Basic ideas: The Gimp's main windows:
The Toolbox
When you start the program, you will see the Toolbox (a) with its menus. Double-clicking on many of these will produce a Tool Options box (b).
You can maximise the ToolBox if that makes you feel more comfortable. However, it is probably better to get used to having tools, image and options in separate, free-floating windows. A "safe" way is to have your Toolbox on the top Left-hand corner of the screen, and keep your image windows about 3/4 of screen size.
The Image Window
When you open an image, you will see, amazingly enough, the Image Window. Right-clicking on this will bring up a range of other windows.
In this case, the window title bar in (a) is marked *image-window.xcf-16.0 (RGB) 200% which tells us several things about this image.
image-window.xcf is the name of the file which contains the original version of this image, and the * indicates that the image in the window has been changed (compared to the version on disk). If the changes are important, the image should be saved.
The 16.0 means window number 16 and view number 0. Every time a new image window is opened, the window number is increased except when the new window is created using New View in which case the view number is increased.
(RGB) gives the image type which can be RGB, Grayscale, or Indexed.
200% indicates that the image is zoomed and is displayed in its window at twice its true size. (its "true size" is not really its size on paper, as that depends on your screen).
You can get more information about an image by selecting the arrow on the top left-hand corner of the image window, then View > Info Window (as in (b) above).
Moving the mouse cursor into the image window makes an arrow appear on each ruler, telling you the position of the cursor. A more accurate way of knowing cursor position is to look at the status bar In (a), the status bar indicates that the mouse cursor is located at the position 99 across, 150 down. Note that this is different to the coordinate system used in Maths. Don't ask....
Important copyright information
This page is based on the material from section
1.1 of Grokking the Gimp
by Carey Bunks.
Copyright (c)
2000 New Riders Publishing. This material may be distributed only subject to the
terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later
(the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited
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