GIMP/C2/An-Image-For-The-Web/English

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Time Narration
00:22 Welcome to Meet the GIMP.
00:24 My name is Rolf Steinort and I am recording this in Bremen, Northern Germany.
00:30 I wanted to do a video podcast about the GIMP.
00:33 The GIMP is the very powerful image manipulation program.
00:36 It is a free and open source software and it runs on Linux, Windows and Mac Operating Systems.
00:46 It is an open source equivalent of the popular graphics editing program - Photoshop.
00:54 The GIMP is maintained and enhanced by a group of dedicated volunteers and has provided me with the means to post and process my photographs on the Linux computer.
1:05 Now I want to give something back.
1:07 I am not very good at coding and hence cannot contribute on that way.
1:13 But I am a teacher by profession and hence I can teach others to use GIMP.
1:18 First I thought about writing tutorials. But John Arnold's ‘Photo Walks Through’ inspired me to use screen-casting to create video tutorials.
1:27 In this 1st tutorial, I want to give you a small tour of GIMP and its features. I will briefly demonstrate how to prepare an image for the web.
1:35 I will give detailed explanations in future tutorials.
1:40 To open an image, I will just drag and drop the image on the tool box.
1:45 And here it is!
1:49 Let’s have a look at this image.
1:52 I shot this at the market place in Bremen. You saw other images of that during the introduction.
1:59 There are always tourist shooting pictures of our town hall.
2:03 And I caught this funny moment where 3 people were shooting the town hall with cameras in front of their faces.
2:13 I want to make this image ready for the web.
2:18 Lets see what I can do with it.
2:20 First the image is tilted so I have to rotate it a bit.
2:25 Then I want to crop it to remove this part - the back of a person.
2:32 The 3rd thing I want to do is to bring in more colors and contrast.
2:41 I also want to re-size the image because now its nearly 4000 pixels wide, which is far too much.
2:50 And then I want to sharpen it and save it as a JPEG image.
2:57 Let’s start with rotating.
2:59 I zoom into the part of the image where it is most obvious that the image is tilted. You can see it here.
3:08 By the way, you can move around in the image by pressing Space and just moving the cursor.
3:18 And now I choose the Rotate tool by clicking here.
3:22 In the Rotate tool, there are some options set by default to values suited for graphical work and not for photographic work.
3:34 So here Direction is set to Normal(Forward) but I will set it to Corrective(Backward).
3:38 I check if I have the best Interpolation. So that's fine.
3:43 And in the Preview grid I choose Grid instead of Image.
3:49 I shall increase the no. of grid lines by moving the slider. You will see it soon.
3:57 Now I will click on the image and get a grid overlaid over the image.
4:05 This grid is straight.
4:10 And I can rotate it and GIMP will rotate the image in the same direction in the Corrective mode so that the grid is straight again.
4:23 Let me demonstrate. I will rotate the grid like this.
4:28 I will check the other part of the image to make sure.
4:32 Looks good to me.
4:36 Now I will click on the Rotate button.
4:40 This will take some time since the image is about 10 mega-pixels
4:49 And its done!
4:54 The image has rotated.
4:56 Lets have a look at the whole picture. Shift + Ctrl + E brings us back to the image. And here it is!
5:05 Next step is Cropping.
5:07 I chose the Crop tool by clicking here.
5:11 I want to keep the aspect ratio of the image as 3:2.
5:16 For that I check Fixed Aspect ratio here and type in 3:2.
5:26 Just clicking to come out of that box.
5:29 And now, I can start cropping.
5:35 I want to include the feet of this person here but exclude this part of the image.
5:42 So I start here at this point and pressing the left mouse button, I drag upward towards the left to select the area.
5:51 Note that the aspect ratio is constant.
5:56 And now I have to decide how far to drag.
6:02 I think this is quite good.
6:08 Let’s checks the borders.
6:11 We have excluded this part. There is a person sitting here.
6:18 I think there is enough room here for the person to be in the picture.
6:25 So I will leave it that way since it looks nice.
6:31 There are windows here on the top.
6:34 And there is enough of them in the image to see them as windows.
6:40 But I think there is not enough room around here at the feet.
6:43 So I'll just click on the image, left-click on the mouse and drag it a bit down.
6:50 I think this is good now.
6:53 But now there is not enough windows seen here and the person seated here is very near to the border.
7:00 So lets make the image a bit larger.
7:06 We are running into a problem here. Perhaps you can see it.
7:13 This happened during the rotation.
7:19 There is a small part here which is transparent now.
7:24 I don’t want to include that, so lets go back to Crop tool.
7:33 I want a bit more room here; so I am dragging this up.
7:41 Not so far.
7:46 I think this is quite good.
7:49 Now just click on the image and here we have the cropped & rotated image.
7:56 Shift + Ctrl + E brings us back to the full view.
8:03 Next step is to boost the colors & contrast a bit.
8:09 There are several ways here. I could use the color levels - here it is, the curves or some sliders.
8:22 But I will try doing this with layers.
8:27 I simply make a copy of this layer here.
8:32 And change the layer mode to Overlay.
8:39 And you can see its a very strong effect. I don’t want to have it that much.
8:45 So I slide the opacity slider down to a value where I think its looking good.
8:59 Little more perhaps.
9:02 Ok, I think this is good enough.
9:06 I can always change that unless I right click the mouse here to go to the channel list and say 'Flatten image' or 'Merge visible layers'.
9:20 Then all the changes become permanent.
9:23 Except if I go into History here and go back and undo the history.
9:30 But we’ll cover that later.
9:34 Next step is Resizing.
9:37 I will click on the Image menu & select Scale Image option.
9:48 Here I will just type in 800 pixels.
9:59 And I get the value for the height automatically.
10:04 When I unlock this link here, I could distort the image while re-sizing it.
10:11 Interpolation.
10:14 I think I will choose Cubic. I found that the highest layer here gives some art effects with brick buildings. Its strange and I will have to check that out.
10:31 Now click on Scale.
10:35 And we’ll look at the result
10:39 Shift + Ctrl + E gets us the whole image.
10:44 And when I press 1, I get 100% zoom.
10:51 Now we can look around in the image to see if we have any really disturbing or distracting stuff. But I personally think it worked out well.
11:10 Next step is Sharpening.
11:17 My lens is quite good and my camera too. But we have manipulated the image. So it has to be sharpened a bit.
11:28 I will select Filters and click on Enhance and here is Sharpen. I could also use the Unsharp mask which is very powerful sharpening tool. But for now, Sharpen is enough.
11:49 This tool has basically only one option which is the sharpness slider. It can be adjusted and its enough for such an image.
12:07 This is the unsharpened image and when I drag this slider, the image gets sharpened more and more. You get a very funny effect if you slide it too far.
12:23 I think for this image this value is good.
12:30 The hair looks clearer now but here you can see some bleeding or distortion.
12:38 So we will slide it down and this is better.
12:44 I would like to go for soft effects rather than have any distortion in the image.
12:52 They are proof that you have manipulated the image.
12:58 So lets look at the result.
13:05 It looks quite good.
13:09 And now the last step is Saving this image.
13:13 I will go to File and click on Save As and just change the original file extension ‘tif’ to ‘jpg’
13:27 and Click on the Save button.
13:30 I get a warning that the JPEG can't handle images with multiple layers. Ok. So we have to export them.
13:42 I think 85%is a good standard value for this image.
13:51 So I have saved this image as JPEG image here.
13:59 You can look at it in full screen.
14:03 Here it is.
14:05 This is it. The first tutorial of Meet the GIMP. In future tutorials, I will cover topics like how to set up GIMP, how to draw, convert, etc. and tools and many more.
14:13 If you want to send a comment, please write to info@meetthegimp.org
14:20 More information is available at http://meetthegimp.org
14:30 I would like to hear from you. Tell me what you liked, what I could have made better, what you want to see in the future.
15:00 This is Hemant Waidande dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial project.

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Chandrika