Table Of ContentThe Artist’s Guide to GIMP:
Creative Techniques for
Photographers, Artists, and
Designers
Michael J. Hammel
Published by No Starch Press
This book is dedicated to my wife and creative partner, Brinda, for waiting patiently each night for me to exit
my cave and join her for an evening viewing of Jon Stewart and South Park. May we laugh together forever,
my dearest love.
About the Author
Michael J. Hammel has been involved with GIMP since version 0.54 and was a
contributor to the early development of the program. Hammel wrote a column on
GIMP for Linux Format for three years and is the author of The Artists’ Guide to
the GIMP (Frank Kasper & Associates, 1998) and Essential GIMP for Web
Professionals (Prentice Hall PTR, 2001). He is an embedded software engineer
living in Colorado Springs.
About the Technical Reviewer
Rolf Steinort is a science teacher in Berlin, Germany. As an amateur photographer
before autofocus was invented and a Linux user at the time Tux became its mascot,
he is naturally a longtime GIMP user. Since 2007, he has produced Meet the
GIMP (http://meetthegimp.org/), a video tutorial podcast about GIMP and other
open source graphic programs.
Acknowledgments
There’s no such thing as a one-man project, and this book is no exception. While
the tutorials are mine, the ideas and motivations come from all over the world,
from many artists and designers with much greater talent that I’ll ever possess. To
them, I owe my modest artistic accomplishments.
But even before these tutorials could be created, someone had to build the tools.
To the GIMP Development Team, with specific thanks to Sven Neumann and
Michael Natterer for keeping the project going for many years, I thank you for your
years of dedication and hard work.
I owe the staff at Linux Format (past and present) a heartfelt thanks for publishing
my GIMP tutorials series long enough for me to come up with the ideas in this
book.
Of course, my biggest thanks are due to Bill Pollock at No Starch Press for eagerly
accepting the idea for this book. And extra thanks go to the rest of the gang at No
Starch Press: Alison Law and Tyler Ortman for their editing, and Leigh Poehler
and Rachel Waner on the sales and marketing team. Thanks to Rolf Steinort from
Meet The Gimp! (http://meetthegimp.org/) for his technical reviews, video
clarifications, and assistance with learning new features in GIMP 2.8. Without all
their great help this would be nothing more than a bunch of text files and
screenshots.
Thanks to Greg Martin for graciously allowing me to create a GIMP version of his
original Photoshop star field tutorial
(http://www.gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/making_a_star_field.html).
Additional thanks to my mom for once again letting me use a photo of her from
her high school days in the photo restoration chapter. I know I wouldn’t want my
high school pictures used for anything except fireplace kindling.
Credits
Selected images appear from the following royalty-free collections:
BigStockPhoto.com http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
iStockphoto.com http://www.istockphoto.com/
PDPhoto.org http://pdphoto.org/
morgueFile http://www.morguefile.com/
Stock.XCHNG http://www.sxc.hu/
Links to all the stock images used in the book are available at the companion
website:
http://www.artistsguidetogimp.com/
Many of this book’s tutorials are inspired by tutorials presented in countless
Photoshop texts. My knowledge of how to use tools like GIMP was born from
those early Photoshop tutorials; I learned to translate and reimagine those
techniques into the button sequences and pixel pushing required to reproduce the
concepts using GIMP. Despite this extensive reading, I never actually used
Photoshop until many years later, when my wife started using it. Though I know
“where everything is” in Photoshop, I find myself happily using GIMP instead. We
all have our comfort zones; use what makes you happy.
Introduction
I’ve been writing about Linux and GIMP in particular since 1996. I’ve written for
every kind of publication, ranging from countless print articles and magazine
columns to website musings and multiple books. In 2001, I wrote about how Linux
and GIMP were starting to make waves in the special-effects industry with the
article “Linux Goes to the Movies” in Salon.com. Open source has come a long
way since then. And so has GIMP.
When GIMP was first started as a class project at the University of California,
Berkeley, it was built on top of the venerable Motif toolkit, which at the time was
really the only full-featured software library for X11-based windowing systems.
Version 0.54 was my first taste of the GIMP in this form. Later, the GIMP Toolkit
(GTK+) was born, and it replaced Motif for various technical reasons. Somewhere
between version 0.54 and version 0.99, I ported John Beale’s Sparkle code to a
GIMP plug-in. For that ancient yet still meaningful work, I’m listed as a contributor
to the project. It even got me into the Red Hat “friends and family” plan when they
had their IPO (I should’ve sold when it was at its peak—silly me). Eventually, my
association with the project led me to write for the Linux Gazette and later Linux
Journal, the latter of which led to my first book on GIMP, in fact the first book on
GIMP, called The Artists’ Guide to the GIMP. You might say I’ve followed Linux
and GIMP from day one.
Of course, after all these years I’m no longer the only one writing on this subject,
and GIMP is no longer just a class project. Plenty of texts exist that show you
which button opens which dialog. In the first edition of this book, I hoped to go
where no one else had attempted, beyond the application itself and into what it can
do. In this second edition, I’m updating the old tutorials, tossing in some new ones,
and giving you a look at how GIMP is evolving.
Linux and GIMP have grown up together, and they are no longer youngsters in the
computing world. Linux comes with a serious desktop, and GIMP is a serious
application. It’s time to get down to business: the business of graphic design. This
book is about learning techniques applicable to the real world.
What This Book Is About
This book is about process, not buttons or menu paths. My goal is to show you that
the processes required to perform a task can be done with GIMP as easily as with
any other graphics editor. It isn’t the tool that’s important, it’s understanding the
process. It’s far easier to grasp that a mask is a black region blocking out a section
of an image than it is to find a use for an alpha channel and a black background.
Don’t get bogged down in the mechanics of the tool. Focus on the task at hand. I’ll
point you to the GIMP components necessary to finish the job. By the time you’re
done with these tutorials, you won’t need any more pointing.
If you can’t find a dialog referenced in the text, just open the Dockable Dialogs
menu, available from the Windows menu. Clicking a menu entry jumps to that
dialog quickly if it’s already open or opens it if necessary.
This book was written during the development of GIMP 2.8, so it’s most relevant
to that particular version of GIMP. But I’ve tried to keep my advice general enough
that the book remains useful even as newer versions of GIMP are released.
What This Book Is Not About
In this book, you won’t find manual pages for each filter, menu, or feature. I won’t
be explaining each icon you find or why some dialogs look like they do. Instead,
the tutorials presented here show how to use filters as if they were a set of tools in
a toolbox. You seldom need just a hammer for a project. GIMP provides the
hammer, the saw, the drill, even the kitchen sink. With this book, I hope you’ll
learn to use all the tools in the toolbox.
