1. Introduction
People have been asking me for pointers about how to improve photos from their digital cameras. I don't claim to be an expert at photography or at image editing, but I do know a few basics, so I decided to write a tutorial on the most elementary techniques.
I'll use The GIMP 2 (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as my example program. (Don't complain to me about the name; I didn't invent it.) This is an image editor along the lines of Photoshop, only free. You can do all of the same things I'll talk about here in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, in more or less the same ways, but the tools might be accessed through different menus.
GIMP's own help documentation is extremely spare. The basic photo-editing tutorials that are out there are often pretty good, but tend to be several years old and based on older versions (GIMP 2 largely rearranged the user interface, and "where do I find this tool?" is a question I get a lot, so they won't do). The tutorials on the GIMP Web site tend to be about advanced techniques. So I saw a need for an introduction I could give to friends and family.
I won't talk about anything at all fancy here: nothing about layers or selections. I also won't talk about special effects or how to create original artwork. GIMP has so many controls that it can be confusing, and most of them are of little interest to someone who just wants to make a photo look a little better, or prepare it for Web or e-mail use, without much effort. That's what I'm going to concentrate on.
I'm also going to assume that you already have the program installed, and you know how to launch it and use the Open dialog to open a picture file.
Note also that the program itself is a work in progress, and your dialogs may well look somewhat different from the ones I show here. The same controls should be present.
Here's a picture I took recently of my cat Niobe:
It's not a disaster-- Niobe is a cute enough cat. But the picture needs work. It's too dark, the camera was tilted at an odd angle, and the composition is not very good-- Niobe seems lost in a vast expanse of bed. We can fix all that.
Here it is opened in GIMP:
The panel over on the left is the Toolbox. There are icons representing lots of tools you can use to do various things-- you select one by clicking on it. Mousing over the tool will pop up a little tool tip thing that tells you what tool it is. There are many tools, but we will only use a few of them. Below that, there's a pane that represents options for the tool that is currently active. There aren't any options in there in my diagram, but stuff will appear there later.
It's easy to make that options pane go away by accident, and not obvious how to bring it back. If that ever happens to you, the solution is to select File->Dialogs->Tool Options in the Toolbox's menu bar. This will make a new window. Then click on the words just below the title bar in the resulting window, drag them out of the window, and drop them into the teeny little narrow bar just below the tool icons. It took me a week of fumbling around and reading ambiguous documentation to figure that out. Now you know.
Next: Rotating and cropping