Friday, February 12, 2010

5 Websites To Make You A GIMP Ninja

Are you into photo editing and image manipulation? If that’s a ‘yes’ then I’m sure you’ve heard of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, codename GIMP.

The GIMP photo editor is a free and light alternative to Adobe Photoshop and is very capable of handling all of your image processing needs. If you’ve mastered MS Paint and don’t have deep enough pockets for Photoshop, GIMP is for you.

So you want to learn the GIMP photo editor? You see, that’s the thing with image editing programs, they’re extensive. You can literally do so much with them that it’s hard to figure out what all the buttons and settings actually do.

Luckily there are websites to handle this dilemma. We’ve covered one such resource previously here at MUO called VunkySearch. We’ve also taught you ‘How To Use Scripts & Plugins in GIMP’ and how to ‘Batch Edit Your Images with GIMP’. Additionally, the following is a list of 5 of the best websites to help you learn the GIMP photo editor.

GimpUsers

GIMP photo editor

The self-proclaimed GNU Image Manipulation Portal is your one stop place for all things GIMP. The community that is GimpUsers has a forum, chat, GIMP hotkeys page, written tutorials page, and page for video tutorials.

The tutorials cover a lot of information from the basics of the GIMP photo editor to the special effects and techniques. Downloading video requires a BitTorrent client.


GIMP
GIMP photo editor

GIMP is where you go to download the latest version of GIMP, but did you know they have a tutorials page?

The page has links to step-by-step tutorials that will help you with some of the more common tasks you might undergo with the program.

They are separated into categories such as beginner, intermediate, expert, photo editing, web, and script authoring.

These tutorials are well-written, very in-depth, and incorporate pictures/screenshots for you to follow along.

It’s not a bad place to learn GIMP, especially if you’re just starting out.


Gimp-Tutorials
GIMP photo editor
Gimp-Tutorials has tutorials that are similar to those mentioned above, but there are many more of them. You can learn how to do a wide range of things with GIMP on this website. Their categories range from painting, effects, and textures to photo manipulation and website layouts.
Tutorials are broken down into easy-to-follow steps and include many large images to help you.

GIMP-Tutorials

gimp tutorials

GIMP-Tutorials is another similarly named website that has a lot of tutorials, nearly 1,000 manually added as of this writing.

These tutorials are user-submitted and clicking on one of them takes you to the original user’s website/tutorial page. You can find an expansive amount of information there.


Gimpology
gimp tutorials

Like GIMP-Tutorials, Gimpology is a collection of tutorials from around the web. Submissions are listed in reverse chronological order and viewing them takes you to the creator’s page.

You can also favorite them, leave comments, and rate them out of 5 stars. Some of the information is going to overlap with that of the sites above, but there are always new tutorials to be discovered.

In conclusion, there are a lot of places out there where you can learn how to use GIMP and all of its vast features.

The websites listed above are GIMP-specific, but by no means do they cover all of the resources that are available to you.

A lot of sites offering tutorials for Photoshop also have a GIMP page. Remember, Google is your friend.

As always, I hope you found these resources useful. Do you know of any other great sites to learn GIMP? If so, leave them in the form of a comment below, along with your thoughts, ideas, and other insights!

No comments:

Post a Comment