Phillip Whitt - Practical Glimpse: Learn to Edit and Create Digital Photos and Art with This Powerful Open Source Image Editor

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484263266 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Thank you for your interest in this book. Its written primarily to acquaint the reader with the most important aspects of Glimpse to help them start using it quickly. Throughout this book, there are a total of 35 step-by-step tutorials that can be used with the digital work files providedthey can be downloaded from the Apress website ( https://www.apress.com/9781484263266 ) by clicking the Download Source Code button.

Glimpse is a powerful, open source image editing program. Glimpse is a fork of the popular program GIMP (an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program), meaning it uses the same base source code but is maintained by its own group of developers. Although (at this time) its virtually identical to GIMP in most respects, it is a separate project. To see the Glimpse website, just click here: https://glimpse-editor.org/ .

GIMP is a free, open source image editing program. Its used by many graphic designers, web designers, digital illustrators, photographersjust about anyone who frequently works with digital images. Because GIMP is such a powerful program, its often used as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

However, the name GIMP has been somewhat problematic for some. According to the Glimpse development team, the word gimp is a slur against a physically disabled person in some countries. It can also be meant as an insult to unpopular school children. To read more about their views on this matter, just click here: https://glimpse-editor.org/about/#what-is-wrong-with-the-gimp-name .

One especially good point made by the Glimpse development team is that educational and business environments unwilling to adopt GIMP because of the name might be willing to use Glimpsethis would be advantageous to schools or businesses constrained by limited budgets. Any potential negativity the GIMP name could cause would be eliminated by using Glimpse.

Glimpse, like GIMP or Photoshop, is used to modify, enhance, and retouch digital photos. It can be used to digitally repair and restore damaged old family photographs, or prepare images for use in marketing and other business materials.

One example of a useful feature is the Shadows-Highlights dialog, which is used to adjust dark and light parts of the image. Figure shows an example of an image being enhanced using this feature by lightening the foreground.

Figure 1

The foreground lightened using the Shadows-Highlights dialog

Glimpse is also used to create digital artwork. There is a wide array of tools for drawing, painting, and creating shapes. Figure shows an illustration created from scratch using Glimpse.

Figure 2

This illustration was created from scratch using Glimpse

Glimpse is also useful for creating art from photos by using filters and experimenting with layer blend modes. The example in Figure is the result of combining two images resulting in a digital mural.

Figure 3

This image was created by combining two photos applying an artistic filter and using the Hard Light layer blend mode

This book covers Glimpse 0.1.2, which is based on GIMP 2.10.12. While this book was in the late stages of production, Glimpse was updated to version 0.2.0. The download and installation instructions in Chapter .

Now that youre introduced to Glimpse and some of its abilities (and hopefully, youre intrigued) and ready to start, lets move on to the first chapter.

Acknowledgments

Id like to first thank Louise Corrigan and Nancy Chen, both of whom I always enjoy working with. They are both first-rate professionals, and each one a credit to Apress. Id also like to acknowledge everyone involved in the production of this book; your work is forever appreciated!

Table of Contents

Part I: Acquiring, Installing, and Getting to Know Glimpse

Part II: Working with Digital Photos

Part III: Creating Digital Art

About the Author

Phillip Whitt

is an author, photo retouch professional, and graphic designer. He is the author of several Apress books and video tutorials pertaining to image editing using GIMP and Adobe Photoshop Elements. He has edited, retouched, and restored countless digital images since the late 1990s. He has served both clients from the general public and a number of commercial clients over the years. In addition to over 20 years of image editing and graphic design experience, he also has an Expert Rating Certification in Adobe Photoshop Skills and VTC certifications in GIMP and Scribus.