As a full-featured, free alternative to Adobe Photoshop, GIMP is one of the wolrd's most popular open source projects. The latest version of GIMP brings long-awaited improvements and powerful new tools to make graphic design and photo manipulation even easier - but it's still a notoriously challenging program. The Artist's Guide to GIMP teaches you how to use GIMP without a tedious list of menu paths and options. Instead, as you follow along with Michael J. Hammel's step-by-step instructions, you'll learn to produce professional-looking advertisments, apply impressive photographic effects, and design cool logos and text effects. These extensively illustrated tutorials are perfect for hands-on learning or as templates for your own artistic experiments. After a crash course in GIMP's core tools like brushes, patterns, selections, layers, modes, and masks, you'll learn: Photographic techniques to clean up blemishes and dust, create sepiatoned antique images, swap colors, produce motion blurs, alter depth of field, simulate a tilt.shift, and fix rips in an old photo Web design techniques to create navigation tabs, icons, fancy buttons, backgrounds, and borders Type effects to produce movie posters and package designs; simulate clouds, cracks, cloth, and underwater effects; and create specialized lighting Whether you're ne to GIMP or you've been playing with this powerful software for years, you'll be inspired by the original art, creative photo manipulations, and numerous tips for designers.

Michael J. Hammel has been a contributor to GIMP since 1996 (version 0.59). A former contributor to Linux Format magazine, Hammel is the author of several books on the GIMP, including The Artist's Guide to the GIMP (SSC, 1998), Essential GIMP for Web Professionals (Prentice Hall, 2001). Hammel currently works as an embedded software engineer in Colorado Springs.