Learn GIMP (2021 Edition)
Brendon Schumacker · Artist and Designer
A decade-long GIMP user walks through every tool and menu, but the delivery is rambling and the pacing tests patience.
Learn GIMP (2021 Edition) sets out to do exactly what its title promises: walk a total beginner through the interface, tools, and menus of GIMP from a cold install to basic photo and illustration work. Brendon Schumacker, who says he has used the software for about a decade, structures the course as a long tool-by-tool tour rather than a project-based curriculum, and that structural choice defines both its strengths and its limits.
What the course actually covers
The early lessons are the most practical. Installation guidance includes a specific and still-relevant tip: if an older operating system has trouble with a modern GIMP release, drop back to version 2.6 rather than fighting the newer branch. The environment setup lesson is unusually thorough for a beginner course, covering the switch from the three-window layout to single-window mode, how to drag dialogs and docks back into place when they get pulled loose by accident, and the specific Preferences settings that matter: raising undo memory and tile cache size, and setting a default canvas size and resolution (300 pixels per inch for print work) so new files start configured correctly.
From there the course moves through selection tools, the brush and color tools, bucket fill and gradients, transform and crop, the path tool, and then a run through the top menu bar: Select, View, Image, and Layer. One genuinely useful insight surfaces in the shapes lesson: GIMP has no dedicated rectangle or ellipse drawing tool because it expects the user to make a selection and then apply Edit > Stroke Selection instead, a workflow difference from Photoshop that trips up newcomers if nobody explains it. The Image and Layer menu lesson clarifies a distinction that confuses many beginners, that canvas size and layer size are separate properties, using a hand-drawn example where extending the canvas leaves new layers blank until they are resized to match.
Where it earns its keep and where it drags
The photo editing demonstration late in the course, where a landscape shot gets corrected using a layer mask and a black-to-white gradient to blend a brightened foreground into a properly exposed sky, is the strongest single piece of teaching here. It shows a real workflow decision, why brightness adjustments alone would blow out the highlights, and how the mask fixes it without a flat global edit.
The Python-Fu scripting lesson near the end is a bonus that most beginner GIMP courses skip entirely, showing how to write a script, install it into the scripts folder, and drive layer operations from the console. It is a nice inclusion but arrives with almost no buildup, so it will mean the most to anyone who already codes.
The course's biggest weakness is pacing and editing. Lessons wander through personal asides, unscripted trial and error, and repeated tangents about interface preferences that do not generalize well to a viewer working on a different screen size or workflow. At 390 minutes across 20 topics, a beginner has to sit through a fair amount of loose narration to extract the concrete instruction. Anyone who wants a tightly produced reference will find the format frustrating, even though the underlying tool coverage is genuinely comprehensive.
The standout
The layer-mask-plus-gradient demonstration for blending two exposures of the same photo is the one technique worth the price of admission on its own.
What you will learn
- Installing GIMP and choosing between the 2.6 and 2.8 release lines
- Configuring single-window mode, undo memory, and tool visibility in Preferences
- Using selection tools (rectangle, ellipse, lasso, fuzzy select) to build shapes since GIMP has no dedicated shape tool
- Applying layer masks and gradients to blend exposure across a photo
- Writing and installing a Python-Fu script and driving GIMP through its Python console
- Distinguishing canvas size from layer size when resizing or extending an image
Best for: A total beginner to GIMP who wants a patient, tool-by-tool orientation and doesn't mind an informal, unscripted teaching style.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows basic image editing concepts, wants a tightly edited course, or needs polished finished-project walkthroughs rather than loose experimentation.