Gimp 5

This is the final installment in my series on the open source software Gimp. You can download Gimp at http://gimp.org  & there is a separate help file which you must download to the same folder you install gimp on. There is a zoom tool that the best way to use it to click on the zoom button followed by a percentage greater than 100 % to enlarge or less to zoom out. There is a shear tool that lets you warp and distort a picture. There is a dodge/burn tool with the dodge option lightening the paintwork and the burn option darkening it. In traditional photography dodge would be a tiny sponge soaked in a chemical that would dissolve some of the ink on a negative. To create a sepia photo which is a kind of brown and white tinted old fashioned photo you need to use the old photo filter. It has a mottle option that ages the picture. Also distort and border options that also help with the aging process. There is a bump map filter with various options for raising features on a photo and creating noise in it etc. You can duplicate an image by choosing edit/ duplicate or edit/ copy. You can create a new layer by choosing layer/ new layer. There is also a heal tool where you control + mouse click a perfect or near perfect portion of a picture to a part that has an imperfection by mouse clicking that part. It copies one part of a picture to another so care is needed in choosing the right part. There is a preferences dialogue box with lots of settings to make gimp work the way you want it to. In one option it saves your changes to tools on exiting gimp and there is another option that saves them straight away. I will be starting a new series of blog posts tutorials on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 tomorrow.