http://youtu.be/gyS3uCClmrA
Hello and welcome to this video on the GIMP. Now in this video, I wanna go over with you a little bit on how to save your images once you’ve done all your editing and got all your docs in a row. So first off, normally you’d think, “well you go over here to file and oh wait a minute… okay… so it’s not gonna be there.” Wrong file. You wanna go to the File in the menu of the image you’re gonna be saving. So you’re almost right. Click on File here. Now we’ve got a few choices here. Actually, there are so about five of them. And if you were to click the Save function, then if you’ve already saved this image once and given it a name and so on, then by clicking on Save again it’s going to overwrite that original image file.
So you wanna make sure you’re doing this right. Otherwise, if say, you aren’t really sure then you wanna go to Save As. That way it will give you the opportunity to save it in a different location or to just confirm in your mind where it was originally saved at. So in case the original one was one that you didn’t want to overwrite then you definitely wanna do the Save As. Because if you have not saved this in the past, given this a name, and so on, then by clicking on Save it will bring up the same dialog as if it were being Saved As. For example.. And since I’ve already saved this once, you can see up here this gives it a name. Otherwise, perhaps say something like untitled or unnamed. Let’s go ahead and do the Save As. And this is a little bit different than your typical Windows save window. It gives a lot of different options here.
First of them, obviously the name. You wanna give it a name. And as you can see right here we’ve got a name for it already and it’s in a .psd or Photoshop extension. Let’s go ahead and give this a name of IMSoftwareBoxCover. And we’re gonna save it in the images folder or you can kinda do some browsing there. Of course, you kinda limit it a little bit. You can click on this or you can go here and hit this plus sign for “Browse for other folders”. It drops down and gives you a lot more options to pick and choose from. And this is probably the best way I would do it is I would just click on this and then click on Save. Then it should open up the next time in this format rather than in the close format as it was originally. So here we can just click on where we want to have the image saved, and then here is the folder, and then here is the preview.
So you can kinda see here. It will give you a preview over here of what the item is that you’re looking at of course to where you gonna be saving. Let me cancel this out real quick here. And back here, Save As… You can see how it opens up again in this format. Now this is the name we’ve got but up here we don’t wanna name this a .psd or for that matter even overwrite the existing files. So let’s go ahead and change this again like I had it a second ago. SoftwareBoxCover. And we don’t have any extension on there just yet. You can do that down here. Oh, and of course, you can create a new folder if you wanted to. This gives you a bit of a path for the location of this image. You’re gonna be saving that right here. So let’s go ahead and hit this plus sign to select file type by extension. As you can see it gives you a whole bunch of options to choose from here.
Now the main ones you wanna consider in working with the most of the internet marketing or webpage style images would be the .JPEG or the .JPG, the .GIF, or the .XCF which is kinda like a .PSD or Photoshop only the GIMP version. Then that would be another one would be the .PSD or Photoshop. And the only other extension that I would consider here would be the .PNG which is pretty close to being the same as the .GIF only the .PNG tends to have a little bit better luck with the compression. It just tends to work a little bit better in some cases than the .GIF but they are so minute that you can probably get away using the .GIF without any hassles. So the three biggies are gonna be the .JPEG, .JPG, the .GIF, and the .XCF. Those are the ones we’re gonna be working with more times than not. And you can see right here the extensions, and here are the file types here, and just kinda go on through here. You can see there’s quite a few options you can use to play with here. But here’s a .JPEG, the .PNG, the .PSD, the .GIF, and the .XCF. Now the .XCF again is similar to that of the .PSD where this allows you to save all the layers intact and the original uncompressed image. So naturally, this is gonna be a larger file. So if you’ve got somebody that’s gonna be downloaded in this, you’re gonna be uploading this, this is gonna be a lot larger file size. It’ll take a little bit longer in uploading and downloading than the .GIF or the .JPG.
Now the .JPG, the .JPEG is much better suited for things like pictures, photos, gradients. You know, things with lots of colors whereas the .GIF and the .PNG are more suited towards the lone number of colors. Ideally, those with like transparencies. In other words, those that do not have a background. And also one of the cool things about .GIF is you can create animations with it too. And we’ll go on with that in a different video. Anyway, those are the basics behind saving your images and whenever you click on this down here you can see up here where it automatically assigns an extension. So let’s go ahead and do this. Given an extension of .XCF, the GIMP version of Photoshop, and then we’ll click on Save. I’m gonna show you something about the .JPG. It’s pretty cool. So I’m gonna give it a .JPG extension. Click on Save.
It’s gonna give you this because I’ve got it into layers ’til we haven’t compress all those as you can see here. It’s still all these layers here so it won’t save it with all those layers like that so it’s asking us if we wanna take care of that and we just go ahead and say yes. And we do that by clicking on Export. Now this is a cool part here. If you show preview in image window then you can kinda see it based on the quality. Now just check out the original size where we at right now. We can up this size a whole bunch. Well almost double in size but you really can’t see that much more of a difference in the quality. So that’s one thing too you wanna use this slider bar here for is to save this space or the file size.
So if you take this all the way down to four or seven you can see how the quality degrades a great deal there. If you’re saving quite a few kilobytes but do you want the quality to reflect that? I’ll leave that up to you. Right there is right about where it was and it looks fairly decent. So that’s what I would do. Again, something as far as the .JPEG this is an additional option that you can play around with where you can kinda compress it even more so long as you do not notice any major degradation in the quality of the image you’re saving. So that being said, that’s pretty much a quick rundown on how to save your images using the GIMP. Thank you much for watching!
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