Grokking the GIMP [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Carey Bunks (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The excitement described by Carey Bunks when he first beheld the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in 1996 is palpable when you hold Bunks's new book in your hands. The phantasmagoric image on the cover of Grokking the GIMP: Advanced Techniques for Working with Digital Images melds a photograph of the moon's surface from a high orbit with an apparent solar eclipse by the earth. A penguin floats discretely in a hot air balloon between sun-earth and moon. Is the sun-moon-earth image a bit of the penguin's imagination? Is it a piece of GIMP artist/developer Tuomas Kuosmanen's imagination? Maybe it is really a credit to the visionaries at New Riders who have produced an art book to suit the computer how-to market.

"Grokking" is a Robert Heinlein-ism for "appreciating," and docent Bunks takes us through the museum of computer art and method as he demonstrates the features of the freely redistributable package. The contents follow that path set down by many other how-to tech book authors: tutorial, a taste of image theory, working with the independent features of GIMP (layers, selections, masks, and colorspaces) before advancing to compositing and rendering, and ending with a short review of Web-based applications of image manipulation.

The book's strengths are Bunks's obvious passion for his subject, his mature didactic style, and the wonderfully spacious design and breathtaking color-on-every-page strategy that allows him to beautifully frame GIMP features at their best. The most notable of his many case studies is the "Panorama" project that glues a series of laterally overlapping narrow-view photographs of an architecturally interesting room into a single, stunning, wide-angle panorama of the whole. Bunks documents each step in the transformation and describes the required geometrical, hue, and brightness adjustments needed to warp and blend them together.

Look again at the cover, but not literally. Ignore the unphysical details. Rather, imagine the mind's capacity for juxtaposition and GIMP's power for actualizing this visual synthesis. In form and content, Bunks and New Riders have shown that the possibilities for the tech book are far broader than previously imagined. This is an eye-opening contribution, indeed. --Peter Leopold

Review
I learned quite a bit from this book. It provides powerful explanations for how to do advanced tasks. It goes beyond the glitz and flash of the latest whiz-bang image filter and provides invaluable, fundamental concepts of image manipulation and correction. -- Zachary Beane--GIMP developer and creator of the GIMP News Web site

Problem solving requires the right tools and know-how for the job. Although the GIMP has long been the right tool for digital image manipulation, until now there has been no serious guide describing the right way to use it. "Grokking the GIMP" changes that; it is the first book to really explain how to use the GIMP. -- Guillermo Romero

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Sams; illustrated edition edition (February 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735709246
• ISBN-13: 978-0735709249
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #522,414 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for the GIMP, and much more, April 17, 2002

By	Jo Ann Tanzer (Dresden, Germany) - See all my reviews

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!

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I grok "Grokking the Gimp", July 9, 2001

By	"rcbto" (North Huntingdon, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews

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.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Way Cool Gimp Book, March 25, 2000

By	Agnes Taherkhani (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews

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.