What this guide is:
There’s a lot to cover when it comes to using a fully featured program like The GIMP. Here I’m going to show how to do a few things to an image that will come in handy in making your own avatar for use on the forums at gendou.com (or anywhere else really). We will be using the open source image editing software The GIMP. Of course, you can apply any of the techniques here to any other images as needed, like to make yourself a signature image or something for your profile.
This guide is primarily written with the assumption that you are using Windows, however using GIMP will be the same on any type of computer though, so you should be able to use this even for OS X or Linux with the exception that some keyboard shortcuts will be different.
What is The GIMP?
It’s just the next best thing to Adobe Photoshop in photo editing. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free?
GIMP is an open source project that has been around for many years. For those of you who don’t know, open source only means that the computer code for the program is available to the public for free, and that instead of a company hiring a team of programmers to write a program to sell, the program is developed by individual programmers in their spare time, collaberating over the internet for the good of the common computer user. GIMP is by far, not the only program of this nature. Many other high quality (or some not so high quality) open source programs are available for free on the internet, such as the Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice. That’s beginning to go beyond the scope of this guide though, so be sure to keep your eyes open for other open source programs around the internet!
Getting Started: Installing The GIMP
It used to be a pain in the butt to get GIMP installed, but now things are super easy. Just go download the latest version at gimp.org/downloads and install it.
Once you get GIMP fired up for the first time you’ll likely see three windows: the tip of the day (read it if you want to, but what am I here for?), the tools window on the left (and also the main window of GIMP. If you want to close the GIMP, close this window, not the other), and the Layers, Channels, Paths… etc window on the right. One note about this window is if you close it meaning to close GIMP, it won’t come back easily. If you need to bring it back, in the main window click File > Dialogs > Create New Dock and from there click both the Layers, Channels & Paths and the Brushes, Patterns & Gradients. If you want to combine these two into one like you started with, you can drag the tabs from the second window to the bottom edge of the first one.
One downside to the GIMP is whenever you open an image, it will open in its own window, having lots of images open will begin to make your Windows taskbar very cluttered (of course, XP can group them for you).
Opening an Image
OK, lets get started. Open up an image and try out these things to get the feel of some basic manipulations; you can try dragging an image file onto the tool buttons or right clicking on an image and choosing ‘Edit with GIMP’. You can (almost) always undo your actions (usually all the way back to the orignial image) with the universal Ctrl + Z, so don’t be too afraid to play around with things.
Zooming
First basic skill: of course you’ll be needing to do some detail work at some point, so you’ll need to zoom in on a part of the image. Easy enough:
Just hold Shift while you scroll the wheel on the mouse. The keyboard shortcut is a little stranger: you have to use plus and minus keys, but since you would have to hold shift to type a ‘+’ you have to do the same to zoom in. Clicking in with the mouse wheel and dragging will let you pan around the enlarged image. You can also hold the spacebar to pan around. You have a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + E) to ‘Shrink Wrap’ the image window you are working in. This will automatically size the window to the edges of the image or to the size of your screen, which ever is smaller.
Cropping
If you have an avatar in mind, the first thing you’ll probably have to do is crop down a larger picture to get just what you want. To do so, there is a crop tool (Shift + C). With the crop tool selected, click and drag a box around the part of the image you want. It will dim out the rest of the photo so you can position and size the box with ease. Once you have the crop set up the way you like, just hit Enter and you will have your cropped image.
Colorizing
I’m sure you’ve seen people’s avatars that are colorized to look all cyan like Gendou’s avatar. You can do this for yourself if you like, with the help of GIMP. The tool you are looking for here is in the image window under Colors > Colorize…
When that window comes up it will give you a preview on the image in the background as you adjust the sliders for Hue (what color you are colorizing the image to), Saturation (how bright the color should be, you’ll probably want this at 100), and Brightness (exactly what you think it is). Playing around with this might be able to give you the effect you are looking for.
Scaling
On Gendou’s forums there is a rule that your avatars should be no higher than 25 pixels (signatures no higner than 100 px), so once you are done cropping and colorizing you’ll need to resize that image to the proper size. To scale an image down in GIMP, just click (in the image window): Image > “Scale Image”
It will bring up a new window telling you the image’s current height and width in pixels. You can ignore the other stuff in this dialog box. Go ahead and enter 25 for the height (or 100 for a signature image) and click Scale. The GIMP will automatically adjust the width so your image will still have the proper proportions.
Saving
Saving is fairly straight forward. Just click File > Save and you’re on your way. The only point I’d like to make here is that the format your image will be saved in is up to what file extension you give it. In case you’re unfamiliar with file extensions, they are a period followed by what is usually only three letters that goes at the end of a file name that helps windows identify what type of file it is. By default, Windows hides file extensions, but GIMP asks that you use them to tell it what format to save your file in. For your purposes, just add ‘.jpg’ to the end of the name of your image. This is the JPEG format which is very common, widely accepted, and quite small when it comes to filesize.
Last Thoughts
So far you have all the skills needed to make your own avatar! All I do to make a simple avatar is Google Image search the anime character’s name. Find a good image, crop down to just the eyes and a bit of the face and then scale to a height of 25px. Once you’re done with that, you’ll need to save it and put it on your photobucket or perhaps tinypic or imageshack. Once uploaded, just follow the instructions in my HTML guide and get it in your profile on the forum.
That’s all there is to the guide so far, but I plan to extend it to with more detail to techniques at colorizing images and how to make a character blink. Bug psoplayer for updates. This page is at revision 0.7
