Basic Skills in Editing Images with THE GIMP

Introduction

Note: this extra lesson is intended for studends of my HTML tutorial to teach them the very basic knowledge they need in manipulating images in order to make them suitable for web pages.

As said already, you should have some basic skills in manipulating images, most importantly resizing and cutting images, saving images as compressed .jpg file and adding text to graphics like the buttons.

You might be already used to a graphic software like the popular "Adobe Photoshop" or Microsoft´s "Picture Publisher", so you may use your favorite tool if you like. But if you have never worked with graphics and don´t want to invest money in any of these professional software tools, then I have the perfect solution for you: THE GIMP.

GIMP is a free open-source software and has originally been only available for the Linux operating system, but now there are also versions for Windows and Mac users. And although GIMP is free software, it´s at least as good as the commercial tools Photoshop and Picture Publisher.

In this lesson, I´m going to show you how to install the software on your computer and how to use the basic functions you need for manipulating the pictures and graphics for your websites.

Installing GIMP

As said, GIMP is originally a software tool for LINUX, so if you want to install it on a MAC or Windows computer, you need to install certain runtime environments first. I have only found these for Windows PCs. If you are using a MAC computer, there are several places that provide GIMP installation packages (some for download, others on CD). Please visit www.GIMP.org/macintosh/ for information about how to install GIMP on MACs. You will need at least Mac OS X.

Installing GIMP on Windows PCs

STEP 1: Download GIMP and the GTK+ Runtime Environment

To download the latest stable version of GIMP, Visit Sourceforge.net Now. The first download link on this page is for the software itself. Below it are the download links for different gtk+ runtime environments.

Download the GTK+ runtime environment version that suits your Windows version: There´s one GTK+ version for Windows 2000 or newer (includes XP) and another for Windows 98/ME and NT4.

I also recommend you download the help package.

STEP 2: Install GIMP

To install GIMP on your computer, you need to install the GTK+ runtime environment first and then install GIMP itself. To start the installation, simply double click on the files you´ve downloaded. If you have downloaded the help package, you need to install this, too.

Congratulations, you are now ready to start working with GIMP.

Working With GIMP

Now that you have installed the software, let me quickly show you the most important tools and functions you need to manipulate images in order to make them web friendly. In the following videos you will learn how to:

Open an image file, how to rotate it (if necessary) and how to adjust the color brightness and contrasts.
Cut out a region of an image.
Resize (or scale) an image to make it smaller.
Reduce the file size of an image by saving it in the "jpg" file format.
Add text to your images (f.ex. buttons)