Herself’s Webtools

There are two tools in Gimp for outlining and selecting things by shape, scissors and the path drawing pen.

If you click on the intelligent scissors and place the mouse over you image the mouse will look like a pair of scissors. Click on the edge of what you wish to cut out from the image. Continue around the edge of the selection making mouse clicks as needed to outline your selection. A dot appears at each click. Continue around until you return to your first dot. You now have several straight lines with dots surrounding your selection. Click inside of your area and the lines and dots will convert to the dotted outline Gimp uses to show a selected area. Now you can cut, copy or otherwise use your selection. If you select the antialiasing and feather images options the edges of your selection will better blend if you are moving a copy of this selection to another image. The scissors are intended to be smart and try to closely follow the outline of your object in better detail than you select. Usually this works well.

Next to your scissors is a tool that looks like an old fashioned ink pen. You can then choose design/edit/move modes. Same as with the scissors click on the edges of the area you wish to select. Dots appear where you click and straight lines connect the dots. When you have your rough outline in place you can move the lines. Put the mouse over any of the dots and drag the dot to move your line.

When you have surrounded the area you wish to select click the ‘Create selection from path’ button that is on the Gimp tool box. This time your selection again changes to a dotted line but the dots where you clicked the mouse remain. Now you can select ‘edit’ mode and click on a dot and drag and a handle appears. Click again on the same dot and a second handle appears. Moving these handles now moves your lines in curves not straight lines. Clicking ‘Create selection from path moves the old line to the new one. You can now move/edit/cut/copy or do anything else you wish to the selected area.

To clear a selected area go to your menu in you image. Click ‘Select’->’None’.

You Tube tutorial, layering with Gimp