One good way to find out about The Gimp is to use it with a photo. Here's one we prepared earlier (actually it is from the Tasmania Together website): click on it and download it, saving it locally somewhere as garden.jpg

Now start up The Gimp, and use File Open to open your image.

Firstly, let's see what we can do with the photograph.

Firstly, let's see if we can add some text to it. In the ToolBox, click on the icon. A dialogue box will open, allowing you to enter text: let's make it "Image courtesy of Tasmania Together" and set it in a small size sans-serif font.  You can shift the text around on the image, until it is where you want it (on the white area somewhere). You will see the four-directional arrow symbol as you locate the text. Text colour will be the current foreground colour.

It is as well to check right now that yes, there is an Undo command! Sometimes it is hard to find, but clicking on the arrow at the top left (or just right-clicking), then Edit >Undo will solve most problems of the "oops.." variety. Undo is multi-level.

Next, we will use some of the drawing and editing tools.

The "select contiguous areas" tool allows you to identify odd-shaped components of your image for copying etc. If you can think of a better name, use it! As it has to rely on colour changes to work out where your shape starts and finishes, it has an adjustment for how precise or fuzzy you want it to be in locating edges. This depends on the nature of your image. 

We will use it to clone the lettuce plants. Try the  tool on a lettuce plant: it will either grab too much or not enough. Double click on the tool and change its threshold setting till it 'grabs" a lettuce properly (about 40 works OK). Use Edit > Copy and then Edit > Paste to produce clones of your lettuce plant. You can move them as required.

If you lose the toolbox, got to the arrow in the top left-hand corner, click, choose Tools > Toolbox, or just pick it up from the Windows toolbar.

You can zoom in in several ways: in the Toolbox there is a magnifying glass, which can have its preferences set as zoom in or out. Zoom in and orient yourself to look at the logo on the student's shirt. 

If we want to remove this logo, we can do so in several ways. 

One way is to use the draw in ink tool. Double-click on this, and set the size to something very small eg 1.0. You can now draw on the image, in whatever colour is set in the foreground colour. 

This colour is most likely black, but you can change it either by 

Either way will work but the dropper is a bit quicker in this case.

Where texture and shadow make a single colour inappropriate, we can either manually add the component colours pixel by pixel, or we can copy a section from elsewhere. We could do this with the shirt if we desired. You will notice that as this photo was originally produced for the web, it has been saved at a reasonably low resolution. As a result, the pixellation is very obvious.

Let's try to extend the dirt the child is playing in. We can copy rectangular or elliptical sections using the   and buttons (click, drag them over the section you want to copy, then Edit > Copy. Edit>Paste will paste them, and the pasted copy can be dragged into place). 

However, dirt is not rectangular or elliptical, and the result will look artificial , so we will use the lassoo tool to draw out an irregular section that we can copy. If we use a big section to fill in most of the background with repeated pasting, we can then use a few smaller ones around the edges.

Do this, saving as you go, and you will see that you can readily edit this sort of image.

When finished, see if you can get rid of the red string on the child's hat using similar processes.

By now you will realise that the editing process can easily endanger things you have already completed. For that reason, The Gimp uses layers to separate various parts of an image.