Introduction

You wouldn’t have purchased this book if you weren’t interested in photography, art, image editing, or some related activity. You also wouldn’t have gotten Using GIMP if you weren’t willing to invest some time and effort in learning an open source image-manipulation program. That’s what this book teaches, with a specific focus on doing, rather than learning concepts, background, or history, so you’ll gain experience in using GIMP very quickly.

The uses for digital imagery are just vast, particularly on the Web. Every image, graphic, wallpaper, and photo you’ve ever encountered had to be created and edited by someone using one or more digital editing tools. Most people tend to think of Adobe products when they think of those tasks, but GIMP is extremely well equipped to do just about everything you can imagine in that realm. With a little practice, you can use GIMP to create many of those images, too.