Tutorials
A small collection of original GIMP tutorials from the mid-1990s, archived from the Wayback Machine and presented more or less as they first appeared. Click a card to open the original page.
Punched-Out Text
Use the Add and Composite channel ops to make text look punched out of a textured sky.
Neon Effect
Blur, composite, and tweak the gamma to turn plain text into a glowing neon sign.
Burning Text
Distort text with Spread and Ripple, then warm the gamma to set it on fire.
Watermark Effect
Use BCG and the Composite plug-in to overlay subtle text that shows only as a lighter tint of the background.
Tileable Patterns
Whirl a checkerboard in quarter-turns to build a seamless, tileable pattern for web-page backgrounds.
Frozen Text
A twelve-step recipe using the Sparkle plug-in to give text a frosty, iced-over look.
Bump Maps are Cool
Combine Plasma, Add Noise, and the Bump Map plug-in to turn flat images into rough stone and paper textures.
Tie-Dyed Cows
Grow cow-spot blotches from noise, then Difference them with Plasma for a psychedelic tie-dye pattern.
Canvas Texture
Build a woven bump map from noise and directional blurs to make an image look painted on canvas.
Compositing Images in an Outline
Split an outline into regions and blend several photos into it so they fade into one another.
Selective Coloring & Old-Style Look
Two tricks: keep one part of a photo in color against gray, and make another look like an aged old photo.
Better 3-D Buttons
Combine the Fade plug-in with a radial blend to build a rounded, beveled web button.
Fun with Tiles
Pixelize an image and bump-map it against its own edges for a tiled, mosaic-like effect.
A Channel Ops Tutorial for Artists
A plain-language guide to what each channel ops plug-in does.
Creating Smoke
Difference two blurred Plasma images and recombine them into a wispy smoke texture.
3-D Text
Layer blurred and offset copies of text with a blend mask to give it a three-dimensional look.
Glass Text Effect
Blur, offset, and Difference text against itself to make it look like frosted glass.
Relief Tricks
Use the Relief plug-in and a blurred Composite mask to emboss text into a texture.