What is GIMP?

When you think of editing or creating digital art, two programs usually come to mind - Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. What's the difference?

Photoshop is typically used for photos. It is good for photo manipulation and editing, and stores information as pixels (individual dots - primarily because that is the format a digital camera creates). This is called a rasterized/bitmap file. They work great for photos, but the larger the images are printed, the more likely you will see the individual dots on the image. When working with photos, this is your best option. When working from scratch, Illustrator and vector files are a better option.

Illustrator is typically used for creating digital art, usually from scratch. It saves information as lines called vectors - essentially two points that make a line. These vector-based images can be resized to any size and they still will print cleanly. The nature of the file also gives you a lot more flexibility in what you can do with the individual elements when you are developing it.

They have different applications and uses, but can be used together to create an overall piece of art. At a very high level, usually Photoshop is used for photos and web graphics and Illustrator is used for most everything else.

GIMP is a freeware application very similar to Photoshop. It is missing some of the features that the very expensive Photoshop has, but for our uses, it's perfect.

Tell me more about vector and bitmap images

Review these two files - About Vector ImagesGIMP Basics Part 1.mp4 and About Bitmap Images.

What can I download GIMP?

It is available for free at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/.

Our Class Assignments

GIMP Tutorial 1 - Basic Photo Editing With GIMP

GIMP Tutorial 2 - Graffiti

GIMP Tutorial 3 - Create Your Twin

GIMP Tutorial 4 - Creating a Collage

GIMP Final Project – Create a Print Ad

Want to know more?

There are lots of tutorials available on the Internet. Check out http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/, http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/, and http://gimp-tutorials.net/. There are also many, many video tutorials available on YouTube. Several are shown below (but there are lots of others). 

To view a tutorial, select one from the list and press Play (or simply click the video). To view the tutorials full screen, click the full screen  button at the buttom of the video.