GIMP lesson 001 – Saving images
I mentioned I was going to try to learn GIMP, and I have a large set of tutorials to work through. Saving sounds like a pretty basic element to a photo editor, amiright? Yet the tutorial file I have for saving is 19 pages long. Wait, what?
Oh, riiiiight. It isn’t about simply saving. It’s about saving in the right formats and size optimization for different uses (websites, emails, graphic buttons, etc.). Okay, that makes more sense. 🙂 For now, I’ll stick to the basics and worry about optimization next time.
SAVE vs. SAVE AS
The first big “hint” is the importance of using SAVE AS rather than SAVE so that you don’t mess up your original picture. Instead, you can have multiple incremental versions as you go in case you need to go back (GRADUATION becomes GRADUATION-COPY, for example, or GRADUATION-ORIGINAL vs. GRADUATION-COPY 1, 2, 3). It keeps the original safe. This is a big issue with smaller editor programs that frequently save right back over the original without even a warning in some applications. You mean you DIDN’T want to erase that one and only copy of your wife, son and mother on her last birthday before she passed? Oops, sorry about that.
While it CAN be devastating to the uninitiated, I’m not sure that’s as big an issue for me. I’m more anal retentive and I tend to keep originals in a separate folder and copy everything I’m working on somewhere else. That way if I need to blow everything off and start fresh, I can simply delete a folder of working files and grab another copy of the originals. The only downside for me is to remember to save incremental versions at key steps. I’ve done previous editing of astro photos where I did a whole bunch of edits and then saved, before I realized that I liked steps 1-3 in the way that I did them, but maybe step 4 should have had a slightly different tweak to the settings before I did step 5, 6, and 7. If I saved sequential versions of the file (rather than just continuing to save over even my working copy), I could just delete everything after step 3 and jump back into my process. In an editor like GIMP, some of that is avoided as many “tweaks” or “changes” are actually done in layers. If you don’t like what you did on layer 3, fix it, and then go back to layer 7.
I confess I’m not a giant fan of GIMP’s interface for saving. My preference is almost always to simply give me the Windows File Explorer-type interface rather than something “unique”, but GIMP’s is a bit closer to other graphical interfaces that want to give you certain types of folders first to help you stick to a better photo-processing process and avoid glitches. However, in doing so, it makes it harder to just easily browse amongst your traditional folders. They do have a “recently used” option though, and that works well enough most of the time.
SAVE vs. EXPORT
Another part that doesn’t really excite me is that like many of the editors out there, GIMP assumes that when you are “saving” the file, you want to save it as a project file and, well, ONLY a project file. If you’re doing something really simple like cropping, you may not even need to save the project file, you can just make the edits and save it as a PICTURE.
However, the point of using an editor like GIMP is the power to do more complex stuff, and this is often accomplished using layers. In a project file, you might have three different “layers” in the image — a background layer, some image, and perhaps some text over top. When you SAVE it as a project file, it saves the file with all three layers kept separate within the file so if you want to edit later, you can just open it up, select a layer, and edit away (such as changing the text). If you save in JPEG, which doesn’t handle layers i.e., it is all just “one layer”, then when you open it up, you can’t edit a piece and regenerate, it’s already all merged. Put differently, the “picture” that was behind the text is GONE from the image, just the text shows up…the background overwritten by the image is also GONE from the file. If you went in and edited one piece, it would be like moving a jigsaw puzzle piece, there would be a gap after you moved it.
In other words, the layers in a project file are used to GENERATE an image, rather than being the actual image itself. Sort of like a recipe card for all the pieces you have, and if you tell it to MAKE A PICTURE, so to speak, it will. This makes sense, that’s the point of using a graphics editor with the power of GIMP or PhotoShop rather than something simplistic.
Yet you may not always want to save in project format. In any other application, say WORD, sure, you want to save in WORD format 95% of the time. But if you want to switch to saving a PDF, you just do a normal SAVE AS, change the file format, and bob’s your uncle, one new file format handled.
More sophisticated graphic editors want you to clearly understand these are really two totally different functions, not just one with a slightly different file format. So they separate PROJECT saving from IMAGE saving. As such, project files use SAVE / SAVE AS; image files require you to use EXPORT.
I find it interesting that the tutorial I have seems to suggest that SAVE AS will let me do both SAVE or EXPORT with a single interface, and that if I choose something that doesn’t support layers, it will prompt me to EXPORT instead of SAVE. I’m using a newer version of GIMP than the tutorial did, and that is NOT what is shown on my screen, they are clearly separate now. Too bad, as I’d prefer that flex. However, as I said, it IS a developer philosophy question, there’s no perfect right answer, and separating them DOES ensure you won’t lose all your work saving it in the wrong format. If you save it as the default project file, you can always generate the graphic file later; if you accidentally saved it as a graphic file, you couldn’t easily recreate the project file from it.
GIMP uses XCF as its default extension for a GIMP project file aka the photo you’re working on, although I’ll have to look to see if there are other project formats to save to, perhaps ones that would import better into other editors (like PhotoShop). That might be more of a script plugin, I don’t see it by default. It won’t matter much for me, other than in the opposite direction. There are some examples out there where people tell you how to accomplish something in PHOTOSHOP for example and provide a sample file to work with, but I might want to try to import it into GIMP instead. It’s unlikely I’ll go in the opposite direction since I don’t have PhotoShop and I’m unwilling to pay their subscription model.
Which is why I’m using GIMP in the first place. 🙂
What I learned today
I learned how to work GIMP’s file manager interface and to differentiate between SAVE for project files and EXPORT for all the graphical/image formats. Being able to process regular and astro photos seems a very long way away.
