GIMP Tutorial #1 – Getting Started with GIMP – the Crop Tool

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is a free open source tool. (Note: GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for "GNU's Not Unix!") Please only download GIMP from the official website here. As of this writing (2019-02-07), version 2.10.8 (2018-11-08) is the current stable release of GIMP.

I've seen some people say that they've tried to use GIMP but they had some difficulties, so I decided to write some tutorials, to try to help people get started. I'm not the world's best writer, and with my desire to try to put something together quickly, this might be choppy and jump from topic to topic. In time, my writing style and tutorial presentation style might improve (or maybe not :-).

The official GIMP website also has Tutorials and Help files (known as Docs). The English online help User Manual is here. They have other languages as well.

I use GIMP on Windows 7, but I assume the menu choices within the application are the same for the other operating systems that they support.

GIMP is a very powerful tool with a lot of capabilities beyond manipulating standard image files. GIMP can open PDF files, use Photoshop brushes, run scripts and plugins, and more. But I won't get into those capabilities until later tutorials. (If you see any older posts on my blog about GIMP, plugins, etc. please don't read those because some or all of what I wrote then is now OBE (overcome by events) due to changes in the newer versions of GIMP.)

Tutorial #1 – the Crop Tool

As I begin this tutorial, I'm going to assume you have already installed GIMP on your computer and know how to open it. (If you haven't installed it from https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ yet, please do so now.)

I'm starting with the Crop Tool, because one of my blogger friends said she couldn't find it. To be honest, I didn't know there was one, because I don't use it. But seek and ye shall find. :-)

So, the first step is to open the GIMP application. (If you're on Windows 7, you can click on the Start button in the bottom left corner of the screen, click on All Programs, and select GIMP 2.10.8 in the list of alphabetical choices, then wait for GIMP to open, which might take a little time.)

The default installation of GIMP opens three windows: the main window where your image will appear, a Toolbox window on the side, and a Layers window on the side. (That's what mine does, anyway.)

If you don't have those two additional windows open, you can open them by doing this: In the main window menu, choose Tools – Toolbox or choose Windows – Toolbox and that window should open. Choose Windows – Layers - Brushes and that window should open. (If they don't open, I'm not sure what to tell you to do. I'm afraid to close mine and re-open them: bad things sometimes happen when you close a default open window. :-( )

The nice thing about the Toolbox window is that if you hover your mouse over any of the tool icon symbols, a tooltip popup box will appear, that tells you what the tool is. I hovered over each tool icon symbol until I found the Crop Tool, which looks like this (more detailed image shown further below):

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When you select a tool icon symbol by left mouse clicking on it, additional controls for that tool choice will appear in the area beneath the tool icons area. You can mouse hover over each item, to get tooltip popup boxes that provide more information about the choices.

I'm going to use the default settings for the Crop Tool for this tutorial.

Now I need something to crop.

Teddy has graciously offered to "star" in all of my tutorial examples. I told him we'll see how that works out going forward in time, but for now, he will do.

There are several ways to open an image in GIMP. You can use the standard menu File – Open method, which presents an open dialog box that has a Unix feel to it even on Windows, but I'm going to assume you know how to navigate around a File Open dialog box. If this part is a little non-intuitive (due to the Unix feel), fear not: we can open a file another way. Within Windows, open a Windows Explorer / File Explorer window and navigate to the directory where your file of interest is. (i.e. go to the directory that contains the file you want to crop.)

Within the File Explorer window, select the filename by left clicking once with the mouse. Right mouse click on the filename and select Open With - GNU Image Manipulation Program in the popup dialog box that appears. You should now see your image in the main GIMP window, like this:

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Either way, hopefully you now have the image you want to crop open within GIMP.

Now, left mouse click on the Crop Tool icon within the Toolbox window, to select it.

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Next, position your mouse in the upper left hand corner where you want to begin your crop. Press down and hold the left mouse click and draw your mouse toward the lower right hand side of the area you want to crop, then release the left mouse hold. If you don't like your selection, left mouse click once outside of it, to unselect it. Try making a few selections following the above steps, to get the feel of it.

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Once you have a selection box around your crop area, you can tweak it if you need to. Once the selection box is over your crop area, if you move your mouse around to the sides and corners, you'll see a smaller rectangle or corner box appear. Press down and hold the left mouse click and draw your mouse further out or in, to adjust your selected crop box.

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To crop your image, left mouse click anywhere within the inside of the selected crop box.

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Made a mistake? Simple: select menu choice Edit – Undo (Crop Image) and you're back to the original image again. :-)

Once you're done, you can save the file to be able to edit it again within GIMP later in time, by doing a File – Save As, to give it a GIMP .XCF extension, or you can save it as an image type by doing a File – Export As and using the desired file extension. (I like to export my files as .PNG files.) If you save your file as type .XCF, you can always export it later.

Hopefully this was helpful. Please leave feedback either way, if you have time, in the comments. Thank you.