Ah. Thanks for all the help with posting this.

Here is a link to the text if the image is not legible for anyone
http://www.amprosoft.com/info/learning/ ... PUsers.php

Thank you very much. The image link I am trying to post is

amprosoft
dot
com/info/learning/10Things-ForNewGIMPUsers.png

apologies for this relatively useless post. I am needing to get my post count to five.

I guess that this post did it.

I would definitely not recommend the color selection tool to new users. This tool and its brother the fuzzy selection tool are the source of about 1/3rd of the questions I see from beginners. Because it doesn't work like beginners (and some non-beginners) think it does. Even though they hardly know about partial selection they obviously expect a color selection on red in a red-to-pink gradient to produce a feathered selection, while the color selector will produce a sharp selection, stopping on some value of pink indirectly set by the threshold.

So IMHO the first thing beginners should be told about is Color-To-Alpha.

I was unaware of Color to Alpha. Thanks for the information.

I am so old-school that a absolute selection is what seems intuitive/expected to me. But you sound like you have a lot more interaction with new users than I do so I will give that some strong consideration if I update it.

amprosoft: a very instructive introduction to some of the gimp tools, very good for beginners.

i think this should be moved to the "essential gimp tutorials" section, as that's the section we always refer new users to.

ofnuts: i don't think any of the new users i've met have had any at all problems understanding the color select tool, but i know how much trouble i had with colour to alpha when i first came across it. what's easy or hard to grasp is different for different people and that's why we need all sorts of beginner tutorials, in different styles and with different focuses.

Over on GimpForums I have met quite a number... My sig over there has four links for the 4 most ignored things in Gimp (I got tired of re-explaing them each time)

- the profile location
- fuzzy select/color select vs Color-to-alpha
- the usefulness of XCF and the wonders of PNG
- using selection tools without stress

I just need to add one about image size in pixels and inches and I'll have all bases covered.

Ofnuts -=- I wish I had though to include some info on file types in there. That would have been more useful.

The 10th point is a bit odd to me, as the clone tool always did what I wanted him to do, which is correcting imperfections on texture (or extending texture parts).

And about those times spent on searching for a tool that seems absent, I have to confess that I spent like 3 years grumbling about the lack of fill with transparency tool, until the day I understood the potential of masks

In the spirit of Nigel Tufnel, I would add one more. "If you can't figure out how to do something you want to do, visit one of the many online GIMP communities and ask."

That's a good one.

I have even recently discovered you can go to gimp.org and even READ THE DOCUMENTATION! That one totally blew me away.

ofnuts: I went to GimpForums and read your article on "fuzzy select/color select vs Color-to-alpha". Now I realize that I have been causing some of my own jaggy edges by being careless with partially selected pixels. The manual makes mention of partially selected pixels in a number of places, but it didn't sink in until I read your write-up.
I assume the reason for the often-repeated advice "don't stroke the selection, stroke the path" is that partially selected pixels in a circle vary at different points on it's circumference, and the path tool "damps" the fluctionations.
Thanks very much for this information.

Never seen this advice anywhere... and on a selection that doesn't come from a path, I assume that stroking the selection, is, under the hood, making a path from the selection and then stroking it, so that wouldn't make a difference with a path explicitly obtained from the selection.

There is a lot of bad advice out there, not backed by any hard facts or logical explanations... Complex software such as Gimp(*) is the new territory of voodoo science.

Edt: Hmm... there is indeed a very visible difference between stroke path and stroke selection, but it has little to do with the shape... "stroke path" is anti-aliased (regardless of the "anti-aliasing" checkbox) while "stroke selection" isn't (also regardless of the "anti-aliasing" checkbox).

(*) I'll let you imagine how worse it gets for really complex stuff like web server or database software...

Interesting advice. I find select>float useful for quick corrections when I'm painting. The floating layer can be adjusted then anchored back to it's original layer and it is quicker than cutting and pasting.

ofnuts: I jumped to that conclusion because the stroked shape thins at 0, 90, 180 and 270-degrees on a circle, when you stroke selection. However, your explanation makes more sense. Thanks.

Thanks for your post!
I'm new to Gimp, but love it and your post is very usefull!