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looking for an experienced gimp user to help~

lilone Sandgrain
unconventially lil' me
Join date: 21 Mar 2004
Posts: 63
05-14-2004 19:07
this is my first attempt at a forum. we just downloaded gimp and are full of dreams but the interface is so foreign i'm not sure what to do. just have very light digital imaging background. am really feeling held back. can anyone steer me or are there any zealous teachers out there?? (=
Loki Pico
Registered User
Join date: 20 Jun 2003
Posts: 1,938
05-14-2004 19:27
Welcome to the forums lilone.

I have never even heard of GIMP, but a lot turned up in a google search. It looks like a pretty cool program. It does look a bit intimidating, but I saw a couple of good tutorials on the web.

I feel a little intimidated with photoshop myself. It does so much and the interface just looks so foriegn. So, I sort of know what your going through. I just been playing with it, trying to figure out what each thing does.

Hopefully someone can help you out, but in the meantime explore and play :)
Azelda Garcia
Azelda Garcia
Join date: 3 Nov 2003
Posts: 819
05-14-2004 22:17
I use Gimp, cos its free and powerful. It offers much the same functionality as Photoshop, so actually if you go into a bookshop and read a Photoshop manual you'll actually feel a lot more comfortable with Gimp afterwards. At least, I did.

Other than that, just play with it... there is a learning curve, you cant get round that, but its very powerful.

One option - it's what I did - is to start by using the Microsoft Paint program that comes with Windows in the Accessories. It's actually quite powerful. I mean, you cant do alpha textures or anything more complex than very basic, but the basic stuff like drawing and copy and paste and text gets you a long way.

After playing with Paint for a bit (maybe just a few hours) at some point you'll be craving advanced functionality (like Alpha), and you'll know exactly what you want, and you'll most likely find that in Gimp.

Hope this is some help. Cant really offer too much concrete stuff because I'm just learning myself :-O I guess I could add that the "advanced" functions I use most are:

- feather selection. When you copy and paste, you can do Feather Selection before doing copy to kindof fade-out the selection somewhat; this is often exactly what you want
- clone. Basically, control-left click on the area you want to clone, then just drag mouse over target area. You can select from "aligned" or "non-aligned". Um, check a Photoshop manual for what this means, cos it'll explain it better than me :-)
- layers/transparency/masks. Again, this is exactly like in Photoshop so a Photoshop manual will be very helpful here, and it'll have pictures and stuff which I dont

Azelda
Harry Manilow
No relation
Join date: 9 Apr 2004
Posts: 37
05-19-2004 04:59
Here are two great tutorials I found after doing a websearch: -

GIMP Savvy covers almost every aspect of using The GIMP

This one has some good tutorials covering various aspects
lilone Sandgrain
unconventially lil' me
Join date: 21 Mar 2004
Posts: 63
many thanks to one and all
05-19-2004 11:38
i wanta say ty for all the responce this post has got. i am definately attempting to learn the program and thanks to all the helpful folk maybe i'll get it within the next millinium hehe, then again, maybe not even WITH the wonderful help~ i tend to be a little slow when it comes to reading and learning, hands on or hand over hand works better for me. so while i will continue to press and push my way into understanding there is no sustitute for those of you who have answered questions. ty again. hopefully as i learn i can hellp make sl an even better place~