The GIMP has a diverse assortment of tools that let you perform a large variety of tasks. The tools can be thought of as falling into five categories: Selection tools, which specify or modify the portion of the image that will be affected by subsequent actions; Paint tools, which alter the colors in some part of the image; Transform tools, which alter the geometry of the image; Color tools, which alter the distribution of colors across the entire image; and Other tools, which don't fall into the other four categories.
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Note |
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In case you're curious, in Gimp lingo a "tool" is a way of acting on an image that requires access to its display, either to let you indicate what you want to do by moving the pointer around inside the display, or to show you interactively the results of changes that you have made. But if you want to think of a tool as a saw, and an image as a piece of wood, it probably won't do you a great deal of harm. |
Most tools can be activated by clicking on an icon in the Toolbox. Some, however (namely, the Color tools), are accessible only via the menus, either as Tools->Color Tools or as Layer->Colors. Every tool, in fact, can be activated from the Tools menu; also, every tool can be activated from the keyboard using an accelerator key.
If you have things set up like most people do, activating a tool causes its Tool Options dialog to appear below the Toolbox. If you don't have things set up this way, you probably should: it is very difficult to use tools effectively without being able to manipulate their options.
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Tip |
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The Tool Options appear beneath the Toolbox in the default setup. If you lose it somehow, you can get it back by creating a new Tool Options dialog using File->Dialogs->Tool Options, and then docking it below the Toolbox. See the section on Docks if you need help. |
Each tool has its own specific set of options. The choices you make for them are kept throughout the session, until you change them. In fact, by default the tool options are even maintained from session to session. (You can alter this in the Session part of the Preferences dialog, though.) The persistence of tool options across sessions can sometimes be an annoying nuisance: a tool behaves very strangely, and you can't figure out why until you remember that you were using some unusual option the last time you worked with it, two weeks ago.
The shape of the cursor changes when it is inside an image, to one that indicates which tool is active.