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Revision History
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| Revision $Revision: 1.55 $ |
2006-02-09 |
j.h |
The GIMP provides a comprehensive toolbox in
order to quickly perform basic tasks such as making selections or
drawing paths. The many tools contained within The GIMP
's toolbox are discussed in detail here.
The GIMP has a diverse assortment of tools that let you perform a
large variety of tasks. The tools can be thought of as falling
into five categories: Selection tools, which
specify or modify the portion of the image that will be affected
by subsequent actions; Paint tools, which
alter the colors in some part of the image; Transform
tools, which alter the geometry of the image;
Color tools, which alter the distribution of
colors across the entire image; and Other
tools, which don't fall into the other four categories.
(In case you're curious, in GIMP lingo a "tool" is a way of
acting on an image that requires access to its display, either
to let you indicate what you want to do by moving the pointer
around inside the display, or to show you interactively the
results of changes that you have made. But if you want to think
of a tool as a saw, and an image as a piece of wood, it probably
won't do you a great deal of harm.)
Most tools can be activated by clicking on an icon in the Toolbox.
Some, however (namely, the Color tools), are accessible only via
the menus, either as Tools->Color Tools or as
Layer->Colors. Every tool, in fact, can be
activated from the Tools menu; also, every
tool can be activated from the keyboard using an accelerator key.
In the default setup, created when GIMP is first installed, not
all tools show icons in the Toolbox: the Color tools are omitted.
You can customize the set of tools that are shown in the Toolbox
using the Tools dialog.
There are two reasons you might want to
do this: first, if you only rarely use a tool, it might be easier
to find the tools you want if the distracting icon is removed;
second, if you use the Color tools a lot, you might find it
convenient to have icons for them easily available. In any case,
regardless of the Toolbox, you can always access any tool at any
time using the menu from an image
menubar.
The shape of the cursor changes when it is inside an image,
to one that indicates which tool is active.
If you have things set up like most people do, activating a tool
causes its Tool Options dialog to appear below the
Toolbox. If you don't have things set up this way, you
probably should: it is very difficult to use tools effectively
without being able to manipulate their options.
![[Tip]](../images/tip.png)
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Tip |
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The Tool Options appear beneath the Toolbox in the default
setup. If you lose it somehow, you can get it back by creating
a new Tool Options dialog using File->Dialogs->Tool
Options, and then docking it below the Toolbox. See
the section on Dialogs and
Docking if you need help.
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Each tool has its own specific set of options. The choices you make
for them are kept throughout the session, until you change them. In
fact, the tool options are maintained from session to session. The
persistence of tool options across sessions can sometimes be an
annoying nuisance: a tool behaves very strangely, and you can't
figure out why until you remember that you were using some
unusual option the last time you worked with it, two weeks ago.
At the bottom of the Tool Options dialog appear four buttons:
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Save Options to.
This button allows you to save the settings for the current tool,
so that you can restore them later. It brings up a small dialog
allowing you to give a name to the array of saved options. When
you Restore options, only saved sets for the active tool are
shown, so you need not worry about including the name of the tool
when you assign a name here.
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Restore Options.
This button allows you to restore a previously saved set of
options for the active tool. If no option-sets have ever been
saved for the active tool, the button will be insensitive.
Otherwise, clicking it will bring up a menu showing the names of
all saved option sets: choosing a menu entry will apply those
settings.
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Delete Options.
This button allows you to delete a previously saved set of
options for the active tool. If no option-sets have ever been
saved for the active tool, the button will be insensitive.
Otherwise, clicking it will bring up a menu showing the names of
all saved option sets: choosing a menu entry will delete those
settings.
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Reset Options.
This button resets the options for the active tool to their
default values.
