Anybody who has just read my Portable Gimp posting will know why I also have been perusing around for a “brush up your Gimp” skills book. There is a piece of software call Gimp Photoshop Layout which helps reconfigure the Gimp toolboxes and panel dialogs to mimic the Photoshop layout. Its nice, but just not close enough, so I make do with Grokking the Gimp and then just intuiting what Gimp can do.
However Grokking the Gimp certainly keeps me on the straight and narrow. The book gets users up to speed very quicvkly in the layout, toolbars, panels and help associated with GIMP. Then in Chapter 2 is 30 pages of layers, resizing, and other transformation. The first thing you notice is that the many illustrations are out of data not for functionality or the theory behind the Gimp process – no its the interface of the layout. Many operations like rotation, perspective, and scaling are no longer dialog driven. Instead users use the mouse to drag and drop the exact correction they want.
The same disconnect occurs in the chapters on Selection and Path tools. The tools’ icons are identically the same, the operations are identical but some of the process step have become draga and drop and/or added new clicking options. So when I came to the chapters on channels and layer masks – I thought this is going to be a replay. But it wasn’t – here the theory and discussion of the methods and trade-offs are first rate and very informative.
Ditto for the exercises done in the next two chapters on colorspaces and blending modes. Suddenly I am seeing the how and why of color blending, grayscale transitons, and channel mixer corrections in … a new light. Finally the next 3 projects pull all the elements together in a some engrossing exercises.
The book is 5-6 years behind Gimp but way ahead in the graphic design principles and explanations used. Though there are several newer and more up to date Gimp books ( see the Artist’s Guide to Gimp Effects for example) but I found Grokking the Gimp very interesting and very helpful. The book had stood the test of time in computing – remarkable.