Customer Reviews

Grokking the GIMP

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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 have referenced the on-line version of this book several times and found several useful ideas and techniques out of it---especially those dealing with color correction and enhancement. However, there is no comparison to actually haveing physical pages to flip through and seeing the photos "in person". After reading through this book, several other Photoshop tutorials available make much more sense as well. My only complaint is that there is not much attention paid to any use of plugins or "advanced" clone tool techniques for repairing marred photographs without destroying the natural film grain etc. Also, some of the keybinding shortcust appear to have changed, and his examples using Layer masks did not always work for me as described in the book. Overall, though, purchasing this book is a great way to support open-source projects and learn a good deal about the Gimp as well.

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.

I've read a number of books about the GIMP, and this one is my favorite. I mostly work with natural photographs, and the big problem is finding the boundaries between the various objects in the photos. I've approached this problem in a somewhat haphazard way ... until now. Grokking the GIMP is the first book I have found which properly explains the relationships between masks, selections, and paths, and how to best use them to work with photos. There are numerous full-color examples showing exactly how to efficiently work with photos, and I've learned about many GIMP features that I never knew existed. This book will make my work with the GIMP much more satisfying.

The GIMP is a powerful image manipulation package, provided under a free software license. It is very much the PhotoShop of the open source world. This book is an excellent introduction and tutorial to the GIMP's many powerful features. However, it is not intended to be a user manual. There is a separate and complete user manual for the GIMP available on the web. This book is also available on the web, and it is published under an open-source license - although cleverly they don't mention this in the paper copy itself. However useful it is to have the on-line copy, I cannot stress enough the quality and value in having a hard copy of this book.
Each chapter covers a different theme including layers, selections, masks, color spaces and blending, photo touchup and enhancement, compositing, rendering and web-based image production (including animated GIFs and imagemaps). The material is thoughtfully presented as a series of walkthrough examples.
The physical production of the book itself is very good. Every page is in full color and each chapter's start has a color flash at the edge of the page to allow you to easily locate it. The content has been equally well thought out. There is a very comprehensive index. At the end of each chapter is a list of FAQs correcting common misunderstandings about that chapter's subject. All diagrams are very clear and instructive.
My only gripe with the book is that there is no overview of the use of the standard toolbox of tools. I feel a simple explanation of how to use the various painting controls at the start of the book would have set the context for some of the later chapters on the image manipulation facilities of the GIMP, which indeed is the main thrust of the package.
It has been several years since a major book on the GIMP was published. What would be great would be a book that focuses more on programming and on plugins specifically - how to write them and a description of the ones currently in circulation. The next book set to be published on the GIMP, "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional" is due to be released in April 2006. Until its arrival, this is still the only book on the GIMP worth reading.
For those of you interested in the vast amount of GIMP plug-in source code, just type "Koders Search GIMP" into Google. The first link in the resulting list is what you want. From there you can search through the folders and find the source for the many GIMP plug-ins.

This is one of my two favorite GIMP books, along with Davis' Quickstart Guide. The writing is very good -- much better than one normally sees in a technical book. Note that this is an *advanced* text, not a general introduction and survey of the GIMP. Instead, it is a detailed exposition of techniques for manipulating digitized photographs.

The GIMP is a wonderful tool, but I have never been able to do very many useful things with it because I lacked sufficient understanding of basic concepts like masks and layers. The great thing about Grokking the GIMP is that the author takes you by the hand and teaches why these things are important and then how to use them in the GIMP.

This is much more than simply a GIMP manual! It is a course in basic graphic design.