In order to start using the GIMP, we need to examine the Toolbox. It contains the tools we'll be use when we work with digital images.


Since we're beginners, we'll limit the number of tools we'll be working with to a manageable amount. The tools we'll be most concerned with at this point are the Selection Tools. The image below is a screen capture of the Selection Tools. They're great for choosing the part of a picture we want to edit.


The Rectangular Selection tool allows us to select areas that are square or rectangular in shape.



The Elliptical Selection tool allows us to select areas that are circular or elliptical in shape.


The Lasso tool allows us to create hand-drawn selection areas. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to be less than reliable or easy to use. We have to make a complete circuit to create a selection area. It draws a line as long as the mouse button is held down. However, fingers tend to get tired quickly. When the mouse button is released, GIMP draws a straight line back to the point of origin and selects everything inside the hand-drawn shape. This can be problematic. For this reason, we probably won't use this tool very much.



The Magic Wand (or Fuzzy Select) tool is used for selecting contiguous areas. It selects everything of the same color connected to the point clicked. This can be very handy for selecting odd shapes (if they are of the same color). The "threshold" at which point GIMP decides to include or exclude ambiguous points can also be adjusted.



The Select By Color tool allows us to choose a single color as a selection area. It's a very useful tool.



The Intelligent Scissors are supposed to work by following, as closely as possible, color contours in an image between subsequent points clicked by the mouse. However, at the time of this writing, the Intelligent Scissors is a GIMP tool that seems to be less than useful. For that reason, we will not be using this tool.

The Create Path tool is a very essential tool, one that we'll make great use of in this training session. It allows us to carefully create a selection "path" around objects in a picture. The wonderful thing about this tool (unlike the Lasso) is that it's very forgiving if we make a mistake. If we make a misstep when while creating a selection area with this tool all we have to do is undo (or press Ctrl Z). It makes complicated selecting simple. This is the tool we'll be using when we make our two layer image.


There are other, equally impressive tools in the GIMP's toolbox. However, this tutorial is only an introductory foray into the rich contents of the program.