How to Create Regular Polygons in GIMP

I have noticed over time that there have been continual searches for "gimp hexagon". I have no idea in which context anyone is searching for this concept, but it inspired me to write a simple tutorial on how to create regular polygons in GIMP. For this tutorial I have chosen to show how to create a hexagon.

A hexagon consists of six sides of equal length. You can think of the hexagon as being composed of six equilateral triangles. Since each angle in an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees, the angle between two adjacent sides of a hexagon is 120 degrees. Keep this in mind during the instructions below.

A Painting Tutorial by Evelyne Schulz

Many months ago I discovered Evelyne Schulz on Twitter due to a GIMP-related post. I immediately loved her artwork and, after some correspondence, she graciously agreed to write a tutorial about how she creates her digital paintings in GIMP. What follows is what she wrote about how she created her Warrior painting, with editing and inclusion of a description of the Palette Editor by me.

Four Ways to Draw a Border Around a Selection in GIMP

I was recently asked for a quick way to draw a border three pixels wide around the inside edge of a rectangular selection on top of an in-progress graphic design. Two methods immediately came to mind and a third occurred to me later that afternoon. I discovered a fourth method while writing this article.

Method 1

The most obvious method to use is Select > Border [1], which opens the Border Selection dialog [2]. This dialog contains three adjustments.

Border Selection Dialog

Alignment and Distribution of Graphic Elements in GIMP

When creating graphic or typographic designs or laying out printed matter such as brochures, leaflets, or newsletters, knowing how to use GIMP to organize and move graphic elements can be very handy. In this article I will explore GIMP's alignment and distribution functions by creating a simple graphic design of colored circles.

GIMP Quickie No. 4 – Creating Color Pop on Midtone Grayscale

The following steps are for GIMP 2.8.

Step 1

• Load image into GIMP and crop as desired.

Original Image
Canon EOS 5D Mark III at f/4, 1/160 sec, ISO-100, 200 mm

Question from the Audience – Sharpening a Selection

A Learning Experience

A reader asked me if it were possible to use the grain extract / grain merge sharpening technique on a selection. Taking the question literally and having never tried that before, I immediately opened GIMP and started experimenting. Let's go through the process of sharpening only the face of this African gray parrot and see what we learn.

African gray parrot

GIMP Quickie No. 3 – Creating a Pencil Sketch from a Photo

Step 1

• Load photo into GIMP.
• Colors > Desaturate
• Luminosity
• OK

Luminosity Desaturation

A Non-Destructive, Adjustable Method for Cutting Out an Image

The Black and White of Masking

In a previous tutorial I described a way to cut out irregular images using the Free Select tool. I used to use that technique frequently, but it's very time consuming, causes a lot of work for the left-mouse-button finger, and leaves a sharp edge unless either you remember to feather the selection before deleting the cutout area or you use the Blur or Smudge tool to soften the edge. It's also destructive to the image and, if you make a mistake, it's painful to fix it.

I have since switched over to using masks. Not only is a mask quicker and easier to use, it doesn't affect the original image, so recovering from mistakes is simple, and if you use a soft brush you automatically get blurred edges. You want blurred edges so that the cutout image blends smoothly into whatever it's in front of.

This tutorial describes how to create the following image using a mask to cut out the background.

Let me give you my two hoots' worth.

How to Create a Textured Background Using Color Functions and Bump Maps

In a previous tutorial, I described a method of creating a background using overlays of various artistic GIMP filter effects. In this tutorial, I'll describe a method of creating a textured background with a 3D look, similar to the one in the following image, using a photo of some gray stone and various functions from the Colors menu combined with Bump Mapping.

How to Create Weathered Text on Wood

Let's say you want to create the look of text painted on a wooden board and you want the text to look like it's been out in the weather for a long while. There are several methods you can use to distress text. You can find some of them on the web by searching for “GIMP text”, plus one of the following words: weathered, distressed, worn.

This tutorial describes how to create the following image using a photo of a gray board, some text, and a photo of a rusty metal texture that is processed and turned into a layer mask. You can download the two photos (Weathered Gray Wood 0099 and Rusty Metal 0817) from the Free Images page of my blog.

How to Create Lightning Bolts with GIMP

GIMP is really useful for adding special effects to photos and drawings. In this article I'll describe a simple method for creating lightning bolts that can then be resized, reoriented, scaled, or otherwise processed to fit into an image.

Behind the Scene – Creation of a Seascape

Back in the autumn of 2012 I had seen a design on Zazzle that I liked quite a lot. It was a limited-palette, multicolored, layered, southwest United States-style design. I got the urge to create something using a similar concept, so after letting my subconscious mull it over for a bit I woke up one morning with the idea of a seascape and quickly made a sketch.

GIMP Quickie No. 2 – Creatively Rescuing a Poor Photo

Original Photo

• Shot with a hand-held camera at the Tulsa Zoo through dingy glass in low light.
• Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III
• Lens: Canon Zoom Lens EF 70-200mm 1:2.8 L IS II USM
• Settings: manual mode, f/5.6, 1/100 sec, ISO 800, 200mm, no flash
• Image size: 5760 x 3840 px

Original Snowy Owl Photo

GIMP Quickie No. 1 – Photo Painting Effect

Original Scarlet Macaw Photo

Changing Brightness and Contrast Without Affecting Saturation

A Color Experiment

A while back I was made aware of an article on DPReview.com entitled Reducing Contrast Without the ColoursFading (using GIMP) wherein Tom Axford talks about the need for reducing the contrast in or otherwise brightening an image to make it look better in print. His original technique involved using an HSV model to make adjustments to a value layer without affecting the saturation of the colors in an image.

Intrigued by the concept, I decided to perform an experiment to see exactly what effect brightness and contrast adjustments have on colors. I created three squares, one each of red, green, and blue — red being lighter, green being darker, and blue being of medium intensity.

Using Color to Define the Focal Point of an Image with GIMP

Making the Balloons Pop!

Have you ever wanted to emphasize a particular part of a photo to make it stand out against a busy background? This intermediate-level GIMP tutorial describes a technique whereby you create a zone of color surrounded by a grayscale background to focus attention on the area of interest.

Specifically, I'll describe how to create this image:

How to Create a Textured Background Using GIMP Filters

What's Behind It All

What do you do if you have a nice photo of a person, animal, or other image, but the background is ugly or distracting, or you're really interested only in the main subject? Well, the first thing you can do is remove the background. (See Which Tool Should I Use to Cut Out an Irregular Image?) But then what? Now you have an image just hanging in space.

I feel like something is missing.

This novice-level tutorial explains one technique you can use to create a textured background for your image by using various GIMP filters and overlaid layers.

A Non-Destructive Adjustable Way to Sharpen a Photo

Honing Your Photo-Sharpening Skills

A while back I read an article on gimpedtutorials.com called How to Make Images Super Sharp in Gimp 2.8. It's a shame this tutorial no longer exists because it contained some really useful techniques. Fortunately, I saved a list of the steps and have been using one of the methods fairly often to sharpen my photos. The nice thing about this method is that it involves using new layers and layer modes and doesn't make any changes to the original image. It's also easy to adjust the sharpness by simply sliding the layer opacity up and down until I like what I see.

I'll use this photo of fuzzy little prairie dogs to illustrate the steps for sharpening an image.

Psst! Hey! Look at that!

How to Create Layered Text with a Shiny Highlight in GIMP

A GIMP Practice Exercise for Layers and Selections

I recently read an article called Shiny, Double-Beveled Text by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson in the March 2004 issue of Photoshop User and thought it would be cool to reproduce the steps in GIMP as an exercise in translating Photoshop techniques into GIMP techniques. If you follow these instructions, you'll get some practice with creating and manipulating layers, using a mask on a layer, and creating and altering selections to achieve various effects.

One of the steps involves creating an outer glow. I describe a manual method for that, but if you already have a plugin that does outer glow you can use it instead.

The instructions below describe how to create this image:

How to Replace the Sky in a Photo

A Simple GIMP 2.8 Tutorial

Have you ever had a nice outdoor picture of something, say a building, where the exposure on the building was good, but the sky looked drab, washed out, or overexposed, and you wondered what you could do to make the sky look better? You could replace the sky either with a simple solid blue color of the appropriate intensity or with a linear or radial blue gradient. Sometimes that's fine, but sometimes you'd like a different effect to make the image more interesting.

In this tutorial I'll describe a technique you can use to create this image:

from this image: