logo - gimp

There's a great site for a tutorial, but the steps are a little vague. Here's how I did it.

1. Made some garbage logo and saved it as a png
2. Duplicated the layer
      Layer > Duplicate Layer
3. Opened the stack viewer so I could move layers up and down
      Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers
4. Highlighted the duplicate in the stack, ran a Gaussian blur about "5"
      Filters > Blur > Gaussian
5. Made a new layer, colored white
      Layer > New Layer > (check white)
6. Put a vertical gradient on the new layer (white to blue looks cool)
7. In the stack viewer, moved the blue layer to top, above the blurred Gaussian.
8. Bumpmapped the blurred layer into the blue layer
      Filters > Map > Bump map
9. With these three layers, slide them around and change their opacity until desired dropshadow appears in the picture, then merge down and flatten.

bucket fill

I've seen again and again (annoying) where Bucket Fill does nothing in a PNG. Nine times out of 10, it comes down to the thing described on this post.

othergimp problems

Over the past 20 years, one of the most frustrating things about GimP, or whatever is capitalized, is its docking docks or tabbing tabs, what GIMP calls "dialogs". They disappear, change configuration, reappear, and so forth. It's as bad as Blender -- useful, but so unintuitive that you basically have to learn Python and rebuild it yourself. What was the point of ever calling it an application: it should be called "Annoyance to make you learn Python called GIMP."

tool options

"Tool options" is easy to close or, impossibly, "undock", either of which lends it to being useless. Further, the tools which are modifiable change with each release -- their icons, their availability, and so on. It's truly a mental health issue when experienced over years at a time. It typically resides in the upper left window, as seen here.

First, dragging the tool options. If you look in the picture below, you can see the circled item in there. Impossibly, this is the handle used to drag the dock or reattach it to the icons above it. "Reattach", because the tool options can become detached from the tools themselves! The icons above the tool options are the tools. Between medication dosages, slide the tool options bar using the circled tab.

tool icons

The tool icons are above the circled tab. These are the available tools, by icon, though they can also be found less conveniently via the drop-down menus above them, "File", "Edit", "Select", "View", etc. In 2020, half of these icons disappeared, apparently because they were suddenly "grouped". See the video below for a fix.

Fix Icons (4:19) MrGizmo757, 2020. What to click inside Preferences to set it back. Fix starts at 2:00

preferences

"Edit" -> "Preferences" provides this box.