I recall having many of the same frustrations when I first started trying to use Gimp. Documentation wasn't particularly good then, and as far as I know hasn't gotten any better.
What I ended up doing was playing around with it to see what it did. I know that isn't very helpful, so let me try to provide some hints based on what my 2.0 Gimp installation does (for the record I really want to go back to 1.x, for various frustration reasons, mostly having to do with zoom in/out). When you first start up Gimp, you will probably see 3 windows. One will have a bunch of buttons, a foreground/background color picker, and a brush/pattern/gradient picker. Another will have various tool options (default is for rectangular select). The third will be a layer window. The tool options and layer windows will be context sensitive to your current canvas window, which I presume you have at least a little experience with on your raw plugin converter. Soooo...open a canvas window by doing File|New. When the dialog comes up, set the width/height as desired. Leave image type as RGB (unless you like drawing in greyscale...I don't). For Fill Type, select "Transparent". Set the image comment if you like, then hit OK. You now have a transparent canvas window. If you do <shift>+<number row plus> (don't use keypad plus), you can zoom in. If you do <number row minus>, it will zoom out. (Aside: in gimp 1.x, you didn't have to <shift> the <plus>. Having to do so is a major pain in the back side, not to mention completely opposite of what it used to be). If you right click inside the window, you will observe a number of context menus, which correspond to the menus at the top of the canvas window (I assume they added the window menus for people who couldn't figure out the context menus....). Now then, the menus that you're probably interested in are Image, Layer, and Filters. Image|Mode gives you the option of RGB/Indexed/Greyscale. Image|Merge Visible Layers allows you to merge your image (<CTRL>+<M>). Layer|New Layer allows you to create a blank layer with fill type (e.g., colorized or transparent) and size. Layer|Duplicate Layer makes a copy of the current layer. Layer|Delete Layer removes the current layer. Remember, too, that <CTRL>+<Z> will perform several iterations of undo. Layer|Colors provides Color Brightness/Saturation/Contrast/etc. Filters gives you access to things like Gaussian blur, motion blur, tileable blur, bump mapping, etc. I suggest you play around with the various options. I can provide some specific assistance on those items if you like as I have become quite adept :) Hopefully that's a good get-started primer. You can see some of what I'm capable of at http://free.house.cx/~william/bg-smithing.shtml (also what Gimp itself can do, and I'm still not a Gimp expert). William On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Joseph Mack wrote: > Having purchased a digital camera, I realise I need gimp. > So far I've only used gimp to convert Cannon raw format > to jpg using a plugin I downloaded. I'd like to do color > balance, merging frames, and compressing/expanding > exposure (at least). > > The gimp books at > > http://www.gimp.org/books/ > > are from 2001 or earlier and are older than gimp_v2.x. Is this a problem? > > "Grokking the GIMP" says its for advanced users. While > I may become one eventually, at this stage I'm more intested > in getting the basics down. > > Thanks Joe > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
