Where did the Other Tutorials Go?
If you're looking for my ancient animation tutorials, look on the tutorial section of the gimp.org site.
GIMP 2 Video Demos
To view these short demonstrations, you need to have a video player capable of showing MS AVI DivX files (mpeg4) such as ffplay from ffmpeg, mplayer or xinelib based players.
If the playback is too fast, try running it at lower FPS rate such as:
All screengrabs have been made using xvidcap that uses ffmpeg to encode the clips.
Please help saving our bandwith by using one of these mirrors, thank you:
If you can provide a mirror of these files, please don't hesitate to contact me to update a link to it.
Docks
Demonstation of the rearrangable docks that enable you to customize your session depending on the task or screen estate.
Colors
Drag and drop has been enhanced and GIMP2 makes great use of it. New color mixer dock has been written and it features new color mixers such as the CMYK selector or a color picker that works on the whole desktop even across multiple X screens. The patterns work great with DnD too and support alpha transparency.
Dynamic Shortcuts
I still believe dynamic shortcut assignment is the most user-friendly way to define custom shortcuts. However functionality like mnemonics clash with it. Instead of creating a bulky editor for custom shortcuts or forcing you edit an rc config file, the developers came up with a Shortcut learning mode in the preferences. To define shortucts the great old way you're used to, just toggle it on and select the menu item holding the shortcut. Use backspace to delete the assigned shortcut.
JPEG export
Exporting to JPEG won't discard your EXIF info and features a nice preview of how the quality settings affect your image/filesize.
This demo shows "smart" sharpening as described at the great gimpguru site.
New Levels
Another completely revamped tool is the levels tool. You can see a new histogram dock in the demo that gives you realtime preview. The demo also shows the possibility to save presets of various tools.
New Image Templates
You can use and save image templates. The demo also shows you can assign custom icons from the templates dock.
Transforming selections and Paths
Simple task of rotating an elliptical selection is shown here. First we use the selection mode of the rotate tool. That, however, introduces unsharpness caused by the interpolation. We try to compensate that using levels too on the quickmask which works most of the time. Another method is transforming a path which we created with "path to selection".
Paths Tool
Another demonstration of the paths tool shows the use of path stroking while dealing with open paths. Afterwards the classic tigert tutorial is performed showing the advantages of previewing the outlines of existing paths. The quick shortcut to replace the active selection with the path is Shift+V.
This demo has been split in two upon request, feel free to view the first (stroking) and second (cube) part individually.
Text Tool
Although a lot more is still planned, the new text tool includes a lot of handy additions to smoke the old one, including gDynText. And of course it renders a neat crisp anti-aliased text using freetype.
Themes
You can modify the looks of GIMP using themes. GIMP2 ships with a "small theme" that uses 16x16 icons and small font size to fit on laptop screens. You can use your own icon sets for the UI.
Transform Tools
Transform tools can now work on layers, selections and even paths. The quality has been enhanced by using new interpolation methods.
Boosting Shadows
In this video you'll learn how to use the levels tool for masking out a silhouette of an object. That gives a nicer, anti-aliased contour than using treshold.
Although the source file is a 12bit RAW, for the sake of this demo I chose not to tweak the shadows before importing the file.
Variable Blur at Fullscreen
This demo shows the use of GIMP's plugin registry, the installation of a plugin source, the use of fullscreen mode, masking objects with bezier paths, and simulating shallow depth of field to bring attention to the people in the foreground.
Due to using Xnest one modifier got stiuck in the middle of editing a bezier path, so don§t try to mimic that ;).
Warped Faces
Have fun with the faces of your relatives. Make cute animations of the deformation.
Fixing Photo Perspective
Although GIMP doesn't have a live preview for transformations, it has a very handy corrective mode for all the tranform tools. This demo shows how you can use it to fix a perspective slant of a photo.
Inverting Alpha Channel
Special demo for Jody (yay!). With 2.0 it is now possible to transfer the alpha channel onto a layer mask. I wish I could work on the Alpha channel the same way as I can with RGB channels though. Feels inconsistent.
Healing Brush
Thanks to the work of Kevin Sookocheff, GIMP 2.4 has a nice 'clone tool with a twist'. Very useful for retouching unwatend bits without too much work as the tool works similarly to the clone stamp but takes the target lighting/shading into consideration.
Perspective Clone
Thanks to the work of Pedro Alonso Ferrer, another nice tool has appeared in GIMP. For cases where you need to clone an area that is strongly affected by perspective, the regular clone tool is pretty much useless. The tool allows you to set up the perspective plane first and then use the clone tool with everything being perspective-corrected realtime.