Okay, first and foremost, this is a tut for beginners at GIMP :) So if you’ve come in hopes of finding out how to add those fancy masks and brushes, etc., you won’t find it here. I know that when I first downloaded the program, I had to figure things out by trial-and-error, and by the time I found really good beginner’s tuts (and they are out there!) I was already experienced enough to know how to do what they taught me.
This tut covers sharpening, scaling, cropping, and different coloring techniques.
Here we go :)
Start off with your base image. I chose one from The Little Mermaid because, well, it’s an awesome movie ^.^
(For anyone who cares, it’s the scene where Eric’s gone off to marry Ursula-in-disguise and Ariel’s thinking she’s screwed :P Pardon my Disney geek-ness.)
Anyway, the first thing you want to do is go to Tools < Transform Tools < Crop. The picture is a little shear-like thing. Then, you can crop off all the extra area that you don’t want. When I finished cropping, my picture ended up being 597 x 441. See what kind of cropping you like best, or find an area you don’t like and crop it off.
02. Now it’s time to scale the image down. This will eventually make it the right size for an icon (100 x 100). Go to Image < Scale Image. You should find a box saying “width” and “height.” You can change these at your will, but I try not to go straight down to 100 x 100, both because I find that images sharpen better larger, and because the numbers are almost never even enough to do that.
So! In those little “width” and “height” put 300 x 222. It should go to 222 automatically. See what I mean about numbers not being even? If they had been even, it would have gone to 300 x 200. But, alas, it’s 222 :(
03. Now for sharpening. Go to Filters < Enhance < Sharpen. When you hit Sharpen, a small box should pop up, and in that box should be you image along with a little scale. Obviously, the farther up you go on the scale, the sharper the image gets. Be careful not to over sharpen the image! It makes it look messy :/
For this picture, I set the scale on 72, just enough to get some nice clean lines.
04. Now I scale it again, to a number closer to 100 x 100. Image < Scale, this time setting it to 150 x 111. If you want to, on this step you can sharpen again, but definitely not as high as 72.
05. It’s time to actually make it 100 x 100. I simply go back to crop (Tools < Transform Tools < Crop) and drag the tool over where I want the icon to be. In the bottom right corner of the program it should tell you what lengths it’s turning into, so if you drag the tool around it long enough over the height and width, you’ll eventually get 100 x 100.
I cropped mine like this:
You can crop in all different kinds of way, though.
06. My favorite part—coloring! I always have so much fun with the colors. Okay, there are really simple ways to get different effects, but one of my personal favorites is the Filter Pack, if only because it has so many different coloring options.
Go to Colors and look down at the bottom—there should be something called “Filter Pack.” Choose this, and wait for a small box to come up (small boxes seem to be love in GIMP, huh? :D). You should see two copies of your images. One has Original over it, and one has Current. Under the “Current” image, click the small white box (more boxes!) beside “
You can play around bunches with this! For my image, however, I chose Magenta once and Yellow once. When you’ve got your image how you like it, close the box. You should be back at the box which has only two copies of your image, Original and Current. At the bottom, select OK.
07. And this is where I leave off! D: I’m going to keep on with my image, adding textures and adjusting some more colors as I see fit. I hope you guys liked it. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I would love to see any icons you make using this tutorial! Maybe I’ll write one for textures next! ;) I know you’ll all miss me…