Articles tagged with: 'the gimp'

This is probably the most important section of the guide, because writing documents, spreadsheets, and occasionally presentations or databases, forms a consistent and considerable part of the working day.

The choice of office suite, and other office type applications, together with the knowledge you have in using them, is one of the most important factors dictating how much, or how little time you will spend at your computer.

The guide has taken considerable care in choosing a small set of programs which provide suitable functionality, together with a pragmatic approach to using them.

The GIMP is another excellent and successful open source project. It was originally developed for the Linux operating system, but is now available on most of the major operating systems, including Windows and Macintosh OS X.

It provides a series of powerful image processing tools, and is more sophisticated, and thus more complicated than normal painting type programs. It is generally compared favourably against top line professional commercial image processing software.

Apart from advising you on choosing from the enormous amount of software available, and showing you how to install, and uninstall the software, the guide also provides pragmatic information on using the programs.

The goal of these tutorials is to provide you with just enough knowledge to make you reasonably competent in the shortest time. They also serve as a basis to become proficient in using one or more of the programs, should you wish to invest further time on them, by offering pointers to more detailed information available on the Internet.

This tutorial will show you how to make basic modifications to an image. These include rotating, cropping and scaling an image, reducing an image's file size, and creating a transparent background. The guide's choice of image processing software is the GIMP.

The GIMP is capable of much more than I can show in this short tutorial, the aim here is to introduce the program to you, without introducing too many concepts (such as layers and paths) which would be needed to produce professional graphic designs.

The following are the download links for all the software discussed in the guide. It can be used to collect all the necessary files on to your hard disk before you use the articles to install the software. It also serves as a reference to the latest versions, which may differ from the versions shown in the various guide articles, as those articles are updated somewhat less frequently.

The downloads are presented as a set of tables, one for each section of the guide. Each table gives the program name, links to the web site and where you can download the software, the current version number, which files to download, and the associated guide article.