Grokking the Gimp

I have searched high and low for a decent book on the Gimp. There are a several, good references ("Learning the Gimp in 24 Hours", "Essential Gimp for Web Developers", etc.) though many are out dated due to the rapid progress progress the developers. The Gimp, an excellent example of what open source cooperation produces, is well represented in this book. The author illustrates the use of the Gimp with clear diagrams, concise descriptions, and excellent examples of the Gimp's functionality. Apart from the official Gimp documentation, this book has served me well.

I had "used" Adobe Photoshop for about 4 years, but could never figure anything out - even after going through their provided tutorials, something was missing. In the past year I'd been using the GIMP more and more, but still never really understood what I was doing or why things worked when I finally got something to look good. But this book has changed all of that. This book contains just the right mix of topics, stepping from fundamentals of GIMP to a very approachable understanding of color spaces to some compound operations to very illustrative "projects" that pull everything together. The flow of the book is great, and for me there was a great balance between answering the questions of "How do I do this?" and "Why/When do I do this?". The sections on how selections and masks are complimentary and when to use them appropriately was especially useful and now photo editing has gone from an occasional chore to a fulfilling and productive activity. Although the specific examples are for the GIMP, the author always gives you enough of the "Why?" to be much more generally applicable. The bottom line is - no matter what photo manuipulation program you use, this book is undoubtedly useful!

This is one of those books where you look at it and say "It can't be any good, there's only a little over 300 pages. There must be a lot left out. After all, 'the other books' have 1000 pages".In this case, size doesn't matter. Technique does -- and Carey Bunks provides you with the techniques for using the full-featured tools found in the Gimp. You are not just presented with "this button does this and that widget does that", but you are given a understanding of why you would use one tool instead of another to get the results you wish.From basic operations such as cutting & pasting and selection techniques, to using masks and layers, to more advanced concepts such as anti-aliasing and the use of colorspace and color balancing, you get it all. With the perfectly illustrative examples that you can spend hours experimenting with, I don't believe you will be found wanting the other 700 pages. Some authors just have the knack for clear, powerful content with fewer words. Carey Bunks, in my opinion, is one of them.

I use the Gimp in my work on a day to day basis, and I thought I knew it pretty darn well. But this book has changed the way I work. It does have very good info about colorspaces and color correction, and I picked up a few things I didn't know, but for me the most valuable sections were about making selections. The section in chapter 4 on using the threshold tool to quickly make a selection mask knocked my socks off! I'm using this technique all the time now.

Bunks has done a magnificent job of explaining the basics, with constant illustrations of his meaning, and a text that, while very understandable, was never condescending. But what really made this book appeal to me was his very impressive and cogent explanation of colorspaces and excellent tutorial on the curves, levels, and threshold tools. Without a clear understanding, these tools seem mere playthings. Pull the lines up and down in the curves tool, and you get a colorful solarized image. What fun. I used it once, and put it away. Bunks showed me how to use these tools to quickly, easily, and precisely perform color corrections. He elucidates a clear series of steps for maximizing the image's use of the available color range, removing any resulting or preexisting color casts with remarkable precision, and enhance the visibilty and impact of foreground elements. I followed this procedure on a number of images I had scanned, and some that were stills captured through a video camera, and the before and after differences were remarkable, for about five minutes an image.The whole book is a great reference, but to me, the chapters on colors and the curves tool were worth the price by themselves.