This tool allows you to adjust both the brightness/contrast of your image and the colors of your image. The first photo editing tool I like to use is the Levels tool. I’ll click the “Open” button to open the image into GIMP. Clicking the file will bring up a preview of the image on the right-hand side of the Open Image dialogue.

Here, I can click on the JPEG image I want to open (red arrow in the image above).

In my case, I went to my E: drive, then navigated to the “Photography” folder, and finally the “Photo Editing Tutorial Article” folder. Once you select a hard drive, you can then double click on folders to enter those folders until you have located your image. Use the “Places” section (highlighted in green in the image above) to select from any hard drive from your computer, including external hard drives. This will bring up your “Open Image” dialogue, which you can use to browse your computer for the location of the image you’d like to edit. To open your photo, go to File>Open (shown in the image above). The most common filetype used in GIMP is the JPEG – so I recommend using that (especially if it is coming straight from your camera). You’ll want to start by opening your photo into GIMP. In the end, you’ll be able to create photo edits you enjoy and that look professional! The longer you work on crafting your style and understanding how GIMP’s tools work, the better you’ll get at this.

Since everyone has different tastes when it comes to the settings of your tools, I won’t get too much into which exact values you should use for each tool discussed here, but I’ll provide some general insight into why you use a tool and how to use it. It starts with opening a photo and ends with exporting it to whatever filetype you want. That’s why in this tutorial I’ve decided to show you a simple photo editing process for beginners. GIMP is first and foremost a photo editor – it can do many things beyond simple photo editing, but it was built to help everyday people get the best out of their photography.

Export darktable to gimp