GIMP tutorial Really basic photo editing with GIM

Matt McIrvin has a nice GIMP tutorial titled Really basic photo editing with GIM

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People have been asking me for pointers about how to improve photos from their digital cameras. I don't claim to be an expert at photography or at image editing, but I do know a few basics, so I decided to write a tutorial on the most elementary techniques.

I'll use The GIMP 2 (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as my example program. (Don't complain to me about the name; I didn't invent it.) This is an image editor along the lines of Photoshop, only free. You can do all of the same things I'll talk about here in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, in more or less the same ways, but the tools might be accessed through different menus.

GIMP's own help documentation is extremely spare. The basic photo-editing tutorials that are out there are often pretty good, but tend to be several years old and based on older versions (GIMP 2 largely rearranged the user interface, and "where do I find this tool?" is a question I get a lot, so they won't do). The tutorials on the GIMP Web site tend to be about advanced techniques. So I saw a need for an introduction I could give to friends and family.

I won't talk about anything at all fancy here: nothing about layers or selections. I also won't talk about special effects or how to create original artwork. GIMP has so many controls that it can be confusing, and most of them are of little interest to someone who just wants to make a photo look a little better, or prepare it for Web or e-mail use, without much effort. That's what I'm going to concentrate on.

I'm also going to assume that you already have the program installed, and you know how to launch it and use the Open dialog to open a picture file.

Note also that the program itself is a work in progress, and your dialogs may well look somewhat different from the ones I show here. The same controls should be pres
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Thanks to Matt for writing this.