CS 424, Fall 2021:
The Gimp Image Processing Program

GIMP, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, is a free program that has many of the capabilities of the better-known commercial program, Photoshop. Gimp can be used both for creating images from scratch and for modifying existing images. This lab covers only a very limited subset of Gimp's features. You can read more about Gimp in Section C.3 in the textbook. Parts of this lab are adapted from that section. It's also easy to find documentation and tutorials on Gimp, starting with its "Help" menu.

We will be using Gimp 2.10, which is installed on our Linux computers and is also the latest version available for download at gimp.org. Gimp is available for Windows and Mac OS as well as for Linux. (If you have Gimp 2.8, that will also work for this lab.)

When you first start Gimp 2.10, I recommend changing certain preferences. Open the "Preferences" dialog from the "Edit" menu, and look in the "Toolbox" section (under "Interface" in the list on the left). Turn off the "Use tool groups" option. Under "Theme," I prefer "Light," and under "Icon Theme," I prefer "Legacy." (The toolbox image below shows Legacy tool icons.)

Assignment

This lab asks you to create or edit six images. The images that you create should be submitted in a folder named gimp in your homework folder, in /classes/cs424/homework. The file names should clearly identify the exercises for which the files are being submitted. For example, you could give the files names such as ex1.png or exercise6.jpg. I will not look for your work until one week after the lab. The grading will be along the lines of: "Not done" for an F; "Minimal effort and incomplete" for a D; "Minimal effort" for a C; "Everything OK" for a B; or "Excellent" for an A. "Excellent" means that your work shows substantial and thoughtful effort, a willingness to investigate and experiment with Gimp features, and some attention to aesthetics.

New, Open, Save

Gimp's "File" menu has a "New" command that lets you create a new image from scratch. You will be able to set the size of the image and other properties, such as background color. And there is an "Open" command that lets you open an existing image for editing.

Saving is a little more problematic. The "Save" command will save an ".xcf" file, which is Gimp's own format. An xcf file is not an image, and it can only be opened with Gimp. It saves the full Gimp editing environment, which you would need for more complex projects if you want to be able to return to editing them later.

To save an image, instead of using "Save," you should use the "Export" or "Export As" command in the "File" menu. If you opened an image file for editing, the "Export" command becomes an "Overwrite" command that is used to replace the original image with the edited version. These commands let you save images in a wide variety of formats. For the lab, you should save your images in PNG or JPEG format. In particular, do not turn in xcf files!

Painting Tools

Exercises 1 and 2. For the first two exercises, you should use Gimp to draw two images from scratch, using Gimp's painting tools. Use several different tools. Try to make something that looks attractive and/or try to draw a (vaguely) representational image. Don't just turn in your scribblings! Spend some time experimenting before you decide what you want to draw to turn in.

Gimp has a wide variety of drawing tools, which you can find in the "Toolbox" in the upper left corner of the window. Point to a tool button to find out what the tool is for. Here is the Toolbox with a few annotations. You might not see exactly the same thing, but you can hover your mouse over a tool icon to see some information about the tool.

Below the Toolbox is the "Tool Options" dialog, which contains options for the drawing tool that is currently selected. The contents of the dialog change when you select a new tool. Here are the options for the Brush tool, which is probably the most basic and useful tool:

Use the "New" command in the file menu to create a new, empty image. Don't make it too big—maybe 640-by-480 or 800-by-600. Try out the Brush tool, and try changing some of its options. Try changing the foreground color (which is used for drawing) by clicking on the forgeground color patch in the Toolbox. Remember that Control-Z can be used to undo any change you make. Also, of course, you can always start over. Remember to spend some time experimenting with various tools before setting out to create your final images!

You'll notice that Gimp does not have tools for drawing shapes such as rectangles and circles. However, it is possible to draw such shapes using selections. The selection tools can be used to select regions in the image. For example, click the Rectangle tool, and drag the mouse on the image to select a rectangular region. Note that one of the options for the Rectangle select allows you to round off the corners of the rectangle. The Ellipse Select tool can be used to select oval-shaped regions. The Free Select (or Lasso) tool, which is next to the Ellipse in the illustration, can be used to select polygonal regions: Just click a sequence of points to select the vertices of the polygon, and click back on the initial point to close the polygon. You can also drag the Lasso tool to draw the outline of a region freehand. Once you have a selection, there are many things that you can do with it.

One important fact is that when there is a selection, you can only draw inside the selection—the area outside the selection is unaffected by painting tools, or by anything else that you try to do the image!!

The Bucket Fill Tool, which looks like a spilling paint bucket, is especially useful with selections. Choose the bucket tool, and set its option to "Fill whole selection". Then click inside the selected area to fill that area with color. Also try setting the "Pattern fill" option for the Bucket tool, which allows you to fill the selected area with a pattern. To change the pattern that is used, click on the image of the pattern, just below the "Pattern fill" option.

Drawing straight lines in Gimp is a little strange. To draw a line with the brush tool, click the image and release the mouse button. Then immediately press the shift key. Move the mouse while holding down the shift key (without holding down any button on the mouse). Then click the mouse again. A line is drawn from the original click to the final click. The same technique works with other tools, including the pencil, erase, and smudge tools.

You will certainly want to try the Gradient Tool. A gradient is a sequence of colors, arranged in some pattern. Many different gradients are available in the Gradient tool options; click the image of the gradient in the Tool Options, to choose a different gradient.

Important Notes about the Gradient Tool: In the Tool Options for the Gradient Tool, I suggest turning on "Adaptive supersampling" to give smoother gradients. And I suggest turning on "Instant mode" to make the tool easier to use.

Apply a gradient by dragging the mouse to specify the points where the color sequence begins and ends. The colors can be applied in various shapes; try changing the "Shape" option to see how this works. If there is no selection, then the gradient that you draw fills the entire image, although parts of the gradient might be transparent or translucent. (Remember that when there is a selection, you can only modify the part of the image inside the selection.)

The picture on the right, for example, was made entirely with the Gradient tool, using the "Square Wood Frame" gradient with the shape option set to "Square" and the "Radial Eyeball" and "Radial Rainbow Hoop" gradients with the shape set to "Radial." (A selection was used to limit the size of the rainbow, which would otherwise have been a full circle.)

The Gradient tool can be used for some neat effects. The background image for this page was prepared from an original image with one application of the Gradient tool, with the foreground color set to white and the gradient set to the "FG to Transparent" gradient. To make a similar background image:

You will want to try some of the other tools as well, such as the Smudge tool, the Eraser, and maybe the Clone tool. For help on using any tool, look at the message in the bottom of the image window while using the tool.

Color Tools

Exercise 3. The third exercise is to use one of Gimp's color tools to change the color of the purple flowers in the following image (which you can save from this web page):

You should change the color of the flowers without changing the color of the background. Here is how to do it:

This exercise just gives you a small taste of what you can do with colors in Gimp. The "Color" menu in Gimp contains several tools for adjusting the colors of an image. You might want to try some of the other tools!

More About Selections

There's a lot more to learn about selections. One of the most important things is that a pixel can be partially selected. That is, a selection is not necessarily just an outline; it's really an assignment of a "degree of selectedness" to each pixel. For example, the Cut command (Control-X) deletes the content of a selection. A fully selected pixel is set to transparent (if the image has an alpha component) or to the background color (if there is no alpha component). However, a partially selected pixel will only be partially cut. If there is an alpha component, the pixel becomes translucent; if not, the background color is blended with the current color of the pixel. Similarly, when you fill a selection, the current color of a partially selected pixel is blended with the fill color. This is very much like alpha blending, with the degree of selectedness playing the role of the alpha component.

One way to get partially selected pixels is to "feather" a selection. When a selection is feathered by, say, 10 pixels, the sharp boundary is replaced by a 10-pixel-wide border, with the degree of selectedness decreasing from one to zero across the width of the border. Use the "Feather" command in the "Select" menu to feather the current selection. Alternatively, selection tools, such as the Rectangle Select tool, have a Tool Option that will automatically feather the border of any selection that you create with the tool.

Exercise 4. Use a feathered selection to create an image like the one shown at the right. The image is a PNG file that becomes transparent around the edges so that it blends with the background of the image. You can follow these instructions to do the exercise:

  1. Open an existing image file in Gimp. You might want to scale the image, if it is too big. I used a cactus flower from Wikimedia Commons. You should use a different image. (Note: I applied the "Artistic" / "Oilify" filter to the cactus flower because I liked the effect.)
  2. This exercise requires an alpha component for the image. A PNG image might already have one; a JPEG definitely will not. To add an alpha component, use the command "Add Alpha Channel" from the "Transparency" submenu of the "Layer" menu. If the image already had an alpha channel, the command is disabled.
  3. Make a selection around the part of the image that you want to keep. Be sure to leave space between the selection and the boundary of the image to allow for feathering. The example uses an elliptical selection, but a rectangular selection also works, perhaps with rounded corners.
  4. Use the "Select" / "Feather" command to feather the image by a rather large amount, say 40 or 50 pixels.
  5. You want to cut away the outside of the selection, but the Cut command removes the inside of the current selection. The solution is to invert the selection, which reverses the outside and the inside. Use the "Invert" command in the "Select" menu to do that.
  6. Apply the "Cut" command, Control-X.
  7. You might want to crop the image, so you don't have a huge transparent border around the edge. To do that, make a rectangular selection around the part you want to keep, and use the "Crop to Selection" command from the "Image" window.
  8. Save your image using the "Export As" command in the "File" menu. Be sure to save it in PNG format. That is, use a file name that ends with .png. And remember to use a name such as "ex4.png" or "exercise4.png" so that I will be able to identify it.

Filters

Exercises 5 and 6. For the two final exercises for this week, you will apply "filters" to existing images. You can use your own images, or you can use images from the folder gimp-pics, or another source of images is the Wikimedia Commons

A "filter" is something that can be applied to an image, usually to modify the image in some way. They might better be called "effects." For example, there is a filter for blurring the image, one for making the image look like an old photograph, and one to make it look like it's made out of cloth. Some filters in Gimp generate images from nothing, and some do even more complicated things. You will find Gimp's filters in the "Filter" menu.

You should make two attractive or interesting images by applying one or more filters to existing images.

As you experiment, use the "Undo" command, Control-Z, to undo any changes that you don't like!

Some suggested filters to try: Distorts/Emboss, Distorts/Mosaic, Distorts/Ripple, Edge-Detect, Artistic/Apply-Canvas, Artistic/Cubism, Decor/Old-Photo, Map/Warp.

Not Covered Here

The exercises in this lab cover only a very small part of Gimp's feature set. One of the biggest omissions is layers. Another is Paths. You can read a little about those in the textbook. But if you really want to learn Gimp, you will have to look elsewhere.