Michael J. Hammel - The Artists Guide to GIMP: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers (Covers GIMP 2.8)

Selected images appear from the following royalty-free collections:

Links to all the stock images used in the book are available at the companion website:

Many of this books tutorials are inspired by tutorials presented in countless Photoshop texts. My knowledge of how to use tools like GIMP was born from those early Photoshop tutorials; I learned to translate and reimagine those techniques into the button sequences and pixel pushing required to reproduce the concepts using GIMP. Despite this extensive reading, I never actually used Photoshop until many years later, when my wife started using it. Though I know where everything is in Photoshop, I find myself happily using GIMP instead. We all have our comfort zones; use what makes you happy.

Ive been writing about Linux and GIMP in particular since 1996. Ive written for every kind of publication, ranging from countless print articles and magazine columns to website musings and multiple books. In 2001, I wrote about how Linux and GIMP were starting to make waves in the special-effects industry with the article Linux Goes to the Movies in Salon.com . Open source has come a long way since then. And so has GIMP.

When GIMP was first started as a class project at the University of California, Berkeley, it was built on top of the venerable Motif toolkit, which at the time was really the only full-featured software library for X11-based windowing systems. Version 0.54 was my first taste of the GIMP in this form. Later, the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) was born, and it replaced Motif for various technical reasons. Somewhere between version 0.54 and version 0.99, I ported John Beales Sparkle code to a GIMP plug-in. For that ancient yet still meaningful work, Im listed as a contributor to the project. It even got me into the Red Hat friends and family plan when they had their IPO (I shouldve sold when it was at its peaksilly me). Eventually, my association with the project led me to write for the Linux Gazette and later Linux Journal , the latter of which led to my first book on GIMP, in fact the first book on GIMP, called The Artists Guide to the GIMP . You might say Ive followed Linux and GIMP from day one.

Of course, after all these years Im no longer the only one writing on this subject, and GIMP is no longer just a class project. Plenty of texts exist that show you which button opens which dialog. In the first edition of this book, I hoped to go where no one else had attempted, beyond the application itself and into what it can do. In this second edition, Im updating the old tutorials, tossing in some new ones, and giving you a look at how GIMP is evolving.

Linux and GIMP have grown up together, and they are no longer youngsters in the computing world. Linux comes with a serious desktop, and GIMP is a serious application. Its time to get down to business: the business of graphic design. This book is about learning techniques applicable to the real world.