Working with Images

Today I want to go over editing images and tools we can use to edit with. First we need to acquire an image to work with. As with all images we will need to respect copyright laws and make sure any image we use falls under Public Domain, Fair Use, or Creative Commons. One way to ensure you are not violating any copyright laws is to make create your images. 

How can we create our images? Well we can take pictures with our mobile phone, we can create images using programs like Photoshop or GIMP, we can use a Snipping tool to capture images or we can utilize an AI image generator. 

Snip & Sketch!

 If I am making some instructional material I will most often start with the Snipping tool or Snip & Sketch which is built into every Windows 10 or newer OS. The snipping tool itself has some features for annotating including a pen and highlighter tool.  

Snipping tools are a great way to capture something on your computer that can' be natively saved as an image like a piece of software. 

While the snipping tool itself works great for getting your image sometimes it still needs some extra work to get it looking a little better. For editing images I like to use GIMP as it is a free image manipulation program. 

GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP!

GIMP is a complex program but it can be used for simple image manipulation, it is not as powerful as photoshop yet I find it does almost everything I need.

To start we will launch GIMP and create a new file and select Advanced Options to change the Fill with option to Transparency. We can now use the option Open as Layer option for the image we would like to edit. For this example I will be editing the above image to get it looking a little cleaner, I will use the image from before I annotated using the Snip & Sketch tool. 

Next I will be using the Rectangle Select Tool to select the portion of our image we want to keep.

   

Our next step will be to trim the canvas to match the size of our selection. Now we will go to our Toolbar and select Image-> Fit Canvas to selection. This will trim our image to match what we had selected and leaves us with our desired image. To get our image out of GIMP we will need to Export it which can be found on the Toolbar under File-> Export As. This will allow us to name it and pick our file type. File formats saved as a GIF or PNG will retain any transparency or will not save with a background color if left transparent.

Now this was a very simple and brief walk-through of GIMP. There are multiple ways within GIMP to do the same task we just completed, I have shown what I think is the easiest way to do so. There are still a plethora of tools with in GIMP to be explored. While our final image could have been obtained using the Snip & Sketch tool it's not always easy to get your snip right the first time or if want to do more with GIMP like adding text or directional arrows GIMP can do that too. GIMP, admittedly, is a very difficult program to navigate and operate. I would strongly encourage you to watch a tutorial if you would like to learn more about it.