Mask. This is what we're going to do is add a layer mask. So you can find that in either and also in the top menu, it should be up there too, under mask. So I'm gonna go ahead and add a layer mask to that. Now, here we have some options and what we're gonna do is just leave these options alone. Just use the default option, which says full capacity. Now we have a choice between white with full capacity or black with full transparency. And the result of these is basically going to give us an opposite effect, which means in essence they do the same thing but with different colors. You'll understand what that means in a minute. And these other ones here, I'm just going to leave those for now because I not a 100 percent tested on those, but they probably do a similar effects. What the layer mask is, is it actually adds a mask. You won't be able to see it at first, but it adds a mask to a layer so that you can do some tricks with it, end with what I know of it so far, what it usually does is dealing with transparency, although there's probably other tricks that can be done with it. Okay, So let me just go ahead and click the Add button. So we have our layer mass now. And you can see it here in the menu. There's a new white box that standing to the right of the thumbnail on the original image, which is this picture of me, right? So you can actually select both of them. You can toggle and go back and forth. But after you add the layer mask, it's defaulted to highlight and be selected on this, which is actually the mask on that white box. That's actually the mask. And what we're gonna do is we're going to draw onto the mask to add some effect. Okay? So now that I have the layer mask and place, let me go over to my tools here and see what we can do. So I have to grab my stylus very quickly. What you wanna do since we added a layer mask and we said, I believe it was black, full capacity. We want I want to use black and white. Pure black and pure white. And you do need to have it for the, for the means of this lesson here, you should have it on a full black and white because we're going to be using gradient as well in a minute. So first of all, let's just experiment and see what this does. We have a full black on a brush here. Now, I'm going to start drawing in. I'm going to just start drawing, brushing around, painting, drawing around. And let's notice that what happens is I draw a, you make my brush a little bigger here. There's draw around on the outside of a picture of me and see what happens there. So as you can see, what's happening, as you can guess, is it's basically taking away everything that is black that I'm painting black, anything it gets painting black on the mask. Makes the layer go transparent. Okay, so I'm just going to keep touch this up little bit. So it looks a little bit presented will give us an idea. I don't like to waste too much time on these videos. The recommended length is somewhere between two to five minutes per video. As you have your following my course, you'll see I easily go beyond that too much. I jibber jabber law. And the reason is because I really like to make sure that you have every detail. And I hate to exhaust your attention span. So I hope that when you do feel fatigue Derby, start to zone out, just go ahead and stop the video and come back later. So there you go. We have a really clean effect. I could go in there and zoom in and clean it out. But look at how crisp and clear that differences between, you know, the difference between the layer on the top and the layer on the bottom and what it was. Excuse me. Let me just take this away from it. Don't need that now. And what it was is the layer on the top that has the mask and the one beneath it. I have two layers on urban on here. The one beneath it, which was an image underneath of it, got exposed while I was painting on the layer above it. The reason for that is because the mass just makes transparent this upper layer. And so the layer that's underneath it got exposed. If I had another image underneath it such as this one, then that would be exposed, right? So whatever visible layer is underneath, the layer that you're painting on with the layer mask is going to be exposed. And this is because of black, the black versus the white. Now if I wanted to bring back some of the original photo, I could flip into the white. See, I'm in the white color of brush right now. And just start, oops, not there on the wrong layer and on this layer mask, let me go back and just start painting it back in. So you see what it is. To understand what's happening here. It's when I paint with white. It'll keep the photo as it is. And when I paint in black, it will make it transparent. Basically. It's basically like erasing it. Now you might say, well, that was a really cool trick. But why bother doing that when I could just use the eraser? Well, this is where it gets really interesting. If black makes it transparent and white makes it opaque, which is solid. What happens if I use gray? Gray is in the middle, right? Because grays in-between black and white. So what it does, it makes it a little bit transparent. And you could do, You couldn't do that. Well, you could do it with actually, you could set the eraser settings to a low opacity, but you won't get the same perfect effect and you won't be able to. Yeah, I haven't on what color DO have it on now anyway, let me go back to where we were to show you what would happen with the eraser real quick. We need white to fill it in, right? Yes, there we go. Okay. Let me go back to this layer and use an eraser and put it on lowered capacity. And you see you will get a similar effect if I'd never let the brush leave the canvas. But what if I take it all the canvas and I'm gonna go back to do more detail now. See it starts getting heavier and heavier. The effect is completely different. So in other words, you wouldn't be able to get as crisper clear of a perfect level of opacity that you would as you can with this. And because of that, in addition, that since we're painting and not erasing, we can do something such as use the gradient tool here. I'll set the gradient tool to gradually fade from black to white on the layer mask and we'll see what happens. Well, you guess what's going to happen first and then I'll do it. 123, go. And there you have it. Since it gradually fades from black to white. That means that the mask is going to interpret that as being fading from transparent to a pick. And I can choose to do this in a very broad way. So it's slowly, gradually fades. Or I can make a very narrow transition such as this. Do it over here, do it over there. Or we could play with the other settings and this in the gradient fill tool. And do something like this where my head is floating in the scene. They're almost kind of a romantic kind of thing. You know, something like that. And then I can flip over after having done that, maybe flip over to a white brush and start doing something. Doing some kind of weird effects or something. In this case, I don't really have any, any particular idea of what I wanna do. So I'm just showing you some random tricks that I could do here doesn't necessarily look good, but is to go to show you using your imagination and creativity. That is a very, very useful tool that you could use there. And so just to push the envelope a little bit, I brought out another image here. Or it can also add a layer mask to a layer mask, the same one. And again, we'll start painting on here with black mega transparent. And I could have done this, actually would have been easier, or the other one. And now you see I had the image underneath was this is a shore scene and the image on the bottom. And then we go actually let me go back real quick to fill that in. Now. The whole selection, right? So I had this scene. You've got to make the point here that this is a datetime beach scene. This is not evening, but, you know, Dawn. Was the sun going down at the time I took this photo by the shoreline. And so maybe I like the beach in this one, but I like this guy and this one. And so that's why I thought this might make an interesting example. Of course, your creativity can go wild with this and you can do all kinds of things. Who knows? What you can achieve? Many, many things. You can use this technique to blend in people into scenes or you can use it too. Super, super impose things. For example, as we did in the previous lesson, I showed you a different method to superimpose. You can also use this to superimpose. What if I had multiple items I wanted to superimpose on one image and just brush them in easily like that. And of course, this sliding effect, like this is always fun. You can make a montage of different beautiful photos cascading together and stuff like that. And when you have the horizons lined up, it'll be really cool effect how like baby, if this was, there's actually two completely different scenes, but what it was the same scene and I did a daytime and nighttime and then transition like this. That would be really cool to write. So just use your imagination creativity. This is useful for illustration, for photography, playing around with the design. Things like that, very useful tool to keep in your arsenal. So I hope that you picked that up and, and use it. And I hope you learned a lot in this lesson and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one. See you soon.
26. Photo Touchups: Hello, this is Brendan. And in this lesson we're going to go over photo, touch up with yet another photo of me. The reason I use photos of me is because they're there and they don't have any copyright on. Well, asides from my own copyright, if there is any, normally don't care about my photos. I don't know why other people do so. Well, I mean, unless there's professional photography, but yes, let me not get off the track here. What we're doing in this lesson is going to be Photo Touch Up. The reason I think this is a perfect photo 2 and I didn't bother going online to find a better one is because this the spot I have on my head right here. I normally don't have a spot. And especially when you shrink the image for some reason, it just seems to stand out. I don't have a spot there. I must have scratched my head, had some hot chili peppers and scratch my head there. Before taking this photo. However I like to photo and I want to I actually do use it. Not only did I want to use it, but I do use it. I like the contrast of the sharp like coming over here. And there's some natural window light and perhaps some TV light making some blue light over here and redness in the middle. So it has a lot of dynamics to it, which makes me artistically I like it whether or not it's a good photo and I don't know, but I've been using it for I can't remember what I have it. And some are for a profile pic. So I wanted to get rid of that spot. What are we going to do? We're asked to do a photo touch-up based on the skills that we've studied so far, the I don't know, I honestly don't know if there's a super advanced technique to this. I know there's some people who dedicate their lives. Professional photographers, for example, they specialize in doing photo touch ups and they might have the best techniques. What I have is logical techniques, which I think will work. Now. First of all, this photo isn't going to be a hard one to touch up because when we zoom in here, notice it's very blurry. But for profile as a profile image, for the sake of profile image, when we zoom it out here, you can't see the blurriness, but you can still see that spot. So I'm just going to use this technique, which is on a blurry image, a simple technique you could use, not even for a blurry image. I mean, even if you had an image that was this big, this same technique will probably work, although it'll be a little bit more difficult. You'll have to smooth it out a bit more hand. You'll see what I mean in just a minute. So obviously based on what we know right now, you can probably guess. Yes, that's right. I'm going to use the color picker. And what I'm gonna do is here's the important part. I'm not just going to tap it once in the same area here and just say, okay, that's good enough, that's a color. Because notice when we zoom in here, there's actually a lot of colors. And if you've gone to Google and search something that will guarantee to bring up people such as famous people. And get your color picker out and pick on every person that you see. You'll be surprised how red people are in. You didn't even know it. You think that their picture white or orange. And when you have, even when you have black people, that's the really surprising thing, whether they be black or white, whatever color their skin is. They all seem to come up as a tone of red, darker skinned person, like a black person that actually come up in this same red category that we have here on this palette, but just little over to the left, little darker. And that's it. You know, it's not like a totally different zone of color there in the red. We're all on the red. So go figure. And I'm going to be wrong about that. Maybe that's just a phenomenon with photos, but that was my discovery. So I picked a color here. Let's see what happens when I rub it on my face like that and zoom out. Nope, looks like I have a dot. Right. So what are you gonna do about that? They might say that just put on that the bad spot, zoom out. I can still see a dot that might pass, might get by, but I can still see it. So let's see another technique. Add a layer, wipe out the same way we did before. Now let's lower the opacity of the layer just a little bit so that the tones that all those little dots and speckles are still shining through. But it's lightened with that color that I just added. Is that going to work? I'm still I'm still seeing it. But let's see. Let's notice a difference. Here's the original, and here it is right there. So it's actually an improvement. It's actually a major improvement, right? And let me put the opacity up a little bit back to a 100 percent. I don't really like that 50%. And I can still, even at 50 percent, I'm seeing it's a little oddness in there. It might pass, but it's not great. So our final resort when those techniques don't work. And this, I'm not saying it's guaranteed work, but I hope it works. Is notice that the patches skin is this big. Let me cite up to an area that has the same exact same amount of light. And I'm just going to copy and paste it. Copy and paste to do new layer. And then as you can guess, we're going to try to move it. I'm going to grab it and move it down to see you. I can cover up that spot right there. And that layer thing out of the way. Now as you can see, that actually works. But it's not perfect because why? You can see there's a little bit extra light coming in here in a spot that doesn't belong there. There's a little bit yellow in there. So what we can do to try and smooth that L is one. We can again go down to bring the opacity down a little bit and two, since we just basically chopped off a square and moved it from this spot to that spot you can make out, you can likely make out the squareness of it. So what we'll do is go into the eraser tool, make sure it has a nice big circle there. And let me turn this layer off so I can see where it is. And just slowly around the edges, kinda smooth it out a bit. Let me zoom in better. Actually, I'm going to undo what I just did. And I'm going to raise the opacity. And just to show you a slowly around the edges here and zoom in even more with a very, very big brush. There's kind of smooth the edges out so it's a little bit transparent. And what that's gonna do is help to just ease in this little patch of color, little patch of skin that we chopped off his head and put it over to someone else. Yeah. I guess you got to have a strong stomach to do this stuff that now they turn that layer on. I didn't notice anything, do you even when I'm zoomed in very close like this, I cannot I can barely tell the difference. Barely. I know that it's there, so I know the difference. We'll zoom out. And at this point, especially when we get to this size or we go down to the profile picture size, it's pretty much perfect. Let's look at our original dot on the head. And then the finished product No.1 ahead. And that same technique should, should sort you out in many, many a situation if this was a very high definition, very close up photo where you could see the skin pores and everything. It would get a little bit more complicated. But I think you could use the same techniques that I just used and just do a little bit more work. It would take a little bit more edging around with the eraser and a little bit more playing with the opacity and trying to get the perfect patch of skin to move ever. You might even get two different patches and blend them together. And a final thing might be to go onto that layer and you might have to play around with the colors. Or you can go in here and the color balance and see like, you know, make it a bit more red or a bit more yellow, whatever it takes using all the tools that we've learned up to this point. Definitely guaranteed you can get the job done even on the most complicated of photos, just a matter of putting the work in. Okay. So that's it for this one. I hope you enjoyed it and learned a lot and see you in the next lesson.
27. Photo Landscape Enhancement: Hi, This is Brandon, and in this lesson we're gonna go over touching up a landscape photo, which can be the techniques that we use to do this can be equally as difficult for a portrait photo or any kind of photo. Because there's there's just a lot of different areas to be covered when it comes to lighting and the light versus the dark and all these different types of things and color. Obviously there's so much more color. Whereas in a close up photo of somebody, you really just focused on the tones of their skin, which in some cases can also be very complicated depending on lighting. But in a landscape, you're pretty much guaranteed to have hundreds of different colors. If not more. You know, there's only really so many colors in the light spectrum that we can see. But when you include all of the different values of light and dark that you can have in a different saturation levels, it actually comes out to millions. So the problem with this photo, I really like this photo, but I think I feel like it's a little dark in the foreground here. For it to qualify as like a real, a piece of art that you could put in a frame and hang up. So beautiful photo, but imagine taking this and hanging it up on your wall. It's kind of just like a really dark photo. The parts that are light where the sun is shining through is obviously very beautiful. That's the most attractive area right there. And with, you know, with all these clouds and stuff like that, we have great foreground here, which leads off into this perspective scene, slowly tapering off into the background. And then we have a distant background. So you can really feel the depth and space in this photo as well as the clouds are all tapering off into the distance. And so there's just tons of perspective and beauty and stuff in this photo that I'd like to keep. But the colors are just way too dark and the overall values of it. So one thing we can do to, first of all, if you don't have years of experience in art, one thing you can do a quick and easy trick to see whether or not your values are in a good place is to desaturate it, make it black and white. And now it doesn't look too bad as a black and white photo either. We could turn this into a beautiful wall piece with a black and white version of it. But even still it's kind of dark. Not so dark that is ugly or anything like that, but it's just not the kind of thing that your average person would have hanging up on their wall because it's a little moody. So let's try and lighten it up just little. We're going to start off by using brightness and contrast to see what that does. Well, actually, while we're at it, let me go and look at some of these. They have some auto things in here, auto equalize. Let's see what that does. Well, that's actually that, that gets the job done, doesn't it? It really lightens up the foreground, which is what I wanted. However, there's a side effect to it, which I don't like, and that's the area that was originally white. As you can see, I'm going to get into brush mode as you see here. This area previously had a lot of beautiful detail in it, which were while we basically lost it. Now let me go back a step. And you can see all that. Look at all that, you know, that little detail in there of the clouds. That was one of the most interesting parts of this. Not to mention the fact that after we had to get back to that, yeah, after we added that saturation to auto auto equalize here. Yeah. See, now this looks like lightning is blasting through the sky. Maybe a comment is coming to hit the Earth or something right now. It's just not a very natural view. So how can we get this equalized version where it's at? I mean, this is technically speaking, it's right where I want it to be this whole bottom half here. It's light enough so that I feel like I'm there looking at it. And at the same time, it just, well, it gets the job done to make a long story short. But the problem is, what happens to this part? To make the rest of it lighter as it gets so light that it just over saturates that area. So what are we gonna do to solve that problem? We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve that we've learned so far in previous lessons. Let's make some of those together and see what we can get done. So the first thing we can do is copy and paste this as many times as we want so that we don't have to worry about losing the original image. So I'm gonna take this new version of it. And I'm going to do that auto thing, auto equalize. And I'm just going to leave that there, I'm going to hide. I think that might be useful. At least I like what I learned from it. What we learned is that the the photos basically little bit off balance. So we have some areas that are too white, obviously because that's the sunlight and then other areas that as a result are too dark. And that might be the cameras way of adjusting to the sunlight. To keep that in mind, the shutter might have had to close in order to allow the sunlight to come in there for everything else gets dark. Let's see, we auto white balance with that does. That's kind of interesting, but we're getting darker, so I don't really like it. Color enhance. That's really weird. I don't even know why why that did that. Let me go back. Okay. So yeah, I'm not really liking a lot of these auto things and this is an experiment for me. Normally I don't even touch those for, just for that reason because it always provides results that I don't really like. But something else I can do is go into brightness. Contrast is always a very good place to start. And you want to use brightness more than you do contrast in this situation. Because look what happens when you use contrast a lot, right? That's going to completely distort the photo. So you'll be real careful with this. Bring the contrast up slowly just a little bit. I don't want to lose that detail. That's the whole trick behind this is I don't want to lose anything that's interesting or beautiful in the photo. But at the same time, I have to achieve my goal of lightening up this, this foreground just a little bit. So I bring the contrast back down and the brightness up a bit. Can we find a happy medium? And they're kinda like, I'm just looking at the foreground now. I'm looking at the bottom area and try and make that part happy for me and then we'll look look at the other part separately. I think I'm okay with this for now. Let's try this. Let's try this only for the foreground. So I like how the foreground is looking here now. And I like how the background looks there. So based on what we've learned so far, if you can guess where I'm going with this, I think we can settle on a Layer Mask and find the best of both worlds. So let's go into the gradient tool and every layer mask on it, make sure I have the black color selected. And the default settings with the layer mask is that anything that's black is going to be hidden. So I'm going to go this way with layer mask and make the bottom half to be. And I want the top half because it's the photo that we lit up anyway, if it's not this side, is that side right? There we go. So now I have Right, the beauty of the clouds is coming through and I'm holding down Shift and Control so I can get a perfect little gradient right here. And I'm doing it over and over several times. I actually have it set. So it's not painting white on to the foreground. I can change the settings here. It's not painting the background color, it's only painting over with right? This one. So let me change that setting. Yeah, this, this will help me to practice a bit more. I'm going to hit that trying to hit that perfect spot. Okay. Right there is probably good enough. So I've taken out I have the clouds from the background as you can see there. And I have this part of the foreground. This is the top layer, has the foreground, and then the bottom layer has o, it has the whole photo. But most importantly it has the clouds on the top there they want. So when I turn on this top layer, it's basically covering the foreground of the bottom layer. However, look at what happens. I have a perfect line there. You can see right about, right about here. I need a layer. Right about here. There's a perfect line where it divides, right? And I don't want that because I want to include these buildings here should also be in the foreground. So I'll go back to my Layer Mask there and I'm going to paint some more black in so that we can hide and we're going to paint black or white. We want to use this, okay, yes, we're gonna have white because black is going to hide it. I get confused with that all the time. But it's one of those things. If it's not this, It's that. So I don't try too hard to remember it because it's not two. It's not a big problem really. So I'm going to zoom in. Look at this building here. It's still has the, the old dark version of the house. And I can zoom in there and just brush that out. Now when we zoom out, you're not going to notice detail that, you know, that meticulous, that small little detail. But it's good to zoom in because you want to make a nice, highly professional photo because some people do notice these little things. Imagine if you're competing with other professional photographers. And they also do photo enhancement, they're going to notice all these little details. Okay, I don't wanna spend too much time on this because we're doing this for instructional purposes. I just want to get, just say can see a half decent finished product. Okay, there we go. Now it might look a little bit unnatural to the Kenai because these, these houses in the foreground are kind of standing out a bit. They almost look photoshopped in. What can we do to help balance that out? Well, going back to our previous tools here, what we wanna do is find a medium place between here and there, right? So if we were to come in. With we're coloring in black. Is that what we're doing? Now? We're coloring in white to get yet to merge this one. So what if we take, go back to the Radial tool? And you know, after all that work I did. We can go instead of a painting from white to black, Let's go from foreground to transparent. So that way I can continuously add little spots here and there. And it should just take that away. What if I add some light back here? So it looks like there's light coming from behind the houses wherever this way, even. Try and fade it in gradually and from different directions. So it's a little, even, even over here a little bit. Remember the important part I'm trying to do. The important thing I'm trying to do is just to maintain the beauty of the sun coming in there, the details and stuff like that. So even like that, It's not too bad. You might, the Kenai might be able to tell that some, some work has been done here. I'm, I'm just slowly smoothing in some of these surrounding edges are surrounding edges making them a little bit white so that they taper off into the other highlighted photo. But I never, the key point is that I don't want to highlight this. Because look what happens there. This, if I highlight the whole photo, then there you go. We lost all that, all that stuff. But what I'm doing here isn't making any detail disappear, so I'm happy with it. And that might work. Even just that right there. We could also go into a brush and make this brush very, very big. Because I can get it and bring the opacity down very, very low. And just find some areas that look a little bit unnatural to me and stop it out a little bit so I can try and find a balance between the darkness and lightness here. And just here and there. I have this on very low opacity. So one little tap, but even still with such low opacity, one little tap makes a huge difference, right? I don't like that. And I gotta be careful. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to leave it like that for now. And let's take a look at what we have. So what I can do is this another pretty important trick that I use frequently. If you want to take snapshots of the work you're doing along the way, but you don't want to have to continuously make saved new files. You can right-click and the layer area here and say new from visible. Now what that does is it makes a new image out of everything that you see with your eyes at the moment when you make it, right. So that makes a new layer right there. And I can turn off all the other layers here. And you see, now we just have this one layer that has basically the finished product. Now I'm only doing that so I can compare it to the original, which is down here. And let's turn that off. So here's the original one we had and our goal was to lighten it up and make it look like something a little bit more vivid. We can hang on the wall. And there we go. I think we did a pretty good job. I kept all the detail of that center area with a week would just a few simple tricks and a little bit of brushwork, we got it done. So that's my finished product right there. And you can see how combining different techniques, we can do a lot of work on photos, as well as what the following lessons we'll get into is doing a little bit of illustration. So I hope you enjoyed that and learned a lot. And I will see in the next lesson.
28. Using Digital Tablets: Though this is Brendan. And in this lesson we're going to cover using tablets. Drawing tablet, which means I have a stylus, which means I have a pen that draws on to a drawing surface so that I can draw naturally. Naturally anyway, such as this. And this is me just drawing with my hand. Now if I were to go to draw with a mouse and let's say try and mimic what I just did over there. You see that come out here and you have to hold the mouse button down and gets all shaky and your hand is just the the mouse just wasn't designed for this, right? It's not what it's designed for it because you've got to hold it with your whole hand. And you don't get that pinpoint, pinpoint precision that you do with a pen touching on a, on a surface. So with this, I could very quickly, well, not with a pen this big. Let me make it smaller. Maybe like very quickly. Draw a little happy person here with hair and ears, zoom in and do their eyes and everything like that, right? But you would never have that accomplished with the Mouseion so much time. So drawing with your hand is obviously a lot more fun. And as usual, he's lopsided. I always hate when that happens. Anyway. Gotta fix him real quick. Just to say I did. Okay. So what we're gonna do with a tablet, the first thing we want to make sure we do is buy one. If you don't have one already. The only one to make a long story short, the only company I know of that is that I can confidently say is an expert in this product is the Rackham or wakeup WAC, ALM.com. And that's where you go to buy one. Most people who are interested in this field already know this. If you don't, There you go. Now you have the expert information. The only decisions that you're going to have to make it first is whether or not you want the Wacom tablet to have a display is your called Wacom displays. And that basically means that it has a big screen that shows exactly what you're drawing and can draw directly onto that screen, into the software. So that's obviously a lot more natural and I assume this would be what most people would prefer. But they're more expensive. I don't have one of these myself. I get by fine with the regular pen displays and the basically non-displaced tablets, which are called the into his pen, the pen and touch or into his pro. These other ones they have here and on these, you will have to adjust a little bit. The one I have looks similar to this and see even a little older than that. And it's about the size of a laptop screen, a small laptop screen. And it does the trick fine. As I was saying, you do have to adjust to these because as you can see, there's no screen on it. So you're looking at the screen with your eyes, as we say, and your hand is down, drawing on this blank tablet. So you're not looking at exactly where you're drawing. However, let me go back here to demonstrate I can move around. And as you can see, the mouse is moving around here, but without drawing anything, so I know where the mouse is. So if I draw a line here, and then I'm going to draw a square. So the next line should start here, even though I can't look down and see where it is, but I look at the screen, move the mouse there, and move it over. Then the next line, I bring my mouse back here and start and bring it down just like that. So you get used to it. It is a bit of an adjustment period. It's not super easy. But I guess if you had drawn on paper for a long time, within about a month, you'll be very comfortably drawing around. I don't even think about it anymore. It becomes second nature. However, I noticed that I do still draw better on paper because I have so many years of doing that. And it's, it's a slow, gradual adjustment period. I'm getting a better and better by the day. It's been a couple of years now. I think I've been using these tablets and so it's, it's coming along. So that's step 1 is to get a tablet and just practice with it every day. If you, I mean, if you want to do this and that's what, that's where you're going if you're getting into illustration or graphic design, I definitely recommend these might even be a requirement, pretty much necessary these days. Have a tablet so that you can really get in there and do the details you can't draw with the mouse. So the other thing that happens when you get your tablet and we're talking about the GIMP software here, is that sometimes if the pressure sensitivity won't work when you first open, get this going to happen. It's happened to me on Windows and Linux operating systems. Haven't tried it on the Mac. But basically what it means is when you're trying to do this effect, we go from thick to small, you know, light strokes and stuff like that. It comes at all comes out with no dynamics. Right? And it said it comes out straight, just flat lines like this. And even right now I'm trying very soft and now I'm pushing very hard. But it all just comes out the same line. So that means you won't be able to use a lot of the effects and there's more effects that you can use them here such as, I don't know what is a basic simple yes. So this one, it judges based on speed and likeness to changes the opacity. And that can be good if you want to like, you know, shade in something softly, have almost kind of like a watercolor. He kinda look to it, I guess. Something like that. But yeah, there's just all different types of effects that you can use with pressure. And so you want to make sure that your pressure opacity is working. This. So the first thing you do if it's not working is go up into the preferences and you'll see, or you can hit it straight from the menu. It's this one here called input devices. And then up here we have configure extended input devices in the preferences. Sorry if you can't see it there, but I'll just read it for you. It's not worth bringing up a zoom tool, I think. Just go to Input devices in the preferences menu and then configure extended input devices. And you'll see in here if your webcam tablet is plugged in correctly, you should see it in the menu here of the input devices. You'll see that, for example, mine here it says There's the finger pad, the finger touch. There's a pen eraser and a pen stylus. And what you wanna do specifically for the stylus and the eraser on the pen, if you use it, is set them to screen. Sometimes when he come into GIMP, It's by default, it's set on disabled and non-disabled. That means your stylus will not be interacting with the screen correctly. So put it to screen. And sometimes if that doesn't work, I've also read some people put it on window. But first try, you're going to hope you're going to want it to be on screen. So we hope that that works for us. So that doesn't work. You might have to use window which causes some weird effects. But yeah, try screen first and you can just go ahead and set all of these things that you use to screen. I don't use the pad or the touch features of it. I only use the, I only want the pen and the eraser to work. So I set them to screen in this area here, and then don't touch anything else in here and just save it and close it. And then you're done after that. If your pressure sensitivity still doesn't work, then you should probably go into some forums or about the GIMP and also, of course, touch, test your pad and other software. And if it's not working in any software, then you have to contact the manufacturers of the product. Whack, I'm going to whack them.com and ask them what might be wrong. You might be missing some drivers depending on your operating system. So that's pretty much it. There's one more tip I can give you what to buy and then how to configure it. And then the other thing is going to be before we start trying to draw with anything. The other thing is going to be adding a pressure size, the basic dynamics that you choose in this menu over here. And maybe I will bring out a quick zoom tool for this. Are going to excuse the mess of that. That was just showing there. They bring this over here. You can see in here it says pressure sides, right? That may just pull this down. This are very, very quickly here. Okay, so we should be able to see the whole menu here. This is when you're in the paint brush mode. You can see that we have, these are all the options for a paintbrush when we're in the paint mode. And one of the options down here where it says press U size, it's supposed to say pressure size. I misspelled that myself. This drop-down menu gives you a whole bunch of different settings that you can use for the pressure. So this one says confetti. So this should do something with my settings and what does it do it? Well, at that actually has nothing to do with the pressure, but that one has something to do, maybe with speed or something else. Here is basic, simple. What does this do? This does, okay, if I go slowly and softly, it'll, it'll draw very lightly. But if I go fast and hard and it's very opaque. So there's all these different settings. Some of them will change the way your pen goes based on speed and other will change the way that it draws based on the pressure. Here's one called speed, size, speed and size opacity. So if I go slow, it's small and opaque and I go fast, it gets, gets smaller. So if I'm slow, it's big and I'll go fast. Smaller. Image makes sense. It's kind of and sometimes it feels kinda natural because isn't that what would happen if you had like, I don't know, a piece of chalk or something went very slowly. But if you go fast, then, you know, just screech across the board or something. And you might find something that you really love in there that'll help you to draw better. So it's worth taking the time to look at all these and experiment with it. But one thing that I found it did not come with was a good setting that I needed for pressure capacity. So what I did is or what you do for that is you go into here and on, while it's on, any kind of setting, just hit this button, button and that'll bring you over. That'll open up this over on the right-hand side. It'll open up this new tab here where you can choose an edit and make a new type of, basically a new type of dynamic. So what I did here is I checked off this box you see here in between pressure and size. So that means when I'm adding pressure is going to change the size. And that's exactly what I wanted. I want it so that when I push hard, just like a paintbrush or a marker, if I push hard, it's going to make it bigger, fatter line. And when I brush on it softly that make thin little soft lines. So you can change this to be whatever you want. You can say like when I push hard to change the hardness or Here they have the spacing and the rate and all of those. It would take me all day or we'd have a 24 hour video here. Literally, if I had to explain all the potential results that you can have out of this, but I'll at least start you off with this one. You can make your own brush by, by pushing this right here. And then let me see Actually, first you have to make a new brush. So to do that. When we drop this one down, yeah, this is over over here. I have to bring this over for you. When we dropped down the pressure size thing, look on the bottom. Okay. I have to bring it down a little bit further. So when I open up the pressure size thing you see on the bottom right here, it has, I believe that's one open dynamics selection dialogue. Right? Here's the one here. And now when that one's open, look down here on the bottom and you see here it has create a new Dynamics. So that would be the first step. And so if I did that, and you can see now it says here is o, it changed. Where did it go? Yeah, there we go. So here is the new dynamics and I could type in a new name here. And no, wait, that's not where you do the new one. Let me see. Okay. Right. And it says Untitled one. So I just made a new dynamic and I can give it a new name like new dynamic. Dynamic, new dynamic with capital NEW. And I will set it. Why? Oh, you know, That's because I switched from stylists to do the other one. Let me just keep on the mouse. Okay, new dynamic. And I'm going to give it. Let's see. When I push harder, it's going to change the jitter. Okay. Maybe that'll work. I'm not even sure if that'll work end with velocity. Okay, Good. So that's a new dynamic and it should use those two features. I don't know why it keeps changing like that. I guess I'm supposed to save it. Close one new dynamic to send something seemed to happen. And I guess that should do it. So now we go over here. Yeah, there's the new dynamic we selected. And let's see what happens if I try to draw with this, it might not even work. I'm not a 100 percent sure. Yeah, this one is called new dynamic and I set it for pressure or not, not philosophy or jitter doesn't work. And let me see with size. Yeah, that is working. So you can see if I go if I have the pressure soft and I push it hard is giving me a different size. But the flow and the jitter is not working. I don't know why. Let me see what color does work. You have added color. So it's giving me less color. If I if I push harder and angle. Now that would work. The angle is only going to have an effect if you have a certain sized brush like this one and they clean the canvas. So I've pushed harder. Yes, He has given me that thick that client. So this is actually working when I have the angle set because the angle of this brush, if I don't have that on, let me show you how it works. The angle of this brush is always at that. See, it's just a flat line like that. So when I go down and makes a thick line, when I go over it makes a thin line. However, when we change the, when we add this setting here, it's going to change the angle of that line when I push harder. So now let's look when I draw and I'll make it bigger so you can see it. Yeah, look at that. You can actually see it's spinning. Let me make it even bigger. So it's very clear. Yeah, I see that. See how it's spinning. Now I'm pushing down and now I'm letting it softer. Your software, software now I'm pushing down. Now softer. So imagine all the weird, crazy effects that you could invent with this thing. You can just make it so that you're basically playing with, with color and sizes and shapes while you paint things. Hardness, I don't know what that would do. Let me I didn't hardness. So it seems more blurred when you when you don't push down hard. Okay. Let me put it back to a regular brush. And also I'm going to take away the size and the angle and have focused on just the hardness to see what that does. We push hard, look at that. It gives you a hard thick lines and then when I go softer, it gets more blurry and soft. That's also very useful. So, yeah, I'm learning stuff while, while we do this too, but I hope you understand that the what I'm trying to point, I'm trying to get across here is this is not very simple, it's actually quite complicated, but you can easily make your own new dynamics to play with this just by opening this dialogue. And again, to do that, It's over here. Under the, after you've opened a brush, you'll have this dynamics menu. And then when you click that dynamics button down here, you have this make a new dynamic button, which is this one. It's the most rightmost button. Down there, you see that little blue icon, and you click on that one. And then you can just start playing with these settings here. And there's even more settings which I'm not going to get into. It's just, there's so many things you could be in there all day long experimenting with it. But my favorite one, the most important one you need to add is just to have pressure, to have the size change on pressure and I call it pressure size, even though I have to spell it again because I made it incorrectly. So that's it for this lesson. We did cover just about everything I even went in to, maybe too much detail with that hope I didn't bore you and we'll call it a day and see you in the next lesson. Thank you very much.
29. Text Basics: Hi, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go over the text using texts. And so diving right into it, the first thing we wanna do when we're adding text is just go ahead and get your text tool out. As a matter of fact, I wanted to bring up the Zoom tool first. Use this over here, right? And so over here you can see in the toolbox we have this letter a right here, and that's our text tool. So we click on that. And you can go ahead and make, you can either make an area which you would like to text to be confined in, such as this? Let me add some text to it though. And how are you today? I was playing with the settings a bit earlier. So now I have to set them back to where they belong. Okay? Right. So hello, and how are you today? It is, oops. Back to where we were. It is nice to meet you and I I'm fine. Okay. Now you can see the remaining texts that I wrote down there cannot be seen because it doesn't fit within that drawable area that I wrote there. So with the text tool still highlighted, while I'm still in the Text Tool mode, I can grab one of these corner boxes and drag it down until I can see all of my text. Now, another problem, we still didn't get to the end of this because the font is too big. So now we can start to look at our options are tool options for this text tool, right? Every tool has tool options as far as I know, I've yet to see a tool without options to it. So while we're at it, let's look at all of the options that we have in here. First, we have here is a nice drop-down menu of all of the fonts. And if you want to install a new font, you will have to install it. And then if you have the GIMP running, you'll have to close the gap, save your work, close it and open it again to have the new font show up in the menu here. Because apparently this drop-down menu, it populates the, all of the fonts while the GIMP is starting. So, yeah, which is probably a good thing. So as you can see, every time I change a font here, then it gives me instantly just changes the font over there, which is as expected. And it's very nice. After that we have the size. And I can just change it right here. Or I can select this area and type a number in there, so there's 20. Now you can tell how big this canvas is because a 20 pixel font would actually be quite big, for example, on a webpage. But right here it's showing up very, very small because I have a very large canvas for drawing purposes. And use editor. That means if you check that when you open a text editor, it'll help you to play with play with the text inside the box here. I don't see it as being neither necessary or useful for any reason. Right now it's probably an old that's an old feature, anti aliasing. I'm never sure how to pronounce that. Anti aliasing. Aliasing. Anti-aliasing means that it's going to smooth out the rough edges on the font. And I would always say yes to that. So just keep that word is hinting. I actually don't know what it is. But because of that, I will assume it's not critically important. And I do think it's the only thing I don't know and it's spinning. So I'm sorry, I can't cover that one for the color. That's pretty self-explanatory. As you know, according to all the lessons that we've had before, this color with the palette selector here, we got the color wheel. You can make the text red or blue or whatever, and just choose a color. Justified means the way is it going to be left aligned or right aligned, right. Or you can center the text, all that stuff. And you know, all of these things are pretty self-explanatory. A lot of people would know it already. Or if you didn't know this, then I would question why are learning to get bright? But some things that people might not know when it comes to design. Let me make this font a little bit bigger. And as expected, I was pulled that up. Okay, Let me try this again. Make this font a little bigger. Something a lot of people don't know if they're not involved with design is these two here. One is the line height, which will make bigger spaces between your lines, right? And that can be very, very important. As opposed to have no write one line at a time. When you're trying to make something like, let's say you are designing a greeting card or something like this. And you want a lot of space to make it look poetic. As opposed to writing many lines, you can just put it all in one box and organize a spacing and hit the center button. And there you go. It looks like a greeting card. Also spacing depending on which font you're using can be very important. This is the letter spacing, the spacing between each letter. So you can make, let me just exaggerate it. See now there's a lot of space in between each letter. It's still the same font size, but I'm increasing the spacing between the letters. And you can do that for different effects, different reasons. It'll just, it's just a design feature basically. And it's very useful. Before recent updates with again, the text editing was very bad, deplorable. Actually. A lot of people complained about it. And so now they have this thing up here, which is supposed to be an improvement upon it and enable you to do more things. I have yet to find it very useful, but I do find it very annoying because it's always there when I'm moving around and sometimes or should I say all of the time, it's in my way. I did investigate a way to make it go away and turn it off and I cannot find one. So yeah, if if you have any updates on that, please let me know. For the meantime, we will all have to deal with this annoying thing being here. It looks cool and useful, but trust me, once you start working, It's not, it's just annoying. Okay? And so that's it for the basics of adding texts. There's not really much to it. You have your fonts, you can install new fonts, just remember to reboot. And another thing to notice is that every time you add font, it does get added as a new layer. Now it's added as a new layer. And it is not art like other things are. Whereas if you take a paintbrush, you can start stretching and scaling things. All of the strokes and the image. And you take a photo or a paintbrush imagery, you can play with it with these tools. You can't do that with with the text. Because I see right now, or maybe you can, but not by default. Let's see if I grab this now. Okay, here, let me restate that once again, you can play with it, right? I'll stretch this here now, but I'm not sure if you'll still be able to edit the text. That is what the problem is. There you go. Yeah. Okay, so now if I go to edit the text again, it says, well, you get this warning message and you may or may not be able, okay, so you can edit the text. But now notice when I go to edit the text, it lost that transformation is no longer skilled. Okay, so another example of this might be what if we go to the Rotate Tool, go to rotate this and it will rotate it. But look over on the menu here. You'll notice that it is no longer a text object. Now it's become a digital object. Which basically means it's just like as if somebody had painted these words out so I cannot edit it. But let's see what happens if I tried to edit it. Okay, See it does remember that it used to be editable text, but if I want to edit it, it's gonna go back this way. So you cannot simultaneously to give it transformations or, you know, you cannot enhance it with any of these other tools without turning it into a non editable text, if that makes sense. So once you start, in other words, basically get your words how you want them, and then you can start playing with it and adding color or change the shape and pull it around and twist it and bend it and stuff. Because you won't be able to edit the text again after you start moving it around. And that's all the basics. Text is supposed to be simple, and it is quite simple. You add it and you choose a font and the size, and then you can start bending it, twisting it, shaping it for your art. So that's it for this lesson. Hope that cover that for you and have a good day. And we'll move on to the next lesson.
30. Text on Curves and Paths: Though this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover very quick and simple but useful trick. And that is to be able to draw text along a path. So this will enable us to write text along, well along a path, as I already said, but along a path that has some shape to it so that the text can be flowing in a nice like, such as on the top of a circle or an arc pattern or something like this. Now, this is very important for certain effects if you want to achieve bending text around to make it look artistic in certain areas. And it's not, well, it's pretty much impossible to do with the default text tool here because you can only draw straight lines. To make this clear, let me give you an example right now. I'll go straight into the path tool over here, which we've covered before. And I'll make a big winding bending path like this. And actually that last one, just in case we need to change it later. And then we're going to go into the texts that we have here. I'll have my text tool selected. Now that path that I just made disappeared when I go back in the path mode. But don't worry about that. I'm going to select this text with the make sure that you're in the text and not on a new text, the text that you want to work with, right-click on it and go to text along path. And then let's just watch what happens text along path. And there you go. It's wrapping the text that we wrote in there along that path that I made earlier. And let me go into the Path Tool so we can see exactly, yeah, this path and as you can see it put, it, put all the texts right in the middle of the line that we made there. Let me zoom in so you can see that now unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bed and, uh, be brutally honest. One thing that is not very advanced in the camp is text. It's just not very good. There's not a lot you can do with it. You can change the font, the size, the spacing, and a height, which normally actually is enough. But when it comes to making artistic texts, there are lot of limitations, especially in comparison to other softwares. So for this situation, what we have here, being able to put text along a path is already pretty advanced. I'd say. I don't even know how they do it. Obviously, it's very complicated. But what I do know is this text that we've made here is not editable. We cannot just edit this text. Let me go back to the text tool for example. I'll select the text here and erase some of it. And as you can see, that doesn't change this bending winding texts that we just made. And so why is the text in this red color and hollow? But what it did, It didn't turn it into a piece of art or anything like that. It didn't draw it onto the canvas. Technically speaking, the canvas that I have here is still blank. I have the text hovering in this layer and my background canvas, There's nothing has been drawn on it. So the text is floating in this layer, the original text. And this text which we'll focus on now, what looks like text, it's actually just a path. And if we bring out the path pool path tool, excuse me, I'm studying lot today and zoom on it. Now you can see there's like hundreds, dozens of just these little nodes that they use to create to draw lines, paths around the text. So I don't want to see all those right now. All they want to do is have the text selected. And we can go into the Path Tool here while we're in this tab, go down to the bottom as I showed you in a previous lesson about paths. And we're going to click path to selection. Now that the path has been turned into a selection, we can go back to the layer that Ron use a paint bucket tool and fill it in with the fill whole selection. There we go. And now you still see the red lines of the path there. So just make sure that path is turned off. And we'll come back to the layer with whatever tool we want to use next and just de-select that. So there you have some fancy wrapped around text. And of course you can use your imagination and jaw texts and in a circle or however you want to, if you have problems, make sure that the length of the text is not too long to fit into the path that you made that can cause problems. Sometimes. That's a good tip to keep in mind. And you don't want it to be too long or too short and you will have to do some trial and error, at least that's what I found. There is no way to see exactly what length of path line is perfect for the text. So you'll just have to undo what you've done. Sometimes go back and forth and make the text. You can make the text font smaller sometimes to fit it better. Or, you know, an increased the length of it, increased the text font size. Or of course, change your path length just to make it fit perfect when you need to. So that's it for this lesson. I hope you learned a lot and I know that's useful for you, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
31. Comics and Illustration: This is Brendan, and in this lesson, we're going to go over drawing a comic book style illustration using the get. And so what I did is I started to do a very rough sketch here, just so that I have some kind of foundation of a, of a comic book style drawing. And if you can't make it out yet, it is intended to be sort of a guy, superpower guy flying through the air. I won't say superhero because he actually doesn't look so nice. Maybe he's a super villain. So I'll just go ahead and keep sketching this. And in the meantime, we'll think of whatever comes to my mind of regarding this, this type of process. So this is not actually a drawing class. If you do want to see, if you want to learn more techniques like this on how to draw. Actually, I have another lesson for that, which you can find in my curriculum, somewhere in there. Or just search it for drawing to illustration, from drawing to illustration, or search for my name. And I should be able to find it in there. To illustration course. There's a couple of other courses in there too. And of course you're welcome to take those or take mine. I don't know which is better. You know, I'm not going to sit here and get competitive with people and argue over what's right and what's wrong. Everybody has their own way of getting stuff done. I've been criticized before for the way that I get things done. My anatomy of the figure and stuff like this. And who's to say who's wrong and right? It's hard sometimes. So obviously I don't do things in a way that I think are wrong. That's not my ambition. But I think people are a little overzealous and perfectionism sometimes. So people nitpick and say that you're wrong. For all these reasons, you get very passionate about the argument. And then you look in reality and you see someone drawing like peanuts, like Charles Schulz. And obviously he's one of the most successful cartoonists of all time. And of course, that's different from comic books, right? It's, it's very different style. But doesn't it go to show that sometimes we should just lighten up. Is that the whole point? Actually, if cartoons like that to just lighten up, not worry so much. But there is, there are certain things that we need to keep in mind to make sure that we're not being sort of, you know, hurtful to the eye. You don't want things to look appalling. So there's supposed to be a super villain style guide. No idea. You know exactly who he is. As you can see, it doesn't even have a mask. You just looks like a regular person. So in maybe I could do something to fix that. Yeah, I'll go like this and don't really like that face even for a bill and it doesn't have to be that weird looking. Okay. So this is a sketch. Alright, it's a sketch, so I'm not going to worry about it too much. But it has to have gloves of course, because there's a super guy. And so while I'm sketching something that is actually relevant to this lesson is that it's nice to be able to flip the layer like this. I have a hotkey set to flip the layer. And we have to note there's a difference between flipping the entire image or flipping the layer. If you flip the entire image, which is nice. In some cases because you might have multiple layers. It's good to have that too, but it takes a lot longer for one. And it's, it's not always good idea. For example, if you have a text for, because we're working in a GIMP here, not Photoshop, and some things are not good to do that with, right? If you do, if you have text on some layers and then you flip the entire image, well, it's going to turn that text into not texts, so you won't be able to edit it again. That can be a problem if you're making something like a children's book or a comic book and you have your text in there, and then you have to edit the text later. Well, you'd have to go in there and redo it all and make a whole new text layer and do it from scratch. So when you're in sketch mode, it's good to have all this stuff done. Now keep in mind, this is digital illustration. We've come along way. It's a lot easier than doing everything with actual paper and pens. You can erase your mistakes. Imagine the old days. When you had, there were no computers to draw with and you had to use actual pen and ink. And every time that you laid that brush down onto the paper or the board, it was basically do or die. If you made a mistake, then well, you could use white out to go over it. Yeah, it's some, making mistakes is something that was not very acceptable in the world of the Illustrator in years past could be very costly to make mistakes. But now we can make mistakes all the time and redo it because we have these digital tablets. So things have gotten a lot better and a lot less stressful. So that's about it for my sketch. That's just a quick sketch there. And what I'm gonna do is lower the opacity on it. Again, the point of this is just to show you some of the techniques that I use for illustration and the tools that I use. So I turn that layer down, the one that's my sketch layer. And now I'm going to go to a new layer. And normally if I'm taking my time, I would call this the ink layer or the line layer or something like that. And now as we do in traditional comic books, I can go in here with a pen. And this is the pressure size as we set it up correctly with the previous, as described in previous lessons. I have it set up so that it writes or it paints, I should say just like a pen or the pennant traditional pen and ink is what I meant to say. The, we'd call an ink brush. And ink brush is good for this traditional style inking because you can get thin lines when you need them and thick lines as you need them, you can go from thick to thin. And sky as little bit of a chubby face. That's okay. Can all be supermodels. And when I do this, what I'm really going to work, I would normally make this a bit more the sketch a bit more detailed. Don't really have time for that right now. As this snarl on his face, so that we call it. So I should be able to veto, excuse me, for not making a masterpiece here. I'm going to try and speed this up a bit. As you can see, he's kind of like in the air flying. And I think you get the general gist of what I'm trying to achieve with this superhero kind of style guy flying through the air, he's coming towards you. As is tradition with a lot of comic books. And what we're gonna do is add the another layer. We're gonna do some coloring and some shading as quickly as I can here. Don't need that. That was about to add a bit too much anatomy there. The what do you call the nipples? They should probably have a different name for that ferment. And that really US and the US that have gotten real sloppy here. But just get the point across. As you can see, there's there's a leg. Might actually end up looking pretty good in the end. But I go through this inking process usually a bit or a lot more slow. And then when this is done, we can jump right into color. So there we have that. Now about the pencil layer. You can take it away and leave this, but I'd like to leave it in there. This is why I call it the pencil there. It's actually sketch layer. And there's a lot of good details in there sometimes, but I wanna make sure it's not where I don't want it basically, it's not like coming out of the seams here, falling around. It doesn't look sloppy. Because some of this stuff that I did in pencil, I don't wanna do it. It wouldn't look right if I went over it in pen because I don't want every single line to be so dark and thick. But at the same time. I also can't have all this messy, scratchy stuff all over the place. So I do have to do a little bit of work. You don't clean it up. Just like this. These clean up the outsides of the character as bare minimum. And we're almost there. Okay, So that's pretty much all I wanted to do. Now on that pencil layer, I can also use it as a shade layer since the background is white in this situation. And I do like to do like to do that even if the background changes color, having this layer as as a shade layer, since it's down in capacity, it's actually black, right? So when I'm drawing here, I'm drawing Onto basically Juang pure black onto a layer that has lowered opacity, right? So that's good because later on I can change the opacity of that and make it lighter or darker. And I can also select all the black if I want to, and turn it into any other color that I might need for the shading, the shading effects that I need. So here I am just doing some shading. And here I have little reflective light. Again, if you want to learn about the actual drawing process, you can check out some of my other lessons or I do go into detail about. How to achieve all of these effects. And I should be updating those lessons soon. I've been meaning to get to him recently actually, but I haven't gotten to it. Okay. I don't want this to get too long, but you get the general idea. There's a guy, you should be flying through the air, I think originally, was he actually on this side? Yeah, that's the original way. So I feel more comfortable finishing that way too. Now let's say there's a background and need to give it a little bit of tone. Will base color there. That way I can apply the effect. I'm looking for it because I feel like he's just hanging there in the air and I'm just anxious to make it look like he's flying in the air like this, right? So I have that effect in there. And so we have the sketch layer, which I had there, the ink layer, and we put them together, doesn't look too bad. Now I'm going to add a color layer. Now actually, I'd like to be a bit of a stickler about this. Make sure I name the layer, excuse me. Very useful. Then we can start coloring it a little bit red tone here. And he doesn't look very symmetrical after work on that. Okay. Now you might wonder why I'm covering his face up like this. If you were a good student and followed all the previous lessons, you know that something, take a guess what we're about to do right now. I'm going to take this layer. And can you guess what I'm gonna do with it? I'm going to go to the mode of the layer, and I'm going to bring it on down to multiply and see how that fits right in there, right? One thing that is not good about this, since we have the gray background, is that it's multiplying. I think it's multiplying that color in with the gray as well. So what I can do to fix that is first put in some white behind him. And yes, as you can see, that's going to lighten him up because the multiply is going to add whatever effect it does. I don't know how to explain that exactly. It's like merging itself with the layers beneath it and it's going to work together with whatever colors happened to be beneath it as well. So I need a white base here in order for the colors that I'm putting over it to come out as they're supposed to be. We just need that white base basically is what I'm trying to say. So put that in there. And now when I go back to, to paint these colors with a multiply layer, should, I should turn out as planned? Why is that? I wonder, let me see. I gotta get that color. Yeah. I don't know why that color disappeared. Should have been in my palate. Okay. Anyway, now I got the right color. And as you can see, they're using a multiply effect. And do that, I'll give him some kind of soup color, which is give it a bluish color here. I can paint it right on in there. Now one thing if I wanted to use the Select tool to fill it in like a paint bucket tool. We can do that too. But first we'd have to go to the ink layer and make sure we turn off the other layers temporarily here and make sure that I have all my lines drawn in. If we leave any little spaces, see that little gap right there. So if I tried to select him now, is it going to go through that? Get well, we got lucky probably cuz my threshold is up kinda high, but leaving little gaps like that can create big problems in many cases. So I'm on the ink layer now, unfortunately in GIMP, we do have to come into that layer to select it. I did. I actually searched that and I couldn't find any other way. But the good news is, I have a good way to fill it in, good and strong. And that is after we select this, I'll go into the select menu, say grow, and I'm going to grow it made that selection a little bit bigger by three pixels. So now when I go to fill it in, it's going to fill it in. Well, very good. And yeah, that's right. We're using the blue color and I'll just use the paint bucket. Make sure it's set to fill whole selection. And there we go. It fills all that in, so I don't have to or I could have brushed it in just as easily with a big brush. Right? So it's nice to make those selections so that helps you. So even look here, see I missed a lot of spots and and this area because I was being fast and sloppy. But when you're being professional Wait, did I put that on the right layer? Yeah. Okay. We're good. I was afraid that I did that paint bucket fill in the wrong layer. Okay. So you wanna make sure that you have the right colors. Very weird. It's supposed to put recent colors that I've used. Maybe that's why there's this. It does not it yeah, this is really weird. It should, it should save the recent colors I've used in, in this area and it's not doing that. So let me see if I can select this color. Is put that in there, and my sketch layer back on. And the white layer. Now I can select that layer, the color, I mean. And okay, I did draw this on the ink layer accidentally. There we go. Sorry for all that. Waste of time there. Okay. Now we're cooking with grease and maybe his legs are just white and, you know, it is what it is. There's all the color. And back to the shade layer C. Now if I had named all my layers here, I wouldn't have had to click on that one To see if it was the right layer. And there it goes. I'm not going to finish this, but I think you can see the direction I'm heading in. I could just continue coloring, coloring, and do all this work here. And eventually he would be, you know, a professional illustration. And just add a little bit like to his eyes. And then when we're done with that, we go into this mode here, bring out some text. And the text he's saying something such as, hey, you know, we have to get a nice comic font. And I have one here at lagged. Bold, right? Do that and make the font a little bit smaller. This is combining a lot of the stuff that we've learned in previous lessons, which is why I wanted to do this. Now I'll make a new layer which I usually call balloons, which is for word balloons has to call him. And I, all I have to do to make this because I made my own script, is to select it and go use my own personal script here for that. And it automatically makes that for me. If you wanted to do it one step at a time, basically select it with a square, then go into here and turn it into a rounded rectangle. And then you border it with the border command. We covered all that. You make the border of your selection and you feel that outside in black and the inside in white, but not in that order. And we did cover that in a previous previous sections. So you can go back and check that out. I need to get this at about 15 pixels, right? I'm going to try and make the word balloon here. Just like this. If I can get it in one district, that would be really nice. Do trial and error. Sometimes there are better ways to do that. I could use a path tool, but it takes long. So I prefer the only took me three or four tries. But it got the job done. Now I can take out this line here. Go right to the bucket. Fill. Whoops, I'm gonna change that to only fill similar colors, not fill the whole thing. And there we go, maybe a little cleanup work here. Try and make it perfect. And that's comic style illustration. Obviously, it needs a lot of work and I was doing that super fast. I did it all the way from the sketch up to the color. But look at how many different techniques we covered there. And just goes to show you how quickly you can throw together and illustration with everything from the word balloons, the text, and, and the character there. So hope you enjoyed that, learned a lot of stuff. And we have a few more lessons leftover sticking with us. If not, have a nice day and see you later.
32. Making Scripts and Script-fu Console: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to go over scripting. And again. And this is a slightly more intimidating lesson because this scripting, It's basically programming and we're trying to figure out how to use programming code to do things with the image, which in itself is a pretty complicated thing to even think about. How do we use programming code to manipulate an image? A lot of people just don't even want to think about that. So but I do want to say that you don't really have to be a programmer as long as you can understand what it is that the script does and save it to the correct directory, then you can still use the script because there's a lot of scripts out there. Gimp has been around for a long time. And we can use other people's scripts. We can share scripts, especially if they come from trusted sources because these scripts, they are like little programs and I might be able to do some damage or play little pranks on you or something like that. So, especially with a Python scripts, I believe based on what I've read, I think Python scripts are actually full-fledged executable programs. And if you don't know how programming works and he can't read the code, then you have to be careful with those. You should be advised to that. However, the scripts which are based on the LSP or lisp programming language, or at least it seems to be that way. It has that context to it. These scripts are a bit more safe. So all of this jargon that I'm talking now, it might sound a little confusing if you don't understand, but just don't worry about it. We'll get right into it. What we're gonna do here is first open up the console, which can be found in filters. And we'll go down to script through. It's actually called script foo. And let me definitely get out my zoom tool for this one. So, yeah, here we go with this. Whoops, not what I wanted to. Always on top right? And we'll bring that down about here. Let me see where the filter's menu here. Go down to Scripts. You have Python, foo, and script that we're going to start off with the script file. There are two different things. I don't know everything about this stuff, but I have made plugins. What I will tell you based on what I know is that scripts, the script through is where you put into the scripts directory. And Python f2 is where you put into the plugin, plugins directory. And again, that's as far as I know, I could be wrong, but based on what I've done and what I've learned so far. Python makes plugins and script through, makes scripts and script through it seems to be a type of a programming language, language, which to me seems to be just like LSP. I did study programming for awhile and I already have this console opens. So yeah, I was looking for something that yeah, already existed. So here we have this isn't a fresh console. This is one I've been experimenting with and I just wanted to show you the reason I left this one open. Actually, it was a reason for it is that I had already made a script here, which was a rather complicated one to make, a very simple thing. Which is why if you don't like programming, I mean, if you don't love programming, you might be better off just using other people's scripts. If you can find one that does the job you need. And so let me just do a quick demo with this and see if it even works by typing this command here. Right? It did something that gave me number 4 thousand because I typed in GIMP draw PBL, width layer. So it told me what the, what the width of the layer there. Okay, here's one that actually does something. As you can see in the zoom area over here, it says GIMP drawable fill layer, foreground fill. So if I'm lucky it would do a foreground fill. And let's see what happens. There you go. And you can see in the background, which was actually white and I'm going to go at now changed to black. So it, it did a foreground color fill on the jaw, a bold layer. Now, the hard part and the sad part about this is before being able to do such a simple command, I had to do a lot of programming, a four or five-step thing with a lot of errors. You can see all this gibberish up here. The first part of it is pretty easy to read. That's the function name. It's gimp drawable, fill with hyphens between it, just to tie it together and make it one word. Because functions have to be one word. After that is where the hard part came, the word layer right there. You don't just type in the word Layer and watch it work. Unfortunately, we had to find the layer mathematically and then set the variable whose name is layer to be layer. So this is where it gets complicated. And you know, if, if you're not into programming, just clues me and put your hands over your ears for a couple minutes. Until I get through this bark. And then we'll show you how you can download a script and install it. But yeah, first to get this layer just to give you an example how this all works. Let's go up to this is where we started at. I had to define the image, right? Well first we have the list of the image. So let's see what happens when I do this GIMP hyphen image hyphen list. And that gives us this list here, a very shortlist which basically just has the number one in it and another number 1. If I had more images open, I'm assuming there'd be a number 234 and so on. That's how I saw it, at least on the examples online. Now, since we only have one image open, and I know that because I only open one, we can assume that the first number is actually going to be 0, because remember we're programming errors, so we start with the number 0. The first one there'll be 0, and the second one. This is an array because the list that the program gave us as actually an array. So the first one will be 0, second 1 will be one, and so on. And it's giving us ID numbers. So what happened here is after I know that the image I want to draw on is the zeroeth one, which is always going to be the case. Luckily, I guess if you were you wouldn't have to go through that if you already knew that you only had one image open. But after that, now we know the number that we need to 0. So I went into, I had to define an image as the zeroeth one. So here we go, define image two. We just named image to. This was based on example I found online. And you have a href. And then I don't know what a href is. I just blindly type this CAD are I do know is this is reminiscent of LSP code, which is basically setting a variable. And then we have the GIMP image list which we already used. So we're pulling out an array. We're taking the first element of the array, which is going to be the GIMP image list array 0. And we set that as we use a href to reference that, I guess we're probably trying to get the address of this variable is array, and we set that address to image the name image two. So I'm going to do this again right now and see what happens. And there you go. All it does is it responds with Image 2, which is actually a good thing because if you don't get that, then you're gonna get a bunch of error code. So now we have a variable for this image, which is called Image 2. Now what we have to do is get the layer that we're going to draw on. So how did we do that? Well, now that we have a variable for the image, Let's go up to an I typed all this code out previously so you don't have to watch me type it again. I'm just scrolling up to get where it is. Okay. I have to make this window a little bit bigger. Too. Little bit wider. Yeah, there we go. And so now that we have image two is a variable, as you can see, I'm using it over here, since it's programming code is usual, might as well read it backwards. So out of this image, we're doing GIMP image, get active layer because we're going to, you know, which layer do we want to draw onto? There could be many layers. I wish it just selected the default one. But we have to go through this process. So we're setting that variable of the active layer to be, we're defining it what we're calling a layer, right? Or in this case, just to prove that we know what we're doing, let's change that and roll call it. You know. So I'll just call it background or something or I'm afraid that would be the I'll call it base capital. I don't know if we can do capitals, right? It will try. So we made a new layer called base, which in my previous test we was called layer. So now we know which layer we're going to draw on. We know which image we want to join and which layer we're gonna join. We should be good to go at this point. So we gotta do this. Gimp, draw both fill but not layer. I want it to be that new and I just called it base. And this is going to be our function which actually jaws it. But in order to test this appropriately, I have to change the color because it's already been painted black. I change it to red. Go back to my console here. So if all of our functions were correct here, this should essentially should fill this with a red color. It'll turn all that black indirect. See what happens. Hit Enter. There we go. It actually works while hallelujah, applause and all that stuff. Okay, so that's a quick introduction on doing something very, very simple. With this. Now the question is going to be okay. For people who are programmers, you're going to say, okay, I understand, I get the general idea. And if you if you know Ella yeah, what do you call it? Lisp programming language? Let me just show you very quickly. You can do two plus two like this and it outputs for, right? So it is very much an LSP programming interface. If you don't know that language, which I wouldn't blame you. I don't know how many people do. I don't hear of it frequently. But yeah, it's not too hard to pick up for the sake of scripting here. But your first question is going to be, well, where are all the functions, whereas the documentation, that's where the good news comes in, right here. On this console, click the Browse button and you're going to get this window over here, which I cannot move because it's. Underneath this, right, There we go. You're going to get this window here, which is basically the best documentation of anything I've ever seen for any programming language is just great. You can search for whatever kind of function you might be thinking of you, if you want to do some of the background, for example, then search the word Background and see what you get there. Actually, background would not be suitable word. Make sure you're using a tool word or something like that. So I searched, for example, bucket to do GIMP bucket fill. And there you go. There's the function for Gim bucket fill. And not only does it tell you what the function is, but over here it has a full description and it tells you all the variables. And in addition to that, if you hit the apply button, it'll automatically put it into the console for you so you can start testing with it. However, remember, you have to set up your drawables, right? You have to set up your, your, your layer that you want to draw on and all that stuff. So you can't just hit Enter after doing that, you gotta change some of these variable names. So that's the good news and bad news, but I think it's very good interface. Now very quickly, a script that I found online, which we do have over here. Let's take this script, somebody else's script who did the hard work for us and try and install it into the GIMP. What we're going to do is go into, actually I'll do it right from here. We just want to save this file. It's called HelloWorld.java, SCM. And the place to save it, we're going to save page as is in the GIMP directory. Now the GIMP directory, whether you'd be on Windows or Linux or Macintosh, it's in your home directory, so you go to your usernames directory. If you're on Windows, it'll be user forward slash your username. And on Linux it's home forward slash Linux and Mac I think are the same at home forward slash. And then you have to make sure that hidden files are being viewed. And look for the folder called dot Gimp hyphen 2.8. As you can see here, it's got a dot before because it's a hidden file. And if you don't select, show hidden files and your preferences, then you might not see it. So first, get your settings straight for the show these hidden files, and then we'll go into the scripts directory right, right there and gave 2.8 scripts directory will just save this script. Now without, I did test this before it should work without closing the gap, Let me get rid of that atrocious red so that my I don't want to go blind right now. Not yet. Okay. Waiting for that to fill. And oh, I thought I was on white and red. Okay, so now let's note something that script is supposed to. If it does what it's supposed to do, zoom in here. It's supposed to make a new menu item, which is really cool, right? We're going to install this. It's gonna make new menu item. And if you can study the code, you can make your own and make your own little GIMP menu item. So it's supposed to be in file create and the name of it is HelloWorld. So let's go look in hello create. And we'll see right now there is a Hello World, but that's because I had installed it earlier for testing. Let me go to scrip script through here and refresh scripts. And I believe now it should technically should not be there. Go into now it is still there. So let me oh, that's because I just saved it in the directory. Okay, let's use our imagination that hello world was not here previously because I know for a fact that it wasn't. But we just saved it and yeah, catch-22, it's there again. So that script we just installed is here in the menu. Now, let me click on it and see what it does. Let me that it gives us a little pop-up dialog. We can play with this. I'm going to say instead of hello world, I'll say Hello universe. And well, the fonts work and I couldn't be that lucky. Let me try whatever. Type something in here. Blue too bold or something. I'll do italics so that we know that it worked. Font size a 100 is okay. Definitely not using red will use black. That reds make me go blind. And we'll just click the Okay button and see what happens. There we go. It actually worked Hello universe. It made a new image size to it and made text. I don't know That made the text verse and made it size to fit or how it did it. It's also using the correct font, so it works perfectly. That's really cool. So that script which I found online, at which website at Gimp book.com. It's called HelloWorld.java, SCM. It's, you know, if you want to use that for testing, at least we know it works because he saw me use it so that make a really good test. And there you have it basically that's everything we know how to play with the script through console here you can experiment with functions. Try some of the functions that I did see that works for you. Just to see it working. If not, you might need to make sure that you don't have a problem with your installation of the GIMP. But yeah, if you try this stuff I did in the order that I did it, then it should work and give you some good feedback. In addition to that, we found some scripts online and we install them and saw them show up in the many so thing that's very successful course. I hope you guys appreciate that and learn something. And I do hope to see you in the next lesson. Have a good day.
33. Making Plug-ins and Python-Fu Console: Hello, this is Brendan. And in this lesson we're going to cover Python console and making plug-ins. So as far as I known, as far as I can tell, with my experience so far, it seems that the Python language is dedicated to making plug-ins. And the scripting language, which is lisp style language, LSP style language is dedicated to making scripts. So that sounds a little confusing. But basically, we have two types of languages that you can make these macro like scripts with evidence, either Python or the script, which is less. And they never specifically seemed to call it lists. But anyway, that's what it is. So let's go in this lesson, we're going to go to the Python console first. And I've already opened one. Right here. I have available, which I was doing some testing with because I didn't want to waste your time anybody's time by not using untested code. So I got that all taken care of and make sure that I know what I'm doing here. So one thing with this. First of all, I want to show you where I'm getting this code from and let you know that I'm kind of working backwards. What happened is, if you go, if you look in the previous lesson, you don't have to right now. But if you watched that one already, then you know that we went in to our hidden GIMP file, which is in your home directory either on Windows or on Mac or Linux it's in that should be in the home file and some systems it could be different if you have an older version, should be in here. And in this area we have both the plugins directory and the scripts directory. So last time we installed the one Hello World script over here in a scripts directory using the, the script that they have there, the SCM, whatever language it happens to be. And now we're gonna go into the plugins directory. And you can see that I already have a good number of them, have four plugins in here that I made myself. And this is a auto save plug-in over here, which actually doesn't work and I don't know why. I actually, I think I do know why it's supposed to be using Perl, but it just doesn't work. So I'll have to figure that out some other time. Gimp seems to not have autosave feature, which was disturbing because I crashed a couple of times. Now, that wasn't good. So let me show you what my custom scripts do first before we go the console so we can understand what the goal is. I like to make comic books. And so doing so, I need to make these word bubbles over and over and over again. And it can be exhausting work if you're using tools to draw, I'll draw out the word balloons every time. She'd be word balloon is not bubbles. Yeah, I always forget. This is another nuisance in the GIMP. If you want to change the text color, you have to actually go down there. It's not, they should set it to the foreground color, I think because it just, well, it annoys me. Every time I want to change the color for the text, I instinctively go up to the foreground color and then realize I actually have to change it down here. Why, why does it need its own color box? I don't know. Anyway, that's a pet peeve addressed and let's move on. So here I have my text. Let's imagine some character is over here and they're saying something. So I need to make a word balloon for them. So what I can do instead of having to draw it out every time and do 15 step procedure, I go up to my own personal menu that I made up here called the my scripts, which you can see right here. And I numbered them so that they're lined up how I want them in order. Most used, the least used. And the first one here, comic balloons, will automatically make a comic balloon for me as long as I select it. Because I can't expect the program to know where my where my text is and how big it is each time. It can vary every time, right? So the least I have to do is make a selection here. And of course I have to have a layer available, afford to John 2. So I'm gonna make a new layer here, excuse me, while I move the zoom tool around and make sure that we're on the right layer. And that layer should be under the text layer so that the bubble, the balloon doesn't cover up the text. Okay, so now I have it all setup. All I have to do is go into my script menu up here. And I'm going to hit that button called Make word balloon. And then we'll see what happens. And it made a giant loon, hold on. Accidents do happen. I think while I was doing all that work, I did something with my selection and okay. There. Yeah, we didn't have this lecture in place, did we? Okay. So let me go through this again. Now we'll do competent. Now if you can see that in slow motion, if you noticed if you had a quick eye, it did like four or five steps all at once. First that made a rounded rectangle. Then it filled it in white, then it made a border, and then it filled in the border black. So let's do it again and see if you can watch very quickly. I'll go back a few steps and I'll hit the button again. 1, 2, 3. Yeah, you can say does it all up? It does it very quickly. If you have a slower computer, you can see it goes step-by-step, but we don't actually want a slower computer, so I'm glad it's very quick. Anyway. Point being, it made that little text balloon right there very quickly. And just to demonstrate in case you didn't see the earlier lessons how this works. I would go into this mode here, and then it's about 15 pixels and thickness. So after doing that, I would draw my little, you know, I don't know what you call this thing and I guess it's the pointer. It's supposed to be pointing to the person. I assume there's a name for it. It's interesting trivia question and bring up what he called the pointer on a comic book texts balloon. And then we just clean it up a little bit like that. And there you go. So you can imagine there was a guy over here talking and they'll stick man. And he's saying hello, just like that. And so that scripts very useful. It might have seemed like it took me many steps this time to set up. But that's because I didn't have my layers setup and everything like that. Usually I just dropped the rectangle around the text and hit the button. Then the last step I have to do is just draw that little arrow thing that the pointy thing which we don't have a name for towards somebody's head. And so that's an example of a script and action. Now, how to make your own script or how to install them. While the installation process, we pretty much already covered it. What happens is you have to get the code and put it in this directory. Let me just move this file out here. It's stuck behind the other window. And so this is the code for my balloon plug-in. Here. We go from the top. Looking from the top here. We bring in the Python environment and we import everything that we need from GIMP foo as they call it. And then here's the definition of my function for Python balloon as I called it. And you can even read the code here. It's pretty self-explanatory. We do script Fu selection, rounded rectangle. Then we do set the background and the 25 fives there means flooding it with white. Then we go Edit, Fill layer background. So I set the background color to white. Actually there's more steps than even thought of. So we have to set the color to white, and then we fill in the white. And then we get a border with eight pixels. So technically it's 16 pixel border in thickness. And then I set it to sharpen, I guess I didn't want fuzzy edges to come out. And then we set the background color again. And then we filled the selection, which was the black border that we filled in. And then in here I feathered. So anyway, and then just to make it less annoying, so I can go back to drawing again. I, as a last step here it says GIMP selection none. So it takes away the selection. So I don't have to de-select it before I start moving on to my next thing about too, because after I make that balloon, I'm sure to always grab the pen. And when I start making a little pointer that has no name. So that's that. Then down here we have some variables which I won't get into too much depth. But basically it's, it's very self-explanatory. I add a description, a name for a Python name for it called Python Fu balloon. And a little description, the name of the author who was me. And apparently I made this in 2013, while almost two years ago. And I gave it a title for the menu. And then this part is kind of interesting. On the very bottom. This is where we make the menu. So I made my own menu called my scripts. It always starts off with image. You put that first no matter what. And then you can put file or view or edit and you can basically push it into any menu that you want to. I think I have seen it done that way and pretty much that's, I believe it's that way. So the new menu that I made is called my scripts obviously. So that's convenient for me. And the name of it is up here, 0, 1 comic balloon. And it seems to put them in order based on whatever order they are in the directory. So that's why I gave these numbers of, you know, 000, 001, 000 too, just so they stay in the order that I want them to be. Because yeah. Well, I'm a little meticulous. I like to have things in order. So this is how you make a script write with code such as this. And installing it is just as easy as putting it in this directory. And I believe you have to make sure it's executable. I remember it not working and then just setting them to be executable. That would be particularly if you're in Linux or Mac operating system in Windows, I assume it'll just work as is. And then, and then we're good to go. So then we go back to the system here and you'll see up at the top that I have the, the, my scripts menu. And when it drops down I have that. So that mind we can look very quickly because I don't like to make this too long and boring at the console. So this is the Python console. Now that you understand what our goal was, what I wanted to do, just like with the same is with the last lesson where we're going over the, the other scripts. I was having problems at first it didn't work because the first thing you have to do in here is tell the console which image you're working on and which layer you're working on. Even if you only have one layer open, it's a computer, so it just doesn't know that. So the first thing we do is GIMP image list, and that'll give us a list. This one's a little better than the last one that just had numbers. It actually tells us the name of it, which currently is untitled because I didn't save this file. I'm assuming that if I save this file, that untitled will change into the name of this file. And so we know that we have an array of images and we want the first one. So of course, that could we know, looks like this. We just add the 0 at the end. And just to see what that returns. Well, that return nothing than me because there was setting the variable, I thought I had a different code there. Let me see. It'll do GIMP image list 0. And basically now you can see it gave us back the same thing, but it doesn't have the brackets around it. So we know it's not an array now, that is the actual image that we want, right? So as we did with this code here, we're setting this variable called image to that first image. So now we have our image variable. That's step one. Step two, we want to get the layer. So the drawable layer that we're working on right now is in the image. It's over here on that right side, it's in this image active layer variable. So I can do this, or I can even skip this step and say image active layer. It's actually just called layer. And then now we have the image, we have the layer. So we can proceed to make our rounded rectangle, which was the first step of making this balloon. So let me go ahead and delete this. I'll make a new selection here. I'm not going to do the whole balloon, but I'm just gonna do one quick test here just to see if we can make the rounded rectangle from the console here, which should be, you know, for me it's exciting and I hope you're excited to keep it. No, that might seem very boring to some people. So we have a square selection right now. I want to turn it into a rounded rectangle. Do we have the correct code? Here is the question or are we going to fail and fall flat on our faces with embarrassment? So instead of calling this drawable, I'm going to call it image. And what was it? It's called active layer. So that's the active layer that we have inside the image. So that'll save us a line of code, right? And here we have the number 50. That means I want to 50 degree radius on the circle. That's going to make the rounded edges. So basically it'll be perfectly rounded edges. And 0, I have no idea what it means at the moment. But you can look that up in the documentation, which we'll see in a minute. So now there's all my code and let me see if it makes it a rounded rectangle, as you can see now, when I fill them, let me see. Yeah, when I feel that square and it turns black. Right? So yeah, it turns black and it's a perfect square. So sorry, I was repeating myself there. I was trying to get that to go back. That's a perfect square, but I don't want it to be a perfect square. I want it to be a rectangle. Where did my console go? There it is. All right, so I have my code typed in here. Let me hit Enter and see what does the magic. And there we go. So now you can see in the zoom area here it is a rounded rectangle and add proof to that will give us a white background in there so we can see it. Very slow, but it works. Okay, yeah, I'll remember that I am bidding wow, video recording here with very high quality and recording sound while I do this, that's why my GIMP might seem a little bit slow. So there we go. I made a rounded rectangle using pure could. If that's not exciting, I don't know what it is. But yet to see things work for those of you who are watching this. If anybody ever watches this, it's the joy of programming, of course, is when we type some code and it actually works. And the ability to control software like this is certainly an amazing thing. And you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it. So that was review of the Python console and installing a plug-in, perhaps in reverse order. But if you're going to be doing programming, you're used to that aren't ship. And so we will end this lesson here. I hope you learned a lot. If you have any questions, do please message me and or get in contact with me however you can. This is in fact the last lesson, by the way, two. And if you went through from beginning to end, congratulations and thank you very, very much for paying attention. I will have one more summary lesson after this where we're go into detail about some of that and have a nice day.
34. Thank You and Summary: Hello, This is Brandon and I would like to thank you very much If you follow through, especially the follow through from the very beginning all the way to the very end of this very last video right here. And while I'm talking a bit about that, I'm going to go ahead and chop out this head here. Because when we play with again, we love to chop heads. Which tool? My looking for lasso, that's right. And I brought up, I open up a bunch of the images of things that we've worked on as a summary and overall summary of things that we've done and that we've been through an accomplished as you've done all this. And so. But the major point is that if you did do all that and you learned something from it, you have achieved a major accomplishment that I know many people would not be able to do because it is a very complicated lesson. It's very long and sometimes I'm a little bit long winded, I'm aware of that. So I do try and keep it as brief as I can, but this is what happens in reality, right? So aside from that, cannot make a new layer. Why would that happen? What about add one here? Okay, well, then we'll just add this somewhere else only. Yep. Sorry about that. Anyway, I'm just trying to add this had in here while it, while we speak. The point was that this was indeed a very long, very difficult lesson to get through, but definitely worth every moment I'd say if you did it and if you're trying to get into illustration or something like this, don't forget to go ahead and sign up for my other course. Which if you go to my website, you can find a link for it. They're convenient link or am I? I think I can just paste the link for it. And here, and I should be able to, they have a lot of rules here which makes things difficult, complicated sometimes, but otherwise, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff that has been covered way too much to just summarize in this one quick video here. But I do hope that you appreciate the fact that there's limited time and a lot of these things are very, very complicated. And I did, do my best to try and summarize things as concisely as I could, but it's not always easy. So in a lot of cases, you really just have to go back and review the video again. As a matter of fact, that might be a good thing for you to do right now while we're talking about that. Not to say right now, but, you know, at some point in time. So with that in mind, I'm going to say thank you very much. We're going to go through some of these images. And as you can see, I make just as many mistakes as anyone all the time, but I never quit. Thank you very much. So what I'm trying to write out here, and this is, this is all a part of the learning process. This software, whether it be this or Photoshop or whatever, they're all I've used all of them and i'm I'm not trying to toot my own horn or brag or anything. I am known to be a very talented person. I do all kinds of things with my hands and feet. If you can put it that way, that a lot of people just don't get around to doing. It requires a lot of patients. As you can see in the later lessons, I even got into programming and stuff that's very mentally straining stuff, very boring stuff. You could also say that a lot of people just don't like to get into. So if you feel frustrated at any point in time, certainly don't feel alone because this is not at all easy stuff to do. And those are probably the best the best parting words that I could leave you with is to just keep on, keep on, keeping on and keep on trying and keep on doing your best. And eventually it should click and come through to you. What you really want to do is have the information that I gave you in these lessons in your brain. That's what we're trying to do is to try and get that stuff up in your head so that when you're having these frustrating moments, you can call upon that knowledge to help you through with it. Otherwise, it's trial and error. In addition to the frustration that you're having every time you find a problem. And that's not really a good situation to be in. If you have to go into trial and error mode when you get frustrated. It's a lot worse than knowing what to do to get yourself out of a jam. So that's that in a nutshell. And users, some of the images that were working on previously. This one, I don't know why it's doing that. Maybe if I were to go up here and then paste, Let's see if that works. That would've worked. Okay. Yeah, see, I'm still learning things to apparently you can't paste onto a layer. I might have been on top of one of these layer masks instead of up on an actual layer. So that's why that happened. And even here at the bitter end, we're still learning things. There's so much to learn with the software. And here we did some coloring, colorizing in black and white. Now this one, this is where we did a touch-up of my face. Or yeah, we this is not the touched up version now, but that was the original one is reminder. So that's Photo Touch Up. You might recall this image in earlier lessons, we did all kinds of crazy stuff with it. And we use this one for some landscape and layer exercises. And I'm not sure if this one was even in these videos. I was playing with it, but I like it. And it's pretty cool. I do think we use this somewhere. I can't remember where I saved it. Particularly, I think it's somehow inspired me the simplicity of it. So it's like a minimalist landscape painting. So I might do some of that later. I think this will look great on a wall. And as, as I was saying before, and as I just made this image here once and last and for all. Thank you very much. And do keep in touch, message me with any questions and go ahead and sign up for other courses. If you enjoyed this one. And I do look forward to hearing from you and hope that you had a great experience and learned a lot. And that's it. Have a great day. We'll see.
Brendon Schumacker, Artist and Designer
