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Introducing Gimp Layers with Will "RMS" Smith

David A. Harding
Thursday, 10 Jan 2008

The GIMP's layers let you edit the third dimension, depth, in a two-dimensional picture. In Grade School, you probably managed layers by cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them on top of each other. GIMP (Gimp) works the same way, but you get a few extra features:

  1. You can resize (scale) layers. You can put a big head on a small body, and then resize one of them to fit the other.
  2. You can adjust the opacity of a layer to let the layers beneath it shine through.
  3. There's no glue moment—no stressful moment of commitment. You can always move a layer again or press undo.

Compared to Grade School layering, Gimp has one disadvantage:

  1. There's no rubber cement to huff.1

If I gave you the poster from the iRobot movie [1], a picture of Richard Stallman from Wikipedia [2], scissors, and some rubber cement, you could almost duplicate the following image [3] in three minutes. (Click on any following image to see it in full-size without the number shadowing.)

iRobot Movie Poster Picture of Richard M. Stallman from his Wikipedia Entry Picture of RMS's head on Will Smith's body

What you can't easily duplicate with scissors and glue is renaming Will Smith to Will ``RMS'' Smith. Like pre-washing vegetables in a Rachael Ray cooking show, I'm going to pretend I already filled in the Will in Will Smith's name [1], blurred the edges of the letters [2], added the text Will RMS [3], and removed the background from Stallman's portrait [4]. I'll explain how to do those things in a later blog; they have nothing to do with layers.

The letters in Will filled in with background colour The border of the letters in Will blurred out The names Will RMS added where Will was on iRobot poster Picture of Stallman without background

Now that the vegetables are washed, we can recreate the poster above in Gimp. It'll take less than three minutes, and you won't need any glue.

In the window containing the modified iRobot poster, I select Open As Layer from the File menu [1]; an Open File dialogue box appears [2], and I re-open Stallman's portrait, which becomes the top layer. When both pictures are displayed at the same scale, Richard Stallman's head is overlarge [3].

In Gimp, File->Open as Layer The Open File Dialogue window Richard Stallman's big head superimposed on Will Smith's Body

Not in 25 years has anyone at the Free Software Foundation done anything about Richard Stallman's big head—but we can: on the Gimp toolbar, click the scale button [1], click on Stallman's head, move the dialogue box that appears [2] out of the way, and click (and hold) onto one of the four dialogue boxes that appears around Stallman's head [3].

On the Gimp toolbar, the Scale Button The scale window The box that appears around the object to be scaled

If you drag the mouse inwards towards Stallman's nose [1], his head will shrink [2]. Keep dragging inward until Stallman's head is slightly larger than Will Smith's head. Keeping Stallman's head slightly oversized makes it easy to completely cover Smith's head with Stallman's head, and I think it helps preserve a sense of universal order: MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant Fellows should have bigger heads than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Arrows demonstrating draggin handles on scale box inwards Showing the head to scale

Select the move tool [1], click Stallman's head, and drag it over Smith's head [2]. Note that Smith's head is on an angle and Stallman's isn't. We should fix that.

On the Gimp toolbar, the Move button Showing the Stallman's head moved atop Smith's head

To match the angle of the two heads, we need to see both of them. select Layers in the Dialogue menu [1] to make the layers dialogue [2] appear. The layers dialogue has two items: Background is the iRobot Poster and the highlighted layer is Stallman's head. Drag the opacity slider [3] left until you can see both Stallman's and Smith's eyes [4].

Dialogues->Layers The Layers dialogue The Opacity slider Stallman's head after opacity reduced to 64%

Use the move tool again to align Stallman's and Smith's right eyes [1]. To match their left eyes, click on the rotate tool [2], click on Stallman's head, click on one of the four handles that appears [3], and rotate it clockwise until Stallman's left eye is aligned with Smith's left eye [4].

Showing Stallman and Smith's right eyes aligned On the Gimp toolbar, the Rotate button The rotational handles Showing Stallman and Smith's left eyes aligned

In the layers dialogue, drag the opacity slider right to 100% [1]. In the image window, save the finished image as iRMS.png. Now write a review of the iRobot movie, add iRMS.png, and post it to your blog [2].

Showing the opacity slider at 100% A picture of the irobot entry on my blog

[Ad: This blog is part 2 of 11 blogs about Gimp for my presentation at the Cherry Hill (NJ, USA) LUG on Friday, 1 February 2007. If you're in the area, consider attending for a live demonstration of this material plus my usual wacky hijinks]

Footnote
  1. The tools of art, like paint and glue, were often toxic until about 100 years ago; making art was a health risk, and at particular risk was your mental health. Near the end of their lives, many great masters were crazy, and it is the masters' later works we most venerate.

    Now that the tools of art don't (physiologically) make artists crazy, I wonder if the time of great masters has passed. Or, maybe, art schools will only admit people with mental disease.

    This footnote is a disclaimer: don't huff rubber cement—you might get admited to art school.

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Copyright 2008 by David A. Harding.
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