GIMP Demystified

If you have a digital camera, you’ve probably tried editing your photographs with the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP. You may use GIMP on a regular basis, or you may be just starting out: but do you really feel like you understand what’s going on under the hood?

Akkana Peck, author of Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, will demonstrate how to use GIMP to improve your photographs or incorporate them into projects like web images or greeting cards.

We’ll start with the basics of photo manipulation, such as the difference between resolution and pixel size, and a comparison of image formats such as JPEG and GIF. We’ll also cover the basic photo operations, such as crop, rescale, and all the different ways of adjusting brightness and contrast.

Then we’ll dive into a few more complex topics. Selection is a simple concept—just cut out a piece of the image and operate on it separately. But there are lots of different ways to select in GIMP, and sometimes using the right tool for the job makes the job a lot easier. You’ll also learn when and why to use layers—the basis of any complex GIMP project—as well as how to use the text tool and how to apply some of GIMP’s simpler filters, like Drop Shadow.

We’ll also cover some of the GIMP’s large collection of tools and plug-ins, some of the useful new features in GIMP 2.4, and some tricks you can use to create great-looking digital art.

Whether you’re a first-timer or a fairly regular GIMP user, this presentation should have something new to offer you.