Tutorials

🛈 As everything created by the GIMP project, these tutorials are fully community-written. Therefore if you find any tutorial incomplete, or if it contains errors or outdated information, the best thing is to contribute a fix. Moreover we warmly welcome new tutorials. See below for the full contribution procedure.🛈

Beginner

GIMP Quickies
Use GIMP for simple graphics needs without having to learn advanced image manipulation methods.

Simple Floating Logo
This tutorial walks through some basic image and layer manipulation techniques.

Making a Circle-Shaped Image
How to create a circular-shaped image.

Making a Heart Shape with Selections
How to create a heart-shape with selections.

Layer Masks
An introduction to using layer masks to modify the opacity of a layer.

Basic Color Curves
A first look at the Curves tool and adjusting color tones in an image.

Your GIMP Profile (and You)
What the GIMP Profile is and how to use it.

Image Formats Overview
Selecting the best image format for your purposes.

Asset Folders
Extending GIMP with new plug-ins, scripts, brushes, and more.

Photo Editing

Digital B&W Conversion
Detailed conversion tutorial for generating a B&W result from a color image.

Luminosity Masks
Using multiple layer masks to isolate specific tones in your image for editing.

Tone Mapping with ‘Colors/Exposure’
Using high bit depth GIMP’s ‘Colors/Exposure’ operation to add exposure compensation to shadows and midtones while retaining highlight details.

Focus Group
Layer masking and creative filter applications.

Painting

Parametric Brushes
A look at the advantages and flexibility of using Parametric Brushes.

Configuration

How to set the tile cache
The tile cache tells GIMP how much memory it can use before swapping some image data to disk. Setting the size of the tile cache can be critical for the performance of your system.

How to install fonts for use with GIMP

How to use MIDI devices with GIMP
GNU/Linux only procedure.

Programming

Basic GIMP Perl
Learn how to write simple perl scripts using the gimp-perl module (GNU/Linux users only).

Automate Editing
Using GIMP Python to automate a workflow.

Automatic Creation of XCF from JPG
Import XCF images a directory at a time.

Contributing new tutorials or fixes

You don’t have to be a developer to participate to the GIMP project. Some team members help with design, community management, bug triaging… and some help with documentation and tutorials!

The only thing we ask of contributors is to use Libre licenses, which allow anyone to share, redistribute and modify the tutorials. It enables others to fix tutorials, even years later, even if the original author is not around anymore. This is the same rules as for our code, making GIMP a Free Software.

Recommended licenses are:

So you want to contribute? The process is simple, here is an example for the hypothetical case where you found an error in an existing tutorial. In such a case of editing existing text, your change will be automatically considered to be in the same license as chosen by the first author:

  1. All tutorial contents can be found on our website’s repository (Gitlab). After clicking this link, feel free to browse to understand the file structure: Each tutorial is listed in a separate folder and each folder has a file called index.md which contains the text of the tutorial. There are many other files that accompany the tutorial inside the folder, such as images, screenshots and various assets.
  2. Once you found a tutorial, which you want to edit, click the index.md link, and you will see a blue button saying “Edit”. Click it (obviously you need to have created a login first and be connected).
  3. Gitlab will propose you to “fork” the project because of missing permissions. Press “fork”.
  4. Once this is done, make your changes using the Markdown syntax.
  5. When you are happy with your edits, proceed to the bottom of the edit page, notice the “Commit message” field. Fill in relevant information explaining what you did. Click “Commit changes”.
  6. A “New merge request” page will appear. Click “Create merge request”.
  7. It’s done! Now all you have to do is wait for one of the core members to review and validate your changes.

If you just need to change an image (e.g. because it shows an outdated version of GIMP), you may select the image in Gitlab and click the “Replace” button. It will propose you to upload a new version and to write a “Commit message” to explain the change. Please write down the desired Libre license for the image in the commit message. Then hit “Replace file”.

For more complicated changes, or if you want to propose new tutorials, it might be necessary to understand at least the basics of the git source versionning system we use. Alternatively, you may simply write your tutorial in a new text file on your machine (following Markdown syntax), then simply open a report and upload all the files (the text file as well as images and other resources) in this report. Do not forget to tell us the license you chose from the list given above.

A list of legacy tutorials can be found here: All (Legacy) Tutorials List

Bear in mind that this list is being provided for legacy reasons only. They were originally made for very old hence outdated versions of GIMP and most of them do no use Libre licenses allowing editing.