Merit.oryo.us

It’s come to my attention that there isn’t a concise list of Gimp tutorials dealing with basic and have to know techniques. Sure there are lists of tutorial sites out there (like this one from TutorialBlog) but with those you have to slink through them all to get at the good ones. Plus, you’d be hard pressed to find one of those tutorial sites categorize their gimp tuts by technique. What I hope to achieve here is just such a compilation, solid tutorials covering the basics to gotta know it stuff organized by technique. Enjoy and please feel free to let me know if you think an addition should be made.

Paths

Drawing Arcs with Gimp

Path Basics from Gimp.org

Useful Things to Do with Paths

Creating Overlays with Paths from Mike’s Picks

Brushes

Best of GIMP Brushes by Techzilo

24 Sweet Brushes for Gimp complements of Kristarella

See Stars by Editing Your Brushes

Grids and Guides

Grids and Guides in Gimp

Gradients

30+ Gradients offered by Gimp-tutorials.net

Shadows

Inner Shadow

Let’s get down to the nitty “griddy”. That’s right. Last time we created our bulletin board and this time where going to fill it. We’ll add some paper and some post-it tabs and do so quickly using grids and guides.

Again, we’ll be working with our bulletin board. If you haven’t done the first part of the tutorial, you can grab the bulletin.xcf.

First, let’s turn on the grid (View->Show Grid). At present, the grid might be too sparse. We’d like to have the points on the grid 15px apart. This can easily be done. Simple configure the grid (Image->Configure Grid) and set the spacing to 15px.

Now, with our grid setup the first item we want to add is a sheet of paper. Create a new layer and call it paper. Go ahead and make a 300×375 rectangular selection for the sheet of paper.

Did you get it? It’s easy to do than you might think. Sure the grid can help you “eye ball” it, but it’s real power comes from snapping to it. Activate snapping now (View->Snap to Grid) and try the selection again. It should be much easier now. Once you have the selection, fill it with #f1f1f1.

The next step will be to add some lines. You remember good ol’ ruled paper, right? That’s what we’re after here. Create a layer for the lines and call it “rules”. Select #b2c7fd and the pencil tool with a 1px brush. Starting from the 4th grid part from the top, draw lines back and forth. To do this, hit one side with a dot and then hold down the SHIFT key and move over to the over side. When you have the line you want, hit the mouse again to draw the line. Continue down the sheet. At some point you may want to turn of the grid to see how you’re doing.

Next, paint a pink line (#bc5858) down the left edge and cut out a few holes.

For our next trick, we’ll add some post-it tags. We could do this with grids but we’ll use guides. But first, go ahead and turn off the the grid (View->Show Grid) and turn off snap to grid (View->Snap to Grid). Now, turn on guides (View->Show Guides).

Hmm. Nothing happened. Where are the guides? Well, we have to add them. To add a horizontal guide, click up in the rule on the top and pull down. You should see the guide. Drop 6 horizontal guides and a couple vertical guides as shown. It will help to zoom in to 200%.

Turn on snap to guides (View->Snap to Guides) and make rectangular selection inside the guide. Create a new layer and call it “post it tabs”. Fill each rectangle in with a post it type color. Then set the opacity of the layer to around 60%.

Finally, create another layer, “post it tabs overlay” and use the pencil tool to draw a darker border around the tabs.

From there, with a few more touches you can get …

The curious can check out the bulletin2.xcf file.

With this post, I hope to start the first of a three or four part post tutorial on how to create a realistic bulletin board using our beloved Gimp. The result were striving for is something more or less what I have on my fleshed out, but not completely finished home page. At the end of the post we should have the following.

To start, create a new 800×600 image and set the fill to transparent. Now let’s get to work on the frame. What we’d like to do is create a 20px wide frame all the way around the image. So pop quiz, hot shot, how ya gonna do it?

Well, if you don’t have any ideas, you can always do what I did (After all, this is a tutorial). I selected the entire image. You can use the Fuzzy Select tool (magic wand) if you like or Select->All. Then I shrunk the selection by 20px (Select->Shrink). The last step is to invert the selection.

Now create a new layer (Layer->New Layer) and call it “Frame”. With the layer active, fill the frame with #dba368.

Next, we want to give the frame some feel. It looks way to flat and bland. Therefore, let’s add to level to the frame. This is really nothing more than a frame for our frame. Do do this create a new layer and call it “Frame Bevel”. Select the paintbrush and the Circle Fuzzy brush with a 7px radius. We also need to use a darker shade of brown (#af6a31 worked for me). Make sure the “Frame Bevel” layer is active and then paint a border around the frame. This can easily be achieved if you zoom in to 800%. Go to the top left and dot the corner with the dark brown. Now scroll all the way to the bottom and hold down SHIFT and CRTL. You should see a line. This is what will be painted when you click the mouse. Go ahead and move the cross hair down to the lower left corner and give your mouse a click. You should have a nice straight line. Continue your way around the frame until you make it back up to where you started. Do the same with the inner part of the frame but with a lighter color (#f6cba0 should do).

Let’s check our progress…

Now that’s not to bad. We used a fuzzy brush to give us several shades of brown and thus give us the bevel effect. However, it looks like we over did it a bit. Let’s try to sharpen up the inner portion of the frame. To do this, select the Eraser tool and the circle brush with a 5px radius. Zoom in again and use the same trick to go around the frame and shave of about 1/3 of the bevel on the inside.

Now we have our frame. Let’s add the corkboard. At stock.xchng I found this image of a corkboard. Grap it and open it up. As is, its way to large. Scale it down to 1000×800 and copy it. Now paste it in (Edit -> Paste Into). Pull up the Layer dialog and make a new layer out of the pasted layer (corkboard). Press the new layer button to do this and move the board underneath the other layers.

The final touch is an inner shadow for the corkboard. Switch to the “Frame” layer and and select the frame. Feather the selection by 10px (Select->Feather). Next, create a new layer and call it “Inner Shadow”. Fill the selection with black. For more help with technique, you can check out my Inner Shadows tutorial.

That’s it. Here’s the xcf file.

Next time we’ll add some “flair”.

Now available, part 2 of building a bulleting board, Grids and Guides. Check it out.

Recently, I was working on a web design and I ended up with the following.

It doesn’t look quite right, does it? There’s something out of place. Ah, yes, the edges of the letters are to sharp. Those jagged edges give the overall image a less than natural feel.

To remedy the situation, we’re going to use the smudge tool to smooth it out. Select the tool and use a brush of about 7px or so. We’ll start with the S. Zoom in and click on the lower right corner with the tool. Now move it up to the upper right corner. Press and hold the Shift key and a line will appear. By clicking the mouse, the smudge tool will be applied on that line. Do so now. Next, move back down to the lower right corner, press shift and hit the edge again with the smudge tool.

Not to bad, by using the same technique on the other edges we can achieve the finished product.

It’s not to bad and much more natural in appearance.

And remember, the difference between a good image and a great one’s in the details. Always be on the look out for a technique or two that will help you with the small stuff. If you sweat the small stuff, it will pay off with more realistic images.

A common technique used to add some depth to an object is an inner shadow. You’ll see it used quite a bit, especially in Photoshop tutorials (Layer->Layer Style->Inner Shadow). It turns out that we can achieve more or less the same effect with Gimp. It just takes more work.

We’ll start with a red rectangle. You can make it any size you want and pick a background color.

Now, select the rectangle. This can easily be done using the fuzzy select tool (magic wand). Next, shrink the selection by about 10px (Select->Shrink).

And then feather the selection by 5px (Select->Feather).

We almost have the selection we need. All we need to do is invert it (Select->Invert). There it is. This selection we’ll fill with a dark gray.

But wait. We don’t want to wipe out the rectangle. Create a new layer (Layer->New Layer) and call it inner shadow. With this layer active, go ahead and fill in the selected region.

We’re almost there. Reduce the opacity some on the inner shadow layer to let the rectangle underneath come through some. You can see that our shadow extends far beyond where it should. It should be confined to the box. To fix this, select the base layer (the one with the box).

Again, select the box and then invert the selection. Finally, switch back to the inner shadow layer and cut away the selection (Edit->Cut).

We’re done.

As illustrated, you can achieve an effect similar to that of Photoshop’s inner shadow with Gimp. It just takes a few more clicks of the mouse.

For a long time, I shied away from paths in Gimp. Every time I tried to use them, I ended up frustrated and no better off then before I’d started. It was all foreign to me and of no use. Overtime, I came to understand the power of paths and learned that they can be very useful and save you a great deal of work. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll try to share some hints with you and see if I can’t all get on the right “path”.

In this tutorial, we will focus on how to change selections to paths and paths to selections, and more importantly, why we care about doing so.

Let’s start with a 250×250 and a white background. Now use the lasso selection tool to carve out a part of the image. The edge you are creating could be the edge of a piece of torn paper.

Now create a new transparent layer and call it paper. Use it and fill in the selected region with a light blue (#4a7bf6).

At this point, we want to save the selection. After all, it’s a bit complicated and would be hard to reproduce. Who knows, we might need it down the road. To save the selection, use the select menu and hit “To Path”.

Hmm. What happened? Nothing? Well, it might seem that way, but we’ve successfully saved the selection to a path. To see it, open up the path dialog from the dialog menu. You should see our new path listed.

Let’s turn back now to our image and clear the selection, (Select > None). As you can see, we still have some work to do here. First, let’s put in a drop shadow. Create a new layer and place it under the paper. I’ll call it shadow. We’re going to need the selection again, so we’ll grab it from the path. Pull up the path dialog and select the path that represents our paper (it’s probably the only one there). Once highlighted, press on the button at the bottom that looks like a selection. This is the “Path to Selection” button. Going back to our image, we can select the shadow layer and fill it with black. From there, well, you know the drill. Use a Gaussian blur to get a drop shadow. I used a radius of 15px.

We’ve made some progress, but there’s still a little magic left we need to work. Let’s try to soften up the edge of the paper. To do this, I want to coat the edge with a lighter shade of blue. I would like to achieve something like this…

To do this, we’ll use our path again. If you take another look at the path dialog, you’ll see a button with a brush on it. That is what we want, “Stroke Path”. Again, with our path select, hit this button. It will bring up a window which will allow us to select a tool that will be applied to your path. In essence, this means that the tool will be applied to the path. Select “Stroke with a paint tool” and grab the paintbrush from the list of options.

We’re almost there, but before we stroke the path, we need to make sure the paint tool is set properly. Bring up Gimp’s toolbox and select the paint brush. Here’s where we’ll make some changes.

The color I used was a lighter shade of blue (#b2c7fd) and a custom round brush with a radius of 2px and a hardness of 50%. If you’re not sure how to edit a brush, you might “brush up” on that and look at See Stars by Editing Your Brushes. Once you have the color and brush set, go back to the stroke path dialog and press stroke.

I hope you agree that paths aren’t as complicated as some might have you believe. You can work with them and they can save you some time and effort.

Next time we’ll look at even more useful things to do with paths.

An often under used feature of Gimp for many gimpers is the brush editor. Often times, this editor can give the control you need to add the right touch. Let’s see how this is the case as we create a simple spacescape.

First, create a new image and fill it with a gradient. A mixture of dark blues will work fine for us here.

Now let’s add a couple of layers of color to give us the glowing gases. Create a new transparent layer. I’ll call it “yellow ball o’ flame”. Now is where the fun begins. First we need to bring up the brush dialog. This can by visiting the Dialog menu or with the short cut “Shift + Ctrl + B”.

Unfortuantly, none of the brushes will meet our needs. We need a custom brush. On the bottom row of the dialog, click the new brush button to bring up the brush editor. Select a round style brush, set the radius to around 280 and the hardness to .45.

Now select the paintbrush tool and your new brush. With a nice shade of yellow, paint the lower left hand corner of the new layer. Finally set the layer mode to overlay.

Repeat that procedure a couple more times with a red and a green and vary the radius some.

Now its time to add the stars. Create another layer and select a small brush place some small dots. To get create a larger star, open the brush editor again and set the radius to around 10 and hardness to 0.

Using a dull white, place a couple stars in your gaseous clouds.

There you have it. I hope you agree that by tweaking your brushes, you can see stars.

Several sites out there offer very nice, professional grade patterns. These can add a nice touch to any website and save you a good deal of work. What happens though, if you find that perfect pattern but the colors don’t quite fit with what you had in mind? Fear not, with Gimp, you can easily change the colors of any pattern to achieve just what you want. I’ll cover two different methods to do this.

The first method we’ll use involves layers and desaturation and we’ll start with the following pattern.

Now, let’s go ahead and desaturate the image. Colors > Desaturate.

In the dialog box that pops up, select “Lightness” for the shade of gray and then hit “Desaturate”.

Now, let’s add a new layer that’s going to give the image its color. Layer > New Layer

Pull up the layer dialog, and move the newly layer down below the pattern.

Fill the “new color” layer with the color of your choice and then change the opacity of the pattern layer to achieve the desired effect.

They’re you have it.

Now let’s move to the second method. One drawback with the first approach was that we lost the contrasting colors. This has flattens the image and might not be what’s called for. Let’s see if we can’t try to keep some of the original color.

Starting with the original pattern, we’re going to make part of the image transparent.

Colors > Color to Alpha

Now, select the color picker from the main window and below check “Show info window”.

Select the color you’d like to replace. In the “Show Info Window” that appears, click on the color and drag it over to the “From” box on the “Color to Alpha” dialog. Click on “OK” and the selected color magically disappears.

Now it’s just a matter of creating a layer to move behind the pattern layer and fill it with a color. Much like we did in the first part of this tutorial.

Here’s the end product using this method.