Figure 3.2. The standard windows of GIMP

The screenshot illustrates the standard windows of GIMP

This is a minimal setup. There are over a dozen other types of dialogs used by GIMP for various purposes, but users typically open them when they need them and close them when they are done. Knowledgeable users generally keep the Toolbox (with Tool Options) and Layers dialog around at all times. The Toolbox is essential to many GIMP operations; in fact, if you close it, GIMP will exit after confirming that that is actually what you want to do. The Tool Options section is actually a separate dialog, shown docked to the Main Toolbox in the screenshot. Knowledgeable users almost always have it set up this way: it is very difficult to use tools effectively without being able to see how their options are set. The Layers dialog comes into play whenever you work with an image that has multiple layers: once you advance beyond the very most basic stages of GIMP expertise, this means almost always. And of course it helps to display the images you're editing on the screen; if you close the image window before saving your work, GIMP will ask you whether you want to close the file.

	Note
	If your GIMP layout gets trashed, fortunately your arrangement is pretty easy to recover by using Windows → Recently Closed Docks To add, close or detach a tab from a dock, click on in the upper right corner of a dialog. This opens the Tab menu. Select Add Tab, Close Tab or Detach Tab.

Unlike some other programs, GIMP does not give you the option of putting all your controls and image displays into a single comprehensive window. The GIMP developers have always felt that this is a poor way of working, because it forces the program to do the work of a dedicated window manager. Not only would this waste a lot of programmer time, it is almost impossible to do in a way that works correctly across all of the operating systems GIMP is intended to run on.

Earlier versions of GIMP (up to GIMP 1.2.5) were very profligate with dialogs: advanced users often had half a dozen or more dialogs open at once, scattered all over the screen and very difficult to keep track of. GIMP 2.0 is much better in this respect, because it allows dialogs to be docked together in a flexible way. (The Layers dialog in the screenshot actually contains four dialogs, represented by tabs: Layers, Channels, Paths, and Undo.) The system takes a little while to learn, but once you learn it, we hope that you will like it.

The following sections will walk you through the components of each of the windows shown in the screenshot, explaining what they are and how they work. Once you have read them, plus the section describing the basic structure of GIMP images, you should have learned enough to use GIMP for a wide variety of basic image manipulations. You can then look through the rest of the manual at your leisure (or just experiment) to learn the almost limitless number of more subtle and specialized things that are possible. Have fun!

2.1. The Main Toolbox

Figure 3.3. Screenshot of the Toolbox

The Main Toolbox is the heart of GIMP. If you close it, you quit GIMP. Here is a quick tour of what you will find there.

	Tip
	In the Toolbox, as in most parts of GIMP, moving the mouse on top of something and letting it rest for a moment will usually bring up a "tooltip" message that may help you understand what the thing is or what you can do with it. Also, in many cases you can press the F1 key to get help about the thing that is underneath the mouse.

1. Tool icons: These icons are buttons which activate tools for a wide variety of purposes: selecting parts of images, painting on them, transforming them, etc. The Toolbox Introduction section gives an overview of how to work with tools, and each tool is described systematically in the Tools chapter.

2. Foreground/Background colors: The color areas here show you GIMP's current foreground and background colors, which come into play in many operations. Clicking on either one of them brings up a color selector dialog that allows you to change to a different color. Clicking on the double-headed arrow swaps the two colors, and clicking on the small symbol in the lower left corner resets them to black and white.

3. Brush/Pattern/Gradient: The symbols here show you GIMP's current selections for: the Paintbrush, used by all tools that allow you to paint on the image (“painting” includes operations like erasing and smudging, by the way); for the Pattern, which is used in filling selected areas of an image; and for the Gradient, which comes into play whenever an operation requires a smoothly varying range of colors. Clicking on any of these symbols brings up a dialog window that allows you to change it.

4. Active Image: In GIMP, you can work with many images at once, but at any given moment, one of them is the “active image”. Here you find a small iconic representation of the active image. Clicking on it brings up a dialog with a list of all the currently open images, allowing you to make a different one active if you want to. (Clicking on the window where the image is displayed will accomplish the same thing, though.)

   	Note
   	The “Active Image” preview is disabled by default. If you want it, you can enable it in the Toolbox Preferences tab.

	Note
	At every start, GIMP selects a tool (the brush), a color, a brush and a pattern by default, always the same. If you want GIMP to select the last tool, color, brush and pattern you used when quitting your previous session, check the Save input device settings on exit in Preferences/Input Devices.

	Tip
	You can get rid of the “Wilber's eyes” (replacing the old Toolbox menu) from the Toolbox by adding the following line to your gimprc file: (toolbox-wilber no). It only affects the toolbox. The eyes in the Image window are only visible when you do not have an open image.