© March 2000 Tony Lawrence

Grokking the Gimp

The Gimp is an Opensource graphics manipulation program that runs on most Unix and Linux platforms. For SCO, it is available from Skunkware

This book is available on-line under an "Open Publication License" at www.gimp-savvy.com.

I'm not an artistic sort. My drawing abilities barely exceed stick figures, my color sense is awful, and even though my own aunt was my 7th grade Art teacher, she still had to give me a "D". I think she thought that I couldn't have been trying very hard- after all, her very own grandfather was the designer of the murals in the Lincoln Memorial, the artist who designed the original National Geographic Magazine cover that ran for so many years and other notable works- and the talent ran strongly in most of his descendants, including my own father and my siblings. They all could draw anything- perhaps not well enough to cause you to gasp in admiration, but more than well enough that you knew what they drew. But not I.

Therefore, although the Gimp is something I use fairly often, my use is simply for converting between graphics formats (tif to gif, etc.) and perhaps adding some crude text to a graphic; I couldn't have even begun to use it for anything else.

After reading this book, I can. Not only that, but I actually understand much of the image editing and printing terminology that until now has just been empty words that I knew had something to do with graphics, but couldn't have defined to save my life.

As the author explains right up front, this is not a book of "Tips and Tricks".There are tips and tricks, but the primary focus is ground zero How To, and it is richly illustrated with full color before, during and after photos of both the images and the tool dialogues used to manipulate them.

I honestly had no idea that the Gimp was this powerful, and I'm sure that even if I had, I wouldn't be able to get very far without this book. The fact that the explanations and examples make sense to a person of nearly no artistic talent like me means that no one should hesitate to buy this if you need or want to work with images. This even has a chapter devoted to the Web, including using the Gimp to make animated GIF's and when and how to use Web safe colors.

Order (or just read more about) Grokking the Gimp- Carey Bunks

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