There are some tools that I have never or rarely used since the times of making first steps in GIMP.
Don't use ink or pencil, measure tool only been used twice or thrice, practically found an excuse for not using healing tool or perspective clone tool. That's 5 tools off my toolbox area to make it slimmer!
Been wondering if GC members removed some of the tools too and which ones or keep Toolbox intact.

Tell me what tools you use the most and I'll tell you who you are in GIMP(?) Can we say that?

There are a few I rarely use but I can't think of any of them I'd want to delete. Just as soon as I got rid of one, I'd find a use for it.

I have never used the measure tool or ink or shear tool. I have used the rest and can't see why I would delete any of them. They certainly don't take up much room.

I use the sheer on drop shadows a lot in conjunction with lighting effects to simulate the light hitting the focal point at an angle. Helps to made it look more 3D. The Measure tool I certainly use a lot in complicated work where I am trying to find the center of a particular area. This is actually part of my Bat Switch tutorial I'm still working on.

The tools i don't use are the Ink, Clone,Zoom, Foreground Select, Scissors, Perspective Clone, Dodge & Burn (never did figure out how to use that one), the Healing tool, Crop tool, and I rarely use the Blur/Sharpen or Smudge tool unless I'm working on Photos. I guess I pretty much just stay with the basics.

I also deactivated some of them, these I found no usage for them:
scissors (the no undo made it too risky for me)
ink (don't remember what it does)
airbrush (don't remember what it does)
align (don't see the point)
measure (although I do need some measurements, I think I never got used to it, so deleted it)
zoom (I use CTRL+mouse and clone view)

And while I'm reading your choices, I was about to remove shear but..

I realize this topic could really bring something to the table (I mean outside simple matters of taste), I never thought about this usage for shear tool.


This is a pretty old tool (I've seen it included in 1993 painting apps) and it was a revolution at that time, it has probably become obsolete the moments the layer modes appear in our software. But I still found it difficult to use as the results does not match what I think it would do, for instance, I would think that burning should act more on colors but in fact it affects mainly value which is a bit confusing. Anyway I'm using it when I need to emphasize small areas with a 5~10px brush or do soft darkening on large surfaces with a large soft brush.

I like the burn tool for making shadows in places where the shadow tool is no use, and also on ends of boards and to darken areas. I use the dodge tool to make hi-lites across wood or wicker edges, I found it very handy for that.

Wow! I've just learned more tricks of the trade than I did in the last couple of months!
Thanks for sharing, guys!
Hope the comments keep coming.

anarkhya - I use the airbrush tool a lot with a fuzzy brush and really low settings to very lightly apply color to an area to blend or cover imperfections or just to paint in some faint color like when I'm making shadows or highlights in snow for instance. I use it to touch up photos all the time and it works great. Just try playing with it at a low setting and I bet you change your mind.

there are some tools i almost never use:
the ink tool and the cage transform

the measure tool i use a lot, doge/burn very little

also i hardly use the special selection tools (scissors, color, foreground)

my favorite tool is probably the move tool

and no, i never deleted any of the tools, because i feel my Gimp would be incomplete without them - there is always an occasion where you might need them

Yeah, I use the Move tool a lot as well. I use the Eraser tool even more, but my absolute all-time favorite is the Undo button! Couldn't live without it.

That's pretty convincing, airbrush now officially unbanned (:

I keep it all, and add more tools than the default amount if possible.

Of the select tools, I mostly use rectangle- and freehand select, followed by area- and colour select in equal measures. I guess scissors, foreground-select and path too is used the least among the select tools, mostly because I prefer to do such thing by hand.

Zooming and color picking is done by keyboard shortcuts, but especially the color picker has several useful tool settings that requires fast access from the tool box.

I used measure tool just recently - it's very convenient for aligning features of a face in straight lines without actually marking the line on the canvas. Same with measuring angles in a face. The align tool I know how to use, but since I rarely use with small enough layers (I usually paint on full-canvas sized layers), aligning layers is not really something I do much (this feels more like something for a vector program like Inkscape).

All the transform tools are important, not only for rotating features, but for shearing and adjusting perspectives, also as a preparation of textures for cloning.

All the painting tools are indispensible. The Pencil tool is indispensible for creating icons and pixel-level artwork. The paintbrush is my main paint tool together with the airbrush, which creates a fuzzier line for effects like smoke and ambient diffusion.

Ink is a very powerful ink pen simulator, far better than a real ink pen really. It creates a varied line with lots of life in it, it is excellent for both technical drawing and comic outline work (as well as signatures).

Clone is what I use for applying textures to plain surfaces, usually cloning off a second layer. I don't use the perspective clone tool these days, I never really understood the reationships it creates. Instead I usually just use the persepective transform to reshape the clone source as I like, and then clone from that, it makes for a much more persistent result I think.

Blur and smudge are important drawing tools in their own right, although it's easy to overdo smudging in particular (I usually work in very low tool opacity for all paint tools, smudge in particular I use with no more than 15% opacity for best control).

Dodge/Burn is an excellent tool for enhancing values in the image, especially for adding in-color highlights. I only use it on an image which is almost finished already (i.e. one where all colour variations and texture is already in place). Dodge/Burn can then give an extra vibrance to the colours. Especially sun-lit skin can take on a very realistic shine by careful use of the dodge.

I also used to add as many of the extra colour tools (curves, threshold, colorize etc) in the toolbox since these are very important to adjusting the final composition. Not sure if that is possible in 2.8, they are available from the tools->colors menu.

... It should be noted that most of the time I work in fullscreen with keyboard shortcuts only. But when I do choose to show the interface, I want as much information and options available with one-click as possible.
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Griatch

So we eventually have someone who uses it and explains its purposes, thanks !


How about your utilization of the blur ? I'm also curious about this one.

The tools I use the most would be all the select tools except the scissors, measure tool most of the transform tools but mainly rotate and flip, the bucket fill and paintbrush.

Used the ink tool once to produce a nice outline on some grungy text never really used all the clone,smear and burn tools.

If only there was an UNDO button for my life. And a REDO button.
And... a preview window where I could see the results of a series of my actions before I make my final decision.

I keep all tools in case one is needed. But so far... I have never used the Cage Transform tool.

I have tried to use cage transform tool several times...and failed.

Thank y'all for very valuable input!
I think it's been useful, indeed, to rethink the usability of some tools!




Sometimes I use CTT for text distortion. Making more sense than transforming objects.



Airbrush is a very delicate and useful tool - am using it a lot for touch-ups



Words of a true artist! Thank you very much for such a complete GIMP Tools personal usage overview!

The tools I use heavily are Select Tools, Blend, Brush, Bucket feel. Often use transform tools. Zooming, color pick and bunch of other actions I do, too, using shortcut keys (Blender school, lol) Dodge/burn and smudge tools are helpful on special occasions. Align tool I use a lot when I do animation within animation kind of stuff and have 50-60 layers of different sizes and need to move them around with more precision than the Move tool can provide.
I guess, nobody would argue the fact that undo action is the most indispensable feature.

If only I realized that when making those ridiculous 250 frames gifs, I need to investigate.

I never remove any options but there are some that tend to get "dusty" on there.
The PS CS6 tool I miss most when firing up the GIMP is the excellent quick selection feature, that combined with some usually minimal quickmask painting speeds things up considerably. Could have sworn I saw something out there for the GIMP that was attempting to emulate it but I do not have it if it does exist.
My other challenge so to speak is keeping keyboard shortcuts straight between the Adobe and Opensource option, they are similar and very close in some instances but there are enough differences to make me pause and think at times.
Two examples: quickmask is q in one and shift+q in the other
and paintbrush is "b" in PS and "p" in GIMP.
another tool I do not use so often but find beyond useful when I do is the content aware feature, saves you loads of time removing things that are often quite cumbersome with other methods in either program.

Foreground select tool in GIMP is supposed to do exactly that, although, I never find it too precise. I have used the similar tool in other standalone applications but the results are about the same, and PS CS6 is not quite outstanding at this also. In the end it always comes down to techniques and good hand/eye.


You can change k/b shortcuts in GIMP to replicate those in PS or whatever s/c you got used to. I use dynamic shortcuts a lot for particular projects, where I can change them on the fly.


There is a resynthesizer plugin for GIMP with heal selection script similar to PS content aware feature, quite sophisticated and heavily used by many.