GIMP Uber Alles, Part 3

Computer graphics apps are bursting at the seams with cool features to tweak and manipulate your images. If you’re at all familiar with visual arts concepts like color spectrums, contrast fades, and like, you know how prevalent these are in even the most simple programs. The sophistication only rises the further you go, starting with MS Paint on your Windows Accessory Menu and moving up the scale to monumentally expensive, custom installations like the Avatar suites. For most of us in the middle, of course, there is PhotoShop, and its open-source counterpart, GIMP.

I made my first book cover with MS Paint, and it showed. For my next attempt, I used GIMP. What a revelation. If I hadn’t had the experience of using Paint, I would never have appreciated the magnitude of the upgrade.

Here’s the deal. The most critical difference between a serious image processing program like GIMP and a simple graphics app like MS Paint is its ability to maintain multiple, separate layers of the same image. For instance, take a simple logo on top of a photograph. Think print ad. In a graphics app like Paint, you would have to write your logo text directly onto a JPEG image. If you needed to move the logo, then you had to undo the text and start over. With GIMP, you would load the JPEG image into one layer, then create a wholly separate layer for your logo. This you could color, distort, and manipulate any way you want. You could see how it would interact with the image underneath it, then move it, resize it, or do anything else that the occasion fancied. 

For my new book cover, I decided I needed multiple elements. The first thing I did was troll IStockPhoto.com for appropriate imagery. My book featured 1) a beautiful woman, 2) a full moon, 3) a satellite, 4) a city at night, 5) guns, 6) cars, and 7) circuitry. For each of these, I copied a dozen different thumbnails. By loading these into separate layers in GIMP, I was able to recombine them endlessly, trying new combinations at will.

 Eventually satisfied that my mock-up was as good as it could be, I procured the images themselves. When I replaced the blurry thumbnails with these high-resolution files, it was like - Bam! The effect was immediate. With these real layers in place, I spent the next week rotating, moving, scaling, distorting, shading, colorizing, cropping, and doing everything else I wanted within GIMP. 

Wow. It was such a better experience. But don’t take my word for it. Here are my two book covers, side by side. See for yourself.