Making a good faith effort to learn GIMP

[blur xc]

Ok- I'm no PS guru, far from it actually, but I know how to do the things that I like to do with it. When I need to do something outside of my comfort zone, I hit google, help pages, and fumble my way around taking an hour to do what a competent PS user could do in 5 minutes.

So, I figure I could explain what I do in PS and maybe some of you can give me examples on how the same tasks can be done in GIMP.

Most of what I do is PS is with adjustment layers. I use layer masks and selectively adjust hue, saturation, contrast, curves, etc... To make the sky a deeper richer blue, I would use the color selection tool and grab the bluest part of the sky, adjust the slider to what I think looks ok, and created a new curves layer- the selection automatically becomes my layer mask. Then I'd drag the curve down to where the sky looks how I want. I would do that for grass, clothes, etc... I find it very useful.

Another common task is to create a photo collage. I would arrange a few photos on a new document, using the transform tool to twist them a bit and move them around the page. I sometimes will scan a piece of my wife's scrapbook paper and use that as a background. to change it's color, I would make it gray-scale, and put it over a sold colored layer, and play with the layer styles and opacity to make it look right. I would add drop shadows to the photos on the page, and some text.

I don't do a lot of cloning and that kind of stuff. I don't do graphic art either. Most of my processing was done in Lightroom, but I'm in the process of switching to Bibble since they have a native linux version. -And, they have Noise Ninja. Noise Ninja is awesome.

Thanks,
BM

[guine]

For the sky part there's 2 different things that I would try. The first way would be similar to PS where you could just use the magic wand tool(4th tool in the main gimp window if you're going through them like youre reading) to select the sky. Depending on how many shades there are to the sky you may have to change the threshold for how close to the color you clicked on the tool will select(you can do this by double clicking on the magic wand tool in the main window) or selecting additional areas by holding shift while you click more areas. You can also add more to the selection that you are working on using the lasso tool before the magic wand the same way. Then you can play with curves, levels, and saturation of just the selection. All of these tools are found under tools - color tools.
Another way that is faster although not always going to be as good is just opening up the hue-saturation tool under color tools and you can adjust the hue, lightness and saturation of the entire picture or just individual colors. While working with just individual colors it works well with saturation, but playing with the lightness level tends to pixelate the image very quickly.
I've never done anything making collages before so someone else can probably give better advice on this but I would just open up the background image and then add the other images on as different layers and then move them around and scale them to get the layout how you want it. Under layers there's transform and scale options.
Hope this can help you out.

[SoftwareExplorer]

I am also trying to learn gimp and meetthegimp.org is really good so far, but I have only gotten through the first 12 or so for time reasons but he really does use layers a lot.