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There are a few basic things someone using any graphics program should know. These include how to access tools, troubleshoot, and actually use the program. Right now this page is incomplete due to lack of ideas and my own laziness, but really, it'll be done soon.
Brushes enable you to change the size and shape of your drawing tool. Some brushes are pretty standard, such as the various circle-shaped brushes to be used for drawing. Others are a little more out of the ordinary, such as a fist, a bird, and an airplane.
The brushes I mention above are definitely not the only ones available; you can pop up the Brushes dialog by going to the main GIMP toolbox, then File -> Dialogs -> Brushes, or right-click on the image, then go to Dialogs -> Brushes after the menu pops up. Here's what the Brush Selection dialog looks like:
Tools for you to free-draw include the pencil tool and the paintbrush. The pencil tool uses the currently selected brush to draw in sharp pixels with jagged edges; the paintbrush uses the currently selected brush as well, but it surrounds the brush stroke with a blur so that it looks smooth.
There's also the airbrush tool, which lightly sprays on some color and doesn't make the color full and dark until you go over the same area a bunch of times. It's very similar to the paintbrush tool, but instead of painting the actual color selected, it paints a lighter color than the one that's selected.
The button to make your tool the Pencil tool in the GIMP toolbox. |
The button to make your tool the Paintbrush tool in the GIMP toolbox. |
The button to make your tool the Airbrush tool in the GIMP toolbox. |
You can also use these to fill selections.
Usually, you'll have no way of predicting how large you'll need an image to be. I learned that only a few days before writing this, and it has really come in handy for the graphics I create for my webpages.
To use cropping, you'll have to start out with an image that is larger than the final product. That's logical, considering you need to be able to see what you're doing and that you're basically cutting out unnecessary material. This can be done with the Crop tool, which can be activated by clicking on the button with the scalpel on it, or by right-clicking on the image, going to Tools, and then Crop. If you'd rather do keystrokes, it's Shift-C by default.
After cropping an image, the empty space surrounding the subject is at a close minimal. That helps cut down on the size of the image, although not very significantly. The dimensions of the image may not be evenly proportioned down, but resizing the image later on really won't be a problem if the program that's resizing it is good graphics program such as the GIMP or xv, which will estimate and round off.
When I had only about 8 megs of swap space on my Linux machine, I found that the GIMP crashed quite often, after reading and crunching at my hard drive for a few minutes. I asked the fellas in #GIMP about it and they told me to increase my swap space. Even though swapping isn't exactly the fastest way to keep stuff in memory, GIMP doesn't get my hard drive crunching as hard as when I only had 8 megs of swap.
Yeah, I know, GIMP uses tile-based something or other, but I just thought I'd add this because having more swap space added really helped boost performance.
If you need information on adding new swap space, try http://jgo.local.net/LinuxGuide/linux-fdisk.html. Just search through and look for information on adding new swap space. It also contains some other stuff about modifying your partitions.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections? Send them to jtg@computers.iwz.com.
Copyright © 1997-1998 Joshua Go (jtg@computers.iwz.com). All rights reserved. Permission to use, distribute, and copy this document is hereby granted. You may modify this document as long as credit to me is given.