Book Review – The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything

GIMP is a graphics editor tool and there are not much resources available to learn it. The recently released The Book of GIMP by Olivier Lecarme  and Karine Delvare provides a comprehensive coverage of GIMP in a consise style. Published by No Starch Publishing, the book is divided into 3 parts spread over 22 chapters.

The chapters in Part 1 examines GIMP basics, Photograph Retouching, Drawing, Illustration, Logos, Textures, Composite Photography, Animation and Image Preprocessing. The authors also provides coverage of the various tools used for designing a website including guides, snaps, grids,and layers.

Part 2 provides reference material for the following aspects associated with GIMP

  • The GIMP Interface
  • Display
  • Layers
  • Color
  • Selections
  • Masks
  • Drawing Tools
  • Transformation Tools
  • Filters
  • Animation Tools
  • Obtaining and Printing Images
  • Image Formats
  • Scripts and Plug-ins
  • Customizing GIMP

The Book of GIMP also includes several appendixes which provides a detailed coverage of Vision and Image Representation, Batch Processing in addition to several FAQs. The author also provided links to additional resources such as Tutorials, Communities, Blogs, Brushes, Plug-ins, Mailing Lists, IRC channels including information rlevant to graphics related tools and websites.

The authors have made a great attempt to provide comprehensive explanation along with plenty of screenshots in color.

I am sure that The Book of GIMP is a handy reference manual and the material covered will be very useful for beginners, media professionals and for all those who are involved in the usage of GIMP.

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