Gimp - basic tutorial

Work with layers, change colors, change text and save your file

In this tutorial we will work with cYo Champagne as example. The principles are the same for other cYo psd files.

Open your psd-file file:
File -> Open -> brows your computer to find the file called "cYo Champagne1024".

Gimp will show you this:

In your own file you won't see the words 'example' those are only visible in this tutorial.

From left to right: the toolbox, the filemenu with the actual file and the layers tab.

First we will have a look at the layers tab. As you can see this psd file consist of seven layers. Six of the layers are visible and one is hidden. The visible layers have little eyes, left from the small pictures. The hiddden layer, the upper one without an eye is called 'Good to know'. When you click on the blanc spot on the left, the layer will become visible and the little eye will appear. You will see a text that gives you some hints about the file format which is best for uploading in SL. (You don't have to read that now, we will come back to this later in this tutorial). Now when you click the eye of the layer 'Good to know' the text and the eye will disappear again.

Now click the eyes in the other layers. You will see which elements in the champagne picture will disappear, when you do so. Play a bit with clicking layers off and on. This gives you an idea which element in the picture is on which layer.

Copy a layer In the left picture we have a situation with two visible layers: the "Lower layer blanc" and the "Background Bottle". When you click with your mouse on the "Lower layer blanc" you will select the layer, and make this the active layer. Let's say we want to see how it looks when we make this label blue. But before we do that we are first going to make a copy of the existing layer. To do so you click this Lower layer blanc with the left mouse button, you hold the button and drag the layer to the little blue screen you see in the lower bar.

The next picture shows the new layer, you just made. This layer is called "Lower label blanc copy". The new layer is one place above the orginal you copied.

Change the color of a layer

Select the copy you just made, by clicking it with the mouse. Then next you go to the file menu (on top of the screen where the image is) and then select the button: colors, and next from the drop down menu: colorize, as in the picture above. Now a little screen will pop-up. This screen shows you 3 banners you can move: hue, saturnation and lightness.

On the left you see the orginal color, on the right picture the color changed to blue. By moving the three different pointers along the bars you can make any possible color you like.
- The hue bar makes the actual color, like red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple.
- The saturnation takes care of the strongness of the color, when the pointer in this bar is complete to the rigth (like pic 2 with the blue label) the color is as strong as possible, when it is completye to the left there will be no color at all, the blue label will look grey.
- The lightness bar takes care of the lightness or darkness of the color. The more the pointer goes to the right site, the lighter the color will be. Moving the pointer to the left site, will make the color darker.

Play a bit with the 3 different color change bars, and see what results you can reach with this tool.

After you changed your lower label, make the Lower border lable and the Upper lable visible again. The way we were just working, with only one visible layer, was for educational purpose. When we have all layers visible, we can still color change just one single layer. The color changes will only work in the active layer. Now we see the results in combination with the rest of the bottle, we don't think it's very great, so we decide to work with different colors. We will make the upper label and lower label border purple and the lowel label it self lilac. But before we do that we will throw away the layer with the blue label.   Delete a layer Left click the layer with your mouse, and hold down the mouse button while dragging the layer to the bin in the lower bar of the layers tab. Add a layer To add a complete new layer with nothing on it yet, you should click the empty sheet in the lower bar of the layers tab. A window will appear, where you can fill in a name for the layer. Click OK to create the actual layer.

Now we are going to change the colors of three different layers with the colorize menu. In the colorize window, you see the name of the layer you are working at. Though you can color the three layers all at the same time, by selecting all three, we are not going to do so. We will color them one by one.

To color your labels purple and pink, you use the next figures:

Every time you have changed a color of a layer you must push OK to submit the changes.

Put text on a texture Imagen you are making a champagne bottle for the 'Romantic Lilac Panther Club' and you decided to put the word 'Romantic' in lilac letters is the upper label of the bottle, and 'Lilac Panther Club' in purple letters on the lower label. One of the tools you can find in the toolbox is the 'text tool'. This tool is symbolized by the letter A. Click on this letter with your mouse. Remark that the lower part of the toolbox is changing. The lower part shows us properties of the text tool. Font is for the type of letter you want to use. Size shows the size of the letters. And color shows us the color. The current color is black. When you will typ a text, it will be in black letters on your texture. You can change the color of the text before you are going to typ or afterwards. In this tutorial we will first write the text and change the color afterwards.

After you have selected the text tool move with your mouse to the upper label in the texture, and click there. Two things are happening now. There will be a spot with four little squares on the picture, and the 'Text Editor' will pop-up. In this editor we typ the word that we want to be on the upper label of the bottle 'Romantic'. When you do this, you will notice that the same text that you are typing in the text editor is appearing on the texture of the sculpt.
After you have written your text, you can close the text editor by pushing the 'close' button .

Have a look at your layers tab. Notice Gimp has made a new layer, and has called it 'Romantic'. Every time you create a new text on a different spot of the texture Gimp will make a new text layer, and give it a name that is equal to the first words of your text.

We cannot see the black text on the purple lable very well, so first thing we are going to do is change the color to lilac. We want it to be the same lilac as the one in the lower label.

Now make sure that still the layer called 'Romantic' is selected. Then you move with your mouse to the Toolbox and click on the color bar. As a result of this the 'Text Color' window will pop up.

In this text color menu is a tool called 'Eyedropper' on the left side a little bit under the middle. Click the eyedropper to select it. Your cursor will change in a little eyedropper. Move this little eyedropper to the lilac lower lable of the bottle, and click there. The text color menu is changing now.

We see some interesting things happening. The color of the colored spot has changed, and the position of the pointers on the bars at the right have also changed, and there are numbers behind it. At the left bottom of the window you can see the color you just have selected (lilac) and the color that was selected before (black). Beside of that there is a new color spot added to the blanc spots on the lower part at the right site of the window; the color you just selected is there. Now notice something in the next picture that can be very handy when you work with prims in SL.

Every color you can make is a mix of the 3 primair colors. On computers these 3 primair colors are: red, green and blue. The color lilac we have chosen is made of 224 parts red, 195 parts green and 234 parts blue. In the picture above red is shown in the bar with a R in front, green with G and blue with B. The color picker of SL must be familiar to you. It also shows us the 3 primair colors. When we put exactly the same numbers in de red, green, blue number choosers of the SL color picker as we see in our color menu in Gimp, it will make exactly the same color. Go back to the text color picker in Gimp and click OK to select the lilac color.

So far, so well. The color is ok now, but we don't like how the letters look, and we also think they are to small. We want to give the letters a more romantic look.

The font that is selected in our example is called 'Sans'. To choose another font click the button behind the word 'Font'. Now you will get a row of all fonts that are available on your computer. You can scroll through them by rolling your middle mouse button. For our example we will choose the font called 'French Script MT' and we will change the size of the font to 56. You can do this by writing 56 in stead of 18 in the size window.

Font and size look ok now. But the text is a bit too low on the label. We are going to move the text a bit upwards. Move your mouse to the midde of the square, where the text is. Your cursor will change to a cross with four arrows on the end. Now you can move the block with the text. As you do so the text editor will pop up again, you can ignore that now. After you have place the text on the right spot, you can close the text editor.

Now we are going to make the text in the lower label. Move with your mouse to the lower label, and click somewhere in the lable. The text editor will pop up again. As soon as you start writing the first letter Gimp will make a new textlayer for you.

As you can see now the font (French Script MT) and the size (56) you had selected in the toolbox before, are still there. The color though has changed again to the default color: black.

	The text is too large to fit in the label. Now we can choose to make the fontsize smaller, or we can decide to spread the words over two lines. We choose for the last. We will put 'Lilac Panther' in line 1 and 'Club' in line 2. We do this by putting our mouse in the texteditor before the word 'Club' and then push the 'Enter' button.
	It seems the text editing spot in het picture is to small to put the text in two lines. We can solve this by going with our mouse to one of the lower corner and put it in one of the little rectangles, hold the mousebutton, and move downwards. Now we see the size of the text editing spot is enlarging.
What we want to do now is putting the word 'Club' in the center under 'Lilac Panther'. For this we will use one of the buttons behind the word 'Justify' in the text menu in the toolbox. Select the third button from the left, and see how the word 'Club' is shifting to the middle.
	Now we are going to repeat steps we have seen before in this tutorial: - Move the text so that it fits nice onto the label. - Select the color bar in the toolmenu, and click the eyedropper. Move the eyedropper to a purple spot in the upper label and click it. This color purple will be added to the text now. - Change the font size from 56 to 70.

Saving a file
Time to save your file for uploading to Second Life. Go to the file tab in the upper bar of the texture window. Choose 'save file as'.

	Click the + that is in front of 'Select File Type (By Extension)'. Now the selection window will show up. Scroll through the possibilities and choose 'JPEG image' .	Choose 'Save'.

Jpg is a file format that can only have one layer and no transparent parts. Gimp is asking us if we want to export the file, without transparency and as flatten image (just one layer). Yes, that is exactly what we want for this upload to SL, so we choose 'Export'.

	Now the file is exported to the jpg format. You still must save it. In the next window Gimp is asking about the quality we want for our save. For SL we want the maximum quality, so we change 85 to 100. And then choose 'Save'.

Now we have a file we can upload to Second Life. There is only one little problem: the size of this file is 1024 x 1024 pixels. Though SL can handle that file it is better to make a texture that is 512 x 512 pixels. This texture will rezz four times as fast as a 1024 x 1024 texture.
So the last thing we are going to do is change the file format of our jpg file.

Open the jpg file. Choose: File -> Open -> cYo Champagne1024.jpg

Go to the 'Image' tab and choose 'Scale Image' from the drop down menu. A new window will appear.

     

Change 'Width' to 512 and then 'Height' will change to 512 at the same time. After you have done this, click 'Scale'.
We are going to save this new smaller image again, and we will give it its definete name. We will call it 'Lilac Panther Champagne512'. You can do this in the name bar.

Since the file is already a jpg file we don't have to select this again in the 'Select File Type (By Extension) menu. Now safe the file and we are ready to upload it to Second Life, put it on our sculpty and see the final result.