How to use GIMP (in 20 colorful steps)

Hi everyone! So while we’re in our Photoshop unit, I thought it’d be helpful to post a GIMP tutorial, in case you want to use image editing software in the future but don’t want to pay $19.99/month (or however much the price is for an Adobe subscription nowadays).

So, first off, what is GIMP? Think of it as like an off-brand version of your favorite cereal. GIMP has many of the same capabilities as Adobe Photoshop, but just minus some bells and whistles, meaning sometimes you have to get creative to achieve the same effect. However, for the most part, GIMP will get the job done for all your basic image-editing needs. And best of all, it’s free!

You can download GIMP at their website here.

For the sake of making a relevant tutorial, I decided to replicate the Advice Animal project we did in class the other day. This way, you can also get a sense of some of the ways Photoshop and GIMP differ.

Step 1: Creating a new file

The first step of any project is to start off with a blank canvas. After you start up the GIMP program, all you have to do is click File > New, and type in what size you want your canvas to be.

One of the unique things that GIMP does is outline each new layer you make with a dotted yellow box. This is partly because, unlike Photoshop, GIMP’s default settings allow you to move different layers around without having to manually switch between them on your Layers Panel (the long box on the right hand of the screen). However, I’m not a huge fan of the yellow boxes cluttering up my visual space, so you can easily disable them by going to View > Show Layer Boundary and unchecking that option.

Great! So far, so good.

Step 2: Drawing Lines and Using Paint Bucket

Now, on our blank canvas, we can draw our background. Unfortunately, GIMP does not have a built in Stroke tool to draw lines with, so instead we have to use either the pencil or paintbrush tool. I’m using the pencil tool (circled in red) because it creates a harsher, cleaner line than the paintbrush tool.

Just like in Photoshop, you can use the color palette icon on the bottom of your toolbox (left hand side) to choose what color you want your pencil strokes to be. Then, in the Tool Options box (also circled in red), you can choose the brush hardness and size of your pencil strokes (I went with 1.00 so the stroke would be as unnoticeable as possible).

Then, to ensure you are making a straight line with the pencil tool, click on the upper left hand corner of your canvas, hold down the Shift key, and then move your mouse to the opposite corner of the canvas. You should get a straight line guide like you see above. Once you’re satisfied with your line, click again, and you will have drawn your first, perfectly straight pencil stroke! From here, you can just repeat the same step to draw the rest of your lines until you have split the canvas into a pinwheel shape.

*Note: Be sure that before you draw a new line, you click at your starting spot before holding down the Shift key. If you don’t do this, then you’ll accidentally connect the end point of your previous line with the start point of your new line.

After you’re done sectioning your background, all you have to do is color in the shapes! Thankfully, unlike Photoshop, GIMP’s paint bucket tool (circled in red) is obvious and upfront. Again, you can use the color palette tool at the bottom of your toolbox to choose what colors you want to color your background in with.

There, nice and pretty!

Step 3: Adding an External Image

So now that we’ve finished our background, we have to add our advice animal. Again, pretty self-explanatory, all you have to do is go to File > Open and choose a JPG or PNG of an animal that you’ve already saved to your computer. After you do that, a new window with your image should pop up.

Next step is to transfer this image to the main canvas we’re working on. To do this, all you have to do is press Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, and then Ctrl-P your image onto our original window.

*Note: Sometimes, when you copy and paste, you’ll notice in your Layers Panel that the pasted image will be contained in what’s called a “Floating Layer” (instead of “Pasted Layer” as you see in the screenshot above). A floating layer is sort of GIMP’s way of letting you preview how your pasted image is going to look on your original canvas. Because of this, a floating layer cannot be moved or altered, so make sure to click the “New Layer button” (currently hidden in the screenshot above, but it’s the left-most icon in the Layers Panel on the same row as the trashcan) to turn your “Floating Layer” into a “Pasted Layer.” Do NOT skip this step.

Now that we have our image pasted, we want to get rid of the white background around our shark. There are multiple tools you can use to do this, but the easiest one for this case (because the background around the shark is all one color), is to use the Magic Wand tool (circled in red below). Just like in Photoshop, all you have to do is click to highlight the part you don’t want, and then press Delete.

Awesome! Then, to deselect the dotted outline left over, just go to Select > None. If you want to move the image around to reposition it, just click the Move Tool (the blue cross with arrows).

Step 4: Adding Text

We’re almost done! Now we just have to add text. The Text tool in GIMP is the big “A” icon. You can then just click anywhere on the screen and start typing.

You can also use the Tool Options panel to choose your font, font size, alignment, spacing, and other nifty things. Be careful though, because sometimes the Tool options panel and the floating toolbar that appears above your actual text box aren’t in sync (in that if you change the font size to 120 on the Tool Options panel, the font size might still be at the default 18 when you actually start typing because the floating toolbox is still set at 18).

Hooray, now we’ve got a “fin-tastic” pastel shark!

Step 5: Outlining Your Text

All right, now here comes the hardest part of the tutorial. One of the biggest grievances I have with GIMP is that there is no Stroke options panel. So, for example, you can’t easily add an outline to your text, or a bevel/emboss effect, or an outer glow effect, or all those other interesting effects that come standard with Photoshop. However, that’s not to say that outlining text in GIMP is impossible; it just takes a few more steps.

First, we’re going to use the Select by Color tool, which looks like a hand pointing at a red/blue/green color swatch (also circled in the screenshot below). Think of this tool as like the Magic Wand tool, but for text shapes.

See how the text is now highlighted by a dotted line after I clicked on the words using the tool? In a way, the Select by Color tool allows us to treat a text layer like an image without compromising the text itself (because while you could turn your text into an image layer, you wouldn’t be able to edit it later on if you needed to).

Now, we’re going to go to Select > Grow. You will then be prompted to type in how much you want to “grow” or enlarge your selection. Because we just want a thin black outline to our text to make it more visible, I’m just going to grow it by 1 pixel. After you click “okay,” it’s not going to be immediately obvious that the dotted selection has actually gotten bigger (because we enlarged it by only a teeny tiny little pixel), but don’t worry, it has.

This next step is the most important step. Now that you’ve “grown” your selection, you’re going to make a new layer (icon circled in red below). This layer is going to end up being our text outline layer.

I have a bad habit of not naming my layers, but I’ve circled the new, blank layer we just created in red below. Now, you want to go to Edit > Fill with FG Color and fill this new layer in with black (which you must have selected beforehand in the color palette tool).

And tada! Now you have a new layer that’s the same exact shape as your text layer, only just 1 pixel bigger and shaded in black. This is your outline layer!

From here, all we have to do is move the outline layer behind the text layer, which you can do in your Layers Panel.

Beautiful! Now just repeat that process with the rest of your text, and you’ll be finished!

Step 6: Saving your File

The final step is to save your file. As we discussed in class, you can save Photoshop projects with the extension .PSD, which will contain all your layers and “raw materials” so you can go back and fix your image if you need to. In GIMP, this extension is .XCF.

If you want your image converted to JPG or PNG so you can post it on the web, all you have to do is go to File > Export As, just like you would in Photoshop.

And that’s it! Hopefully this tutorial wasn’t too lengthy or too confusing. Overall, I think the great thing about image editing softwares is that, once you learn how to use one, you pretty much have all the basic skills you need to figure out how to navigate another one. Really the hard part is just figuring out the nuances of each individual program, which is fun in its own way too.