Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Creating and Modifying Graphics

The GIMP is a graphics program that’s considered in many ways equivalent to Adobe Photoshop. Many don’t consider The GIMP the friendliest program on the planet, but at the very least, it has enough features to keep you busy experimenting for weeks! To open The GIMP, choose ApplicationsGraphicsThe GIMP.

When you start The GIMP for the first time, you have to walk through its user setup routine. Fortunately, you can just click Continue each time, unless you’re a graphics guru who has a particular reason to want to do things in a different way. After you’ve clicked past all these dialog boxes, a collection of one or more dialog boxes pops up containing the GIMP main dialog box (see Figure 14-4) plus additional tool dialog boxes. I recommend closing all but the main one for now, just to keep your screen and brain uncluttered.

Figure 14-4. The GIMP’s main dialog box in Fedora 7.

The GIMP is an incredibly complex program, with entire books written for the people who really want to use it heavily. Here are a few things to get you started.

GIMP basic tools

Because it’s such an advanced tool, it’s astonishing that the GIMP main menu bar only contains three ...