In this interview, Steve Yegge said that,

“I find the GIMP invaluable, and also maddeningly unintuitive. I’ve been using it for years and can still barely do anything with it. But I couldn’t live without it, ironically enough.”

GIMP isn’t very intuitive; I think that this is partly because there are three different windows that pop up when you first open a document up. Aaaah! Three windows! What the hell am I supposed to do?

Breathe in, Breathe out… The Windows will not hurt you. I am not going to explain the features of every window—that is where I as a newbie got lost.

The Layers Window

(aka the window that you, as a newbie to GIMP, won’t use alot. Skip this window for now, and invest your time getting the basic functions down.)

(aka the window with the most kinship to every other graphics program you’ve used previously, like ms paint and iPhoto. So, no sweat you probably already know this part.)

The Main Window

(aka the window that you should be using without making visible: oooooh, what does that mean?! See 10 things below.)

The 10 things...

1. Make sure the image window that you want to work in is selected. Since there are three windows, we aware that if some command isn’t working and you think it should, you might not have the correct window selected.
2. 1: Press 1 when the image window is selected to view the opened photo at 100% zoom.
3. r: Press r to start selecting a Rectangular region.
4. shift + o: Press shift + o to start selecting a region by color.
5. T: Press T to insert text.
6. shift + e: ...to get the eraser.
7. Image/Scale Image: Select “Scale Image” from the Image menu to resize the entire image.
8. Image/Crop Image: Select the region you want to crop. Right click. Select the Image menu. Click Crop Image.
9. Image/Mode/Gray Scale: Select the Image menu & then ‘Mode’. Click Gray Scale.
10. Try shit. Use Control + Z alot. See what you can do.

Maybe I will be able to do something with GIMP one day! I have to wonder if the counterintuitiveness of GIMP is due more to my complete lack of graphics concepts and techniques. Any thoughts, oh ye knowledgeable GIMP users?