Gimp 1

I have just started on a video training course called Using Gimp by Que at Safari Books Online so will do a series of blogs on what I learn. Gimp which is pronounced with a soft g is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. You can do either graphics or photography with in this program. It's open source which among other things means it's free and it rivals Adobe Photoshop in terms of features. I think there is a lot of snobbery when people insist on using and learning how to use Photoshop. This program might not be quite as intuitive but let's face it everyone should be learning how to use it because it's free. There is a toolbars button under the windows menu button. The box that comes contains all your toolbars and each button corresponds to a different toolbar. You can draw a straight line by selecting one point of the line with a click of the mouse. Then you press shift and select the next point of the line. There is a crop feature where you set your guides up first and with the crop tool select the portion you wish to keep selecting from top to bottom and press enter to discard the excess of the picture. If you import a photo you may wish to reduce it and this can be done by entering how many units one of the dimensions will become and because there is a link button it should resize it automatically and you just have to press enter once you are happy with it. Of course if you press the link button it breaks that link between the dimensions. Another popular job is removing red eye from photographs where you zoom into the photo and select the red eye removal tool. This works by adjusting the sensitivity to red on a sliding scale so the rest of the photo should be left unharmed. I must admit this tutorial seems a little better than the Wordpress one which contained a lot of programming. From what I have done of it so far it seems great.