Seattle GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) Tutorial December 2026

Joe Mabel will give a hands-on workshop on GIMP . The workshop is free and open to all. Primarily directed to Wikimedia Commons editors.

Details and images at Seattle GIMP Tutorial December 2026

Joe Mabel (User:Jmabel) will give a hands-on workshop on the GIMP tool Saturday, December 5, 1:00pm – 5:00pm, at the Beacon Hill Branch Library, Seattle, Washington. The workshop is free and, while the primary audience is people who wish to learn about using GIMP as a photo editing tool in support of their work on Wikimedia Commons, it is open to all. I strongly recommend that participants each bring a laptop computer with GIMP installed. You will want the latest stable version (GIMP 3.2.8 as of about a month ahead of the workshop) and may also want to install GIMP 2.10.36; each of these two versions has some advantage over the other. (The UI differences are small.) Obviously, the laptop should have enough memory and processing power to be a reasonable machine for graphics. I also strongly recommend a mouse, because graphics work usually requires more precision than most of us can manage with a laptop touchpad. Please, if you are basically a beginner with GIMP, try to arrive relatively promptly at 1:00pm. (If you are an experienced GIMP user and just looking for some help with some particular advanced features, feel free to drop by any time that afternoon.)

What is GIMP? Link to English-language Wikipedia article The GNU Image Manipulation Program, almost always referred to simply as GIMP is a free, open-source program for photo retouching, image editing, free-hand drawing, and converting between image file formats. Its capabilities are comparable to those of Photoshop, although it does not have some of the more recent Photoshop features, especially the AI-based ones. It is available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. Why GIMP? It’s free, it does the job, and once you put in a relatively small amount of time learning it, it is very powerful. The caveats GIMP is massive, but don't let that worry you. You really do not need to learn more than about 10% of it to use it very effectively. The UI is a bit idiosyncratic, but it’s pretty internally consistent. It crashes more than it should, but from what I can tell usually while it is open but you are not currently using it. I've generally found it stable enough to be an effective tool. Some of the tools are probably too customizable, and it doesn’t seem to be consistent about saving settings from one session to another; this has been somewhat fixed in version 3. Scenarios Because this is primarily for Commons users I plan, in particular, to teach you enough to handle the following scenarios: How best to photographs art in a museum, including dealing with lighting issues and viewing angle issues beyond your control. How to post-process to optimize a photograph taken in less than ideal light, or where you discover you made poor color balance choices. Using Gaussian blurs or other…