 All right, well, I take a lot of photographs, as you see. Not all of them are great photographs. This was a beautiful place, Monrovia Canyon, which is just a couple of miles east of here and up in the mountains, and there's a stream, and there's a forest, and at the end there's a waterfall. And you don't really get the sense of any of that from the picture. So what I'm going to be talking about mostly is how to take photographs that may not be the best photographs, and how to apply a few tricks in GIMP to make them better. GIMP, of course, as probably all of you know, is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's an open source app. It just celebrated its 20th birthday. So yay, GIMP. And let's see. So the first problem with this image is that the bottom of it is dark and the top of it is really light. The sky was overcast that day. So on overcast days, you just get a washed out sky. You can't even see a lot of the tree details. But at the same time, this foreground is really too dark. If you've done any manipulation at all on images, you probably know about colors' brightness contrast, where you can make it brighter, which you think would help, but it makes it look really awful. So you bump up the contrast to compensate. And no, the lower part is a lot better. You can see bright green in the leaves, and you can see the stream sparkling, and you can see details in all these fallen leaves, except the top is even worse. So that's not going to do it. I'm trying to do slides and a live demo at the same time, so bear with me, I haven't done this before. So what we're going to need to do is have a way of separating the top of the image from the bottom of the image. And of course, there are ways to do that. You can make selections. If you know about selections, you can try to select the top, select the bottom. But that ends up being really fiddly. If you've ever tried it on an image like this, you'll find that figuring out how much to feather is a selection, it's complicated. So what I'm going to suggest first is cancelling out of this and using what's known as a layer mask. So the first thing to do is go to the layers dialog. And when I first started using GIMP, I used to close the layers dialog right away because it's confusing. What's a layer? I don't know what a layer is. Always keep your layers dialog visible. It'll be your best friend in GIMP. I'm going to make a new layer that's just a copy of this layer. With this button down here, which you probably, yeah, take my word for it that the tooltip says, create a duplicate of the layer and add it to the image. So I'm going to click it. And now I have two identical copies of this Monrovia stream image. The top one is the one that I'm going to make lighter. And to remind myself of that, I'm going to double click on it and say, lighter. You can name layers anything you want. It won't show up in the final image. You'll have to hint to yourself. And then since I want it to be lighter, I'm going to go ahead and do colors brightness contrast again. Just like I did before. Brightness way up. Contrast until it looks good. And I'm not going to worry about this top area. I'm just going to say okay. Now just to remind yourself, when you have layers, you can turn them on and off. So if I want to look at the bottom layer again, I click on the eyeball to make this layer invisible. That's the original dark image. That's the new image. Now I'm going to add a layer mask to the top layer. I'm going to right click and say add layer mask. Most of that's showing. There are a lot of options here. Don't worry about them. Just take the default because any time you make a layer mask, you're going to be drawing into it or pasting into it or doing something with it afterward. So I'll just click add. And now I still have the layer. And this white thing is the layer mask. And then what I'm going to do is paint black on the mask where I want the top part to be invisible. So this top area here in the top layer is very, very bright. It's all washed out. I want that to go away and show the layer below where it looked better. But down here I want to show the top layer. So I'm going to use the paintbrush tool. If I mouse over the image, you can just barely see by the arrow there's a little tiny dotted circle there. That shows how big the brush size is. I want a much bigger brush. So over here in size, these sliders are a little tricky. They came in, I think, in Gimp 2.4. And if you drag on the top side, you get big changes. If you drag on the bottom side, you get small changes. So right now it's 20, and I'm making small changes here. I can make it 40. If I drag up here in the top, whoa, it's 422. And look how big it is. And actually I want it pretty big. So I'm going to drag on the top for this one. But anyway, if you've used recent Gimps, you may have come to blows with those sliders a little bit. It took me a long time to figure out how they worked. And even then it took me a long time to get the touch of doing the top part or the bottom part depending on what I wanted. So if you find it a little bit tricky at first, don't feel bad. Everybody has trouble with that except maybe the people who wrote it. Okay, so I'm drawing black because that's the foreground color, but I'm drawing it on the mask. So I do this and look at that. Everywhere I draw, I'm seeing through to the layer below. And now over here in this preview of the mask, I see that I drew a bunch of black hair. So I'm going to draw it a little bit lower. And because I made this brush so big and it's a fuzzy brush, which you can sort of see in the preview here, that means that I'm getting a gradual transition from one layer to the other. So I just kind of feel it out. And the nice thing about layer masks is that if I make a mistake, like if I do that, oops, I can fix it. All I have to do is swap the two colors. Now white is the foreground color. And I can get rid of what I did. Of course, undo is always good too. I'm a big fan of GIMPs undo. That's my most used GIMP command. Let's see, I'm still drawing white. So let's make these a little lighter. No, that's too light. So I'll swap them back. And you see how well that works. And layer masks are great because as long as you save as a GIMP image, you have all that information in the image, you can change it at any time. If you look at it two weeks later and say, you know, I think I want that bush to be brighter. You can do that. Layer masks are terrific. Now what about that sky? Actually, I still don't like this. Just tweak a little bit more. Okay, what about that bright sky? That bright sky has got to go, I want it to be a nice blue sky. Never mind that it wasn't a nice blue sky while we were there. It's a pretty place. It should have a nice blue sky. And I can do that with GIMP. Now, select by color is this tool right here. And by default, it'll select similar colors. So if you click in a green area, it'll try to find all the green that's nearby the green you clicked. Actually, it'll try to find all the green anywhere in the image. So here if I click, ideally it would find all the white that the sky looks like. And it didn't. I know why. This is a trick question. So, you know that. It's the other layer. And I'm actually, I've still got the layer mask active. So what I selected was this big black blob here. Now in the layer style, whatever is active has a white border. And I know that's not super intuitive. I don't always remember whether it's white or black. Just remember it kind of looks different from all the other layers. And if you draw and it doesn't show up the way you want, it's probably because your mask was active rather than your layer. So I'm going to click here. I'm going to undo this, of course. And what I really want to do is select this guy in the original image, the dark one. Because in that top one where I made everything brighter, I washed out all those delicate leaves and branches and all those details. So here's where I want to select by color. I click. If I drag down and right, I select more. If I drag up and left, I select less. And no matter what I do, it's not really looking right. There's a lot of kind of... There's a lot of stuff selected that I don't want. There's a lot of stuff selected, not selected that I do want. I can make it a little bit better with this in the tool options for select by color down here. Select by composite, as I said, looks for similar colors. If I click in green, it'll look for greens. If I click in purple, it'll look for purples. Clicking in a white sky just looks for white stuff. If I change it to value, it might look a little better. I could also look for saturated colors or less saturated colors. So play with this menu if you ever want to use select by color and it's not getting exactly what you want. But in this case, it's really not going to help. You can take my word for it. I played with it quite a bit, and I never got a good selection that way. So instead, I'm going to do something tricky. I'm going to do a more advanced option after I undo. What I'm going to do is colors, components, decompose. And this is a great trick for skies. You'll use it all the time once you try it once. It's amazing what it'll do. What decompose does is it'll give me a new image with three layers. And by default, the color model is R, G and B. That means it'll give me a layer showing all the reds, a layer showing all the greens, a layer showing all the blues. Which is not what I want, because there are some greens in here, but really the colors are mostly kind of brown and gray and muted. What I want is what's light and what's dark. And HSV is a great color model for that. You can use saturation and value, which I'll show you in a second. And whoa! The image looks really strange. I have a hue layer, a saturation layer, and a value layer. And hue is on top. I know it's a little confusing that it looks like value is what's showing. Value is active, but hue is showing because it's still visible. The eyeball is here. The hue layer is always strange. Some things are a little more purple. Some things are a little more red. Some things are a little more yellow. And usually you can't do very much with the hue layer, and you should just turn it off. Saturation is more interesting. What we're seeing here is that those green trees down here are pretty saturated green. They're a fairly bright green color. Nothing else in the image is colorful. So all we're seeing in the saturation layer is the green trees. So that's interesting theoretically, but that's not what we want either. What we want is value, which is basically like a black and white version of the image. Now if I had a layer mask, if only I had a layer mask that looked kind of like this, it would select the sky where it's light and it would get rid of everything that's dark. And the only problem is these aren't dark enough. I want to get rid of everything except the sky. Now you may have tried something called the threshold tool. I'll show you the threshold tool. The threshold tool in GIMP can turn everything into a black and white image. And that would sort of work for this, but there's a better way. Something that will give you a smoother image than threshold. So I'm going to undo. That's interesting. It didn't undo threshold. Oh, okay. That was what I just talked about. And I know these slides are small, but they're available at a bigger size on the conference website, so you can download them later. That's the main reason I made them, so you'll have reminders later of what I did. All right, so what I'm going to do, instead of threshold, I'm going to use the levels tool. The levels tool is one of the most complicated color operations in GIMP. It's got all these things. It's got input levels. It's got output levels. It's got auto. It's got pick white point. It's got gamma. And most of that most people never use. You don't need to understand what these all are. All that's important is that on this input level graph, this is the dark stuff. This is the light stuff. And the slider in the middle, the mid-tone slider, is what you want. If I slide it toward the darks... No, sorry, toward the lights. It's confusing which side is dark and which is light. Then all the middle grays get lighter. If I slide it right, the middle grays get darker. And, of course, that's what I want. What I want is something like a threshold where everything gets pretty black except that sky, which is staying just as white as it ever was. So I'm going to slide it almost all the way, but not quite, and that'll give me a nice gradual cutoff. See, okay. And then the whole point of this was that I'm going to use this for my layer mask. So I'm going to copy that. Go back to the original image. My layer is on the original image. And what I want now is a third layer. I want a third layer where I'm going to draw in a blue sky. I'm not going to get the sky from anywhere here because it's just white. So I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to name it Sky. If I can type. And I'm going to put it on top of everything. So I'm going to just drag it up to the top here. You can order layers by clicking on these arrows, but you can also drag them around, which is much easier. I'm going to make a layer mask, and then that kind of thresholded, leveled thing that I just copied from the other image. I'm going to paste that. Gimp has a really horrible misfeature that I wish the developers would do something about. Whenever you paste, it doesn't actually paste. It gives you something called a floating selection, which is kind of floating in nowhere, not doing anybody any good. And there are two things you can do with a floating selection. You can either click the new layer button, which will make it a layer all by itself, or you can click the anchor button, which will anchor it to whatever layer or mask was currently active. So most of the time, I click the new layer button, but in this case, I want it to go into the mask. So I'm going to click the anchor button. And of course, you don't see anything, because I haven't drawn anything in the sky layer. But at this point, what I have is a sky layer where whatever I draw will only show up in the sky and nowhere else. So let's do that. Let's pick a nice blue color, something like... That looks like a reasonable blue sky, right? If I drag that into the... And if I drag it into the image right now, it's going to go into the mask. So, you know, I make that mistake all the time, even though I'm telling you not to. You know, I tell you to look for the white border. It's easy to miss it. Now I'm going to drag blue. The whole layer gets blue, but only the parts where the mask is white show up. And it's a little bit hard to tell on the projector, but all those little fine branches, all those leaves, they're pretty much preserved. And so why doesn't it look good? Why doesn't it look like a sky? The thing is that skies are not solid blue. Even if you go to Wyoming or New Mexico where I live, you know, beautiful blue skies up there. And down there, this guy's a little lighter. So you have to pick a slightly lighter color, like maybe this one. I love these memories of colors you've used before. So going through the talk, of course, I've picked lots of different shades of blue. I'm going to pick this light one. So now I have the same blue I already used here as a foreground color. I have a lighter blue as a background color. Can you even see that's blue? Anyway, take my word for it, it's light blue. And then I'm going to make a gradient. This is the blend tool, but everybody calls it the gradient tool because it makes a gradual fade from one color to the other. So if I just drag like this, that looks much more like a sky. And it still doesn't look perfect because it's a little too blue at the top. I don't know, it's like aquamarine. It's not the right shade. And I could go and pick two new blue colors and I could keep fiddling with that, or I could just use two saturation. I'm behind on my slides, all right. Because I think part of the problem is this color is just sort of too saturated to be a sky. If I make it a little unsaturated. Now that actually is looking like a sky, I think. I don't know what you think, but I'm pretty happy with that except since I'm in hue saturation already, why not play with it? Because you can change the hue too. You know, if you want to go to Mars, you can make a red sky. This is, of course, much more interesting if you bring the saturation back. Make it a little more saturated. And I think a purple sky looks kind of good here. So I'm going to stick with my purple sky. You can make realistic images with Gimp or you can make anything you want. It's fun to make Christmas card. I made a Christmas card one year where my husband and I were on Mars and I used a trick like this. Woohoo! And by the way, I didn't say at the beginning, but feel free to ask questions at any time. I love questions. The question was, could I turn off the bottom two layers? And that's what the sky layer looks like. And in fact, one thing I didn't mention, you probably noticed when I was doing my levels tool to do something like threshold that there was still some... down where the stream is, some of that was white because it was reflecting that white sky. And I left it there because sometimes that actually looks good if you have the blue of the sky reflecting off the blue of the water. It's okay if your blue gets there. But the nice thing is with a layer mask, you have your choice. So if I wanted to get rid of that, I could just draw... I have to go back to black and white. And I could... Let's see. I think I'm drawing black here. Yeah. I'm clicking in the mask. I'm drawing black. And it's gone. Or I can bring it back. So you get the idea. You can also, if you're painting on the mask and you're not sure if you've left some things out, you can see the mask directly. You can say, show layer mask. And that's what the mask looks like. And there are times when it actually makes more sense to paint on the mask rather... paint with the mask showing. So you can... Yeah. You can do that too. You can say, disable layer mask. And that's the gradient I got that I drew with the blend tool. And even if I turn on the other layers, you can't see anything because they're all hidden by the solid layer. If I turn the layer mask back on, there it is again. I'm not happy with all this haze, but I'm not gonna inflict... You know that you can edit it and adjust it as you see fit. Now, in my talk description, I talked about pasting from one layer to... from one image to another. I talked about how do you take your Evil X's picture and paste Brad Pitt's face on him. I don't actually... I kind of lied about that. I don't... Not that I don't have an Evil X, but I don't have any pictures of Evil X's. So I'm gonna... Instead, I'm gonna paste something into this image. I'm also going to... get rid of that because I use Open Recent all the time. GIMPS Open Dialog can be somewhat difficult, but I don't think they allow motorcycles on Monrovia Canyon, but it looks like it would be kind of a nice place to just ride through the stream and under the trees, and especially if you didn't have to wear a helmet because you were actually sitting in front of your garage and not actually riding. Now, you may have played with selections before selecting an object from one image to paste into another. What I usually tell people is start with the lasso tool unless... If you're selecting something that's all one color, then select by color is a pretty good way to start. Otherwise, the lasso tool is great. It's actually called the free select tool, but it looks like a lasso, so that's what I call it. Generally, when you're selecting something, if you're gonna paste, you'll get hard edges. So you wanna click feather edges, and that'll give you a more gradual transition. I'm actually not gonna do that here, but you would if you were doing it that way. And I'm going to make a very quickie selection. I'm going to go outside where I wanna be. So I'm making sure that I'm getting everything. You may notice my hand isn't very steady. If you want to really do a good selection, zoom way in. You can... The middle mouse will let you move the image around. Look at that. That is in the wrong place. Move it. And then I can draw some more. But again, I'm not trying to make a good selection. So I'll go back to the previous zoom level, finish my super crappy selection, and there I go. I can edit copy, and I'm done with that image. Edit. Notice the layer mask here is still active. It doesn't actually matter because I'm gonna paste as a new layer, I always get confused when layer masks are active, so I try to unselect them when I'm done with them. Now I'm going to paste, and I get the stupid floating selection. I make it a new layer, and obviously, that's not gonna look any good because I've got all this extra stuff. Question? You can do that. The user interface, he asked, why not just paste this new layer? And you definitely can. The reason I don't actually is that I don't do edit paste most of the time. I'm just doing control C, control V, and learning the key bindings for all the various types of pastes is slower than just pasting and clicking the button. But yeah, excellent point, especially if you're going through the menus, you can just paste as a new layer. And I have often been tempted just to rebind my control V key to do paste as new layer, except in the very unusual circumstance when I'm pasting into a layer mask or something, and then I would get all screwed up. Oh, you know what? Just a quick mention. If you are using selection, instead of this trick I'm about to show you, I love the quick mask. You can edit your selections with the quick mask. It works a lot like a layer mask. You can paint on them, make them more gradual, and then when you get out of quick mask mode by clicking on this button again, this selection has gotten closer. It's changed according to how I edited it. And usually in my talks, I'm a total quick mask evangelist, but I'm not going to do that this time. So in this case, I'm just going to paste into the image, and I'm going to use the eraser tool because the cool thing is this is just a layer that's sitting there by itself. I don't care what the edges look like. I'm going to make the pen size a little bit smaller and just kind of erase all that extra stuff. And again, if I want to do a good job, I'm going to zoom in, like to 400%, make my brush a little smaller, and you get the idea. That was a mistake, so I undo it. Let's go to like 100%. So I'm just going to erase the worst of this hard layer here, and you can see how, if you wanted to really spend time on it, erase part of my head. And I can undo that, but what if I erase part of my head and I don't notice it till later? We'll go back to that. The eraser tool has this weird option called anti-erase because in a color image, when you erase something, what it's doing is adding transparency to the image. It's not actually removing what's there. It's just adding extra information saying, well, this is still hair and this is still head and this is still blue sky, but it's transparent. You can't see it. So anti-erase gets rid of that transparency and puts back whatever was there before. Now, if you're editing an image that you want to spend a lot of time on, you want to be really painstaking, I would recommend doing this with a layer mask and not trusting anti-erase. But for a quickie paste, anti-erase is really a lot of fun. It's so quick. It's so easy to do. You don't have to make a mask. You don't have to keep all those layers separate. So it's pretty handy. I skipped over a slide because this bike is way too big for this image. I'm going to use the scale tool. I turn on the scale tool and I click in the image and whatever the active layer is, it's going to operate on that except you can't see anything with all those lines. So you can say, let me move this out of the way. Guides is what it's called here. Number of lines changes to no guides and now I can see the image and I can make myself a low rider except I don't want to do that. What I actually want to do is keep the same aspect ratio. So I'm going to click keep aspect and then I can't be a low rider anymore. I'm going to center up to drag it anywhere I want. And that's probably a pretty good size except I can't see anything because the original two big images in the way. What I can do with that is change the opacity, make it invisible. Actually, I can probably just, yeah, I can turn it off that way too. The opacity. Drag this around until I like the size. Click scale because I turned off the opacity. So now I bring it back. So all the transform tools, that means scale, perspective, here, all of those have two opacities. Let me do this one more time. I'm going to, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can turn off the original layer, the one you're trying to change here in the layers tool in the layers window. And you can change the opacity of the thing you're transforming over here in the tools options. And that can be useful in case you're trying to, if you're trying to make it a size so that it fits over something else in the image, like if I wanted to just fit across the stream, I might want it to be a little bit transparent. I'm going to use the move tool to put it back. Oh, I'm still in anti-erase. That's my problem. I'm being a little bit anal here. This thing by the wheel is bothering me and I'm going to get rid of it. I know I said I wasn't going to make a good selection and I'm not. Okay, so we have, I love this a little bit. One more thing, when you paste something into an image, it usually looks like it doesn't belong there and that's partly because it doesn't have a shadow. There's a tool called perspective shadow. It's in light and shadow perspective. And the dialogue is horribly complicated. You have to figure out what angle you want and what transparency and you don't get a preview of any of this stuff. And then when you do it, probably you don't get your whole shadow because it gets clipped according to the layer. It's just a terrible plugin. You don't want to use it because it's so easy to make your own perspective shadow. And you start by, just making a normal drop shadow, strangely enough. And you know a drop shadow isn't what you want here. So now it's like I pasted a picture of a motorcycle onto a picture of a stream. But if you use the perspective tool on that, I'm going to make my drop shadow layer active and then I'm going to use the perspective tool on that. This is, which one is that? That's that one, right? Yeah. Calling all these little transform tools apart can be tricky. And there's a solution for that coming in GIMP 2.9 which I will show you at the end of the talk. But if I click, again, we have lines in the way. But in this image, probably the shadow would come back toward us. But I'm just giving you an idea of what it looks like. So you can drag the shadow out to look like anything you want. Transform it. That's a little bit too obvious, but that's okay because opacity can change it. And again, with the stream, that's going in the wrong direction, but you get the idea. I already talked about the opacities and the transform tool. Okay, we've done a lot of work on this image. And at some point you want to save it. And you do file save as. And who here has used GIMP 2.8 and hit the... Okay, most of you. Who here was kind of annoyed when they tried to save something and found out they couldn't save as JPEG or PING or... Yeah. Okay, that's a decision by the GIMP developers. Save should only save to GIMP's format, which is an XCF. Let me show my slide. And if you want any other format, it might be lossy. It might lose information, so it's not a save. It's an export. And there's been endless debate over this. I'm not a fan myself. You may get that idea. In fact, I started collecting emails discussing it on the email list. I'm up to 1,700 emails now, since this happened, which was a couple years ago. It's a fairly popular thing to complain about. It's not going to go away. The developers feel very strongly about this, and we need to learn to live with it. Either you can export, and export is bound to control E, or I have a plugin because I couldn't stand it. The nice thing about GIMP, one nice thing about GIMP is that plugins are super easy to write. So I whipped up this Python script at about two pages of Python, and you can bind it to control S and control shift S. It's like save, but it'll save to either XCF or, in fact, both. It's called saver. And you can even have an XCF and a copy. I don't want it right over my original image, so I'm going to say that. And you can have a scaled-down copy. So I couldn't find plugins, but this is something that a lot of people ask about, so I thought I'd mention it. So now I have an XCF and a JPEG. I can still edit all my layer of masks, but I can also put the JPEG on the web if I want to. Since we're talking about saving, I don't want to spend a lot of time on image formats and DPI and things like that because it's not fun. It's more fun to fiddle with images, and I expect you all would rather see that. But you do know that GIMP had its images made of pixels. Let me show you, for instance, that Wilbur here somewhere. Wilbur is really small. He's 80 by 60 pixels. And if I zoom him in, you can really see those pixels. And of course I can do scale. I can do image scale. I can scale him up to 800%, but he's still going to look crappy. He's going to look blurry. And we get people on GIMP IRC all the time who say, you know, I have this icon, and I'm trying to print it as a banner, and it's not looking good. And they say, well, I set it to be 24 inches by 36 inches. Why isn't it looking good? And it turns out that it's 100 pixels by 50 pixels. And it helps to try to think in pixels when you're working with GIMP. GIMP does have a thing called print dialog. I think that's under image. Yeah. Print size, where you can set width and height in inches. In this case, it's sensible, and it knows that Wilbur is a little tiny thing. But I could set that to be 100 inches by 1000 inches or whatever. It wouldn't make any difference to how well it printed. So just be aware of that. And people ask. So part of the reason that people are confused about this is that you sort of have to multiply. If you have 100 pixels across and you want it to be 100 inches, then you need to know how many pixels per inch you want. And people talk about 300 dots per inch, 150 dots per inch. You know, experiment and see what you can tolerate. But another question we get a lot is vector formats, PDF. You know, I want to write to PDF. I want to edit a PDF. GIMP can import PDF, and it can even write to PDF as of the current version. But you're not getting a real PDF. What you're getting is a PDF wrapper with an image made of pixels inside it. A real PDF should be scalable. It should be able to zoom up to any size banner you want. It should have, you know, lots of details about the fonts inside and so forth. Don't edit PDF with GIMP if you can avoid it. It's not the right tool for the job. And actually, I have one story that's not directly related to it. But, you know, a lot of people who want to edit PDFs come from Adobe software. And people ask about how GIMP compares to Adobe Photoshop. This is not something you should ever ask on the GIMP IRC list, by the way, because GIMP is not trying to be a Photoshop clone. It does some of the same things. It has some of the same concepts. But that's not the goal of GIMP. The goal of GIMP is to be the best open source image editing app that it can be. But it's a lot better than Photoshop in at least one way. I went to a talk a few months ago where someone was trying to demonstrate he was doing astronomical image processing. And he got to the point where he was going to do his live demo. And he fired up Adobe Creative Suite. And he got a dialogue saying, need to register. And he said, but I tried this this morning. You know, I tried it today before the talk. I know I was okay. And apparently a time had passed in the few hours since he had last tried it that it would not run unless it checked in over the network with Adobe to verify that his web license was paid up, which it certainly was. So he had to go out and find somebody who knew the network settings at the place where the conference was happening. It took about five minutes to get his network going and then he managed to connect to Adobe. And the audience is sitting there watching him the whole time. So there are a lot of mistakes that can go wrong with live demos, but at least with open source software that's not going to happen. Okay, removing things from images. I've got a different image for this. And I'm going to start going quickly because we're coming close to running out of time. Where's the dog? There. Okay, I've got this nice dog. He's up in the hills above Burbank and he's looking down on the San Fernando Valley. And there's this funny little thing sticking in front of him. It's actually a piece of road, but you can't tell that. The easiest way to remove small things like that is the clone tool, which is this. It looks like a rubber stamp. And the first thing you do is make your brush size a lot smaller than that. Yeah, that's good. Okay, I want to clone this area here. So I'm going to hold my control key down and click. And now that's what I'm cloning. I've got a little outline there showing me. And it's gone. So the clone tool is great for things like that, just getting rid of small things. But for other things like this leash, go back to 100. I'd like to get rid of this leash. And there's a technique I like to use for that that involves selecting with the lasso tool. I'm going to feather the edges just a little bit. I can't even read that. I don't know, two pixels or something. So I'm going to select around the leash. And then I'm going to move that selection parallel to itself so that it ends up somewhere where there's no leash. And I'm going to copy from that. So I'm going to use the move tool. And I'm going to tell it to move the selection. Here. And then I'm going to copy. And then paste the thing I just copied. Make it a new layer. So again, I could have pasted it as new. Now I'm going to move that back. I'm still in move the selection layer. So I have to change the move tool back. And something funny happened around his legs. But that can be fixed. And for everything else, where there's grass, I got grass. Where there's high grass, I got high grass. Where there's legs, mostly I got legs. So a quick demo of something you can do a little more carefully and it will work really well. Okay. So a quick tour of cool GIMP 2.8 features. And you already have 2.8, most of you. But the new features don't always get really well advertised. This is single window mode. And I was going to have that ready. Well, anyway. I'll go fast. But a lot of people, particularly coming from the Windows world, don't like having all these image windows scattered around the screen. And so they like it all in one window. And you can get that with Windows single window mode. So try it and see if you like it. If you don't, you can always go back to multi-window mode. It's nice to have a choice. Layer groups. For instance, what's a good example? Well, anyway, you can make a new layer group, Biker. So inside the Biker layer group, I have me and my shadow. My shadow. And if I transform them with a transform tool, they'll move together. I can copy them and paste them together into another image. And I can turn them off together. In theory. Did I get the wrong drop shadow? One more. Oh, yeah, right. Right, I didn't turn off the group. Okay, yeah. So I can turn off visibility together. The only tricky thing is that if I want to move them together, you would think I could just pick the move tool. But you actually have to, say, move the active layer. The active layer being the layer group. And now I can move them together. So layer groups are really great. It means that your XCF files, when you save them, are not compatible with GIMP 2.6. But who cares about 2.6 anymore? So that's not a problem. I've got a propeller beanie here. I have two features that are kind of geeky features. But I really love this scale image. If I want to make it half the size, I can do that. I'm going to hit Tab. So it was 800 by 600. Now it's 400 by 300. Now of course you can do that by changing to percent. But I hate doing all that mousing. I just love being able to type times something or divide it by something. That's a wonderful thing. Paint Dynamics. I don't really have time to show you all about paint dynamics. But in the paint tools, Dynamics, you can do all these things. Fade tapering. A lot of these things are things that you can do if you have a tablet. So the artists with graphics tablets have been doing this for a long time. But you can do things like have a line that tapers off depending on how fast you draw or how long the line is. And it's pretty fun. So experiment with it. See what the various things do. And here are some examples. Now GIMP 2.9. So I'm going to exit this and show you GIMP 2.9. This is GIMP built from Git as of about a week ago. It was running so I didn't want to risk updating it anymore. You know how that is. It is still somewhat unstable. Not everything works. But there are some really great things coming up. GIMP 2.9. The biggest change is that it's based on GEGL. Which if you look it up on Wikipedia stands for the Generic Graphics Library. And it's a back end that handles image formats and image precision and all that sort of thing. It really stands for genetically engineered goat large. And that's the GEGL logo. This is not my fault. But just so you know, you'll probably hear about it. And the big thing GEGL does for you is color spaces. Everything in GIMP under GEGL is stored as floating points. So instead of being 8 bits per channel of integer information, you have floating point numbers. Much higher image precision. And in particular, no it's an image. It would help if I actually had an image here. Image precision. You get all these choices of precision. So you can 64 bit floating point. If you want high color images, if you want to import them from your camera or from whatever other workflow, you can do that. There's still some issues and there's a lot of discussion going on in the GIMP list. So if you're big into color, you should probably either check out in the slides I have a link to guide to high bit depth editing. There's a two part very involved article. And the woman who wrote it is the woman in the GIMP list and is very happy to talk about this stuff. Warp tool. Ah, remember I warped? Remember how hard that was to use because you can drag things around but it's in a little tiny window? Things like this are what you get because of the GEGL color spaces. So, you know, you can... Which one's the I warped tool? That one I think. Warp transform. And you can make the brush a little bigger Come on, wake up. Now you can... And you can get a full size preview. You can zoom in on this and everything. It's great. So, I always loved I warped and I always wanted a warp tool. I don't use it much but when you want it, you know, there's no substitute. There's a unified transform tool which I don't really have time to show you. Well, I'll show you briefly because it is pretty cool. It has all these handles. It basically can do all of the transforms at once. So, if I mouse over this handle, you notice on the bottom it says change perspective but on this handle, it does shear. So, you can do some perspectives. Then you can shear. Then you can rotate. So, just mouse over various places and you can figure out what you can do. You can change the place where you're going to rotate around the axis. And that's still under development but really it's working pretty well and it'll be nice to replace all of those other transforms. Text search. See my beanie? It's another geeky thing. Wonderful. Type flash. And I want to know what perspective things there are. There they are. And I can call them up from that. If I want to just run the perspective tool, I can double click there. And here's the perspective tool. I don't have to know where it is in the toolbox. I just have to know something about its name. This is my favorite feature, being a geek. If you use the MyPaint program, there's a new tool that can use MyPaint brushes. They're a little slow. They're still under development but there are a lot of interesting brushes. You can have fur and things that change as you draw. You can script and get pearl as well as... And then there are a bunch more things, sort of like I work, but more general. A lot of these don't work yet, so I can't demo them. I have some more things I can demo, but I'm out of time. So, questions? Any questions or anything you'd like to see? Yes. Oh, yes. Saver works on both 2.8 and 2.9. Yes. Yes. Bitmap like BMP? Yeah. Gimp can save in all kinds of different formats. The question, of course, was about BMP format. I'm going to use Save As rather than Saver here because it has the... No, I'm going to use Export As. You can't save as BMP, but you can export. I can find it. Export As. Select File Type, and you've got this huge list. So, these are all the formats that Gimp supports. And I won't go through them, but BMP is definitely in there. Yes. There is. If you scale... How to get good scaling is this interpolation thing in the Scale Image Dialog. The default, I think, usually is Cubic, although I may have changed that. In Gimp 2.9, you'll see no halo and low halo. I'm unclear on the differences, but they're both much better than Cubic for scaling down. And it's called Lensos in 2.8. So, either way, play around with those scaling options. And I think you'll find the different interpolations do a better job. You made text, and it looked smooth in Gimp, but when you exported it to another format, it looked jaggy. Is that to be sure? But when you see, particularly if GIF is involved or GIF, I guess technically it's pronounced GIF, but I hate that. GIF is an index format, which means it can only store certain colors. It can't have very high color depths. So it's something that looks good on Gimp. Yeah, even so, I have seen that be a problem. So that could be a problem. And pink can also be indexed. So that might be it, but if you have it here come up and we can try to figure it out afterward. Yeah. Well, as long as it's not indexed, but pink can be indexed too. So it depends on the image mode. There are a couple of things that could be wrong there. Any other questions? I forgot to mention, I always forget this. Since we're before lunch, I brought some chocolates for people who ask good questions. And I haven't been throwing them out, so I think there were some over there. I know there were some over here. I don't know how good my arm is, but... Oh look, I got to keep one. So any other good questions? Yeah, high and low-press, pass filters. I believe that there are plugins for that, but I don't know offhand what they are. I'd have to look them up. And if not, it would be very easy to write a plugin to do that. But I'm sure they already exist. Anything else? Oh, wait.