A walk-the-walk learning experience.

TL;DR

• I decided to install GIMP to edit my screenshots
• I learned how to grey out parts of an image in GIMP

Why GIMP?

A fresh start

Starting a new job comes with a ton of excitement, this weird phenomenon of confidence and staggering insecurity at the exact same time, and freshness. Like, the kind of freshness you feel when moving into a new home; all of your things are in boxes, some got lost in the move, and your roommate accidentally sold your favorite mug at the yard sale. A fresh start, with all the enthusiasm and inconvenience that comes with it.

So I may not have access to some of the resources and programs I did at my previous institution— some proprietary resources, specifically… *cough* the Adobe suite *cough*…— and while I could get access if I wanted, I’m choosing to take this fresh-start opportunity to explore alternative, opensource applications. I mean, that’s part of the fun, right? I work with this awesome team that’s excited about homegrown open resources and values that learning process and experience; I’d be missing out if I didn’t dive right in with a support system like this.

All this to say, I was asked to update some internal documentation this week, which primarily involved taking new screenshots to align with one of our system’s updated style. I wanted to closely emulate the original screenshots to avoid any potential confusion when folks review the document, and those screenshots were ~fancy~ in that the important part of them was in a neat little box while the irrelevant parts of the shot were greyed out.

via GIPHY

It’s the little things.

Now, if there is an easier way to do this, DON’T TELL ME. This is what I came up with and I’m stickin’ to it.

Changing my mindset

While I typically just mark up screenshots using Preview, this “greying out” challenge triggered my instinct to spin up Photoshop. But… I don’t currently have Photoshop. Fresh start.

Then I remembered an opensource program a former student of mine recommended with a name I wasn’t crazy about. (This student was a lot cooler than me btw and used all sorts of open software… he was a Brave diehard, sommelier of Linux distros, the whole 9.) Perfect.

Installing GIMP

There are a couple of ways to install GIMP depending on your OS. I’m just going to cover how to do it on Mac and Windows¹… if you’re doing it on Linux you’ve probably already done it by now, and you’re probably bored. (If you want to learn the really cool stuff get on over to my colleagues Chris Blankenship, Taylor Jadin, and pretty much anyone at Reclaim‘s blogs.)

macOS

For macOS, you can either

1. download the DMG file or
2. install via Homebrew with brew tap homebrew/cask && brew install --cask gimp

I’m a big fan of Homebrew; it makes installing the entire package and dependencies really easy and quick. And, you know, beer puns.

Windows

For Windows, GIMP is available on the Microsoft Store or an executable file.

Greying out part of an image in GIMP

Once you have GIMP installed, open it up and let’s get started.

1. Drag the screenshot you’re working with into the application.
2. Click the “New Layer” button in the lower left-hand corner of the Layer tab to the right of the GIMP window.
3. Arrange the new layer to be first in the layer order in that tab.
4. In this new layer, click on the “Bucket Fill Tool” , set the active foreground color to a dark shade, and click into it in the image viewer to fill.
5. In the Layer tab, adjust this layer’s “Opacity” using the drag-bar at the top of the tab until you’ve reached the greyed-out level you prefer.
   
6. Click back into the screenshot you initially uploaded and right click to select “Duplicate Layer.”
   
7. Move this third layer to the top of the Layer tab, now above the dark-filled layer.
8. While in this third layer, click the “Crop Tool” and drag the crop box over the area of the screenshot you’d like to have highlighted.
9. Once desired area is selected, press “Enter” for the remainder of the image to be cut.

Voila!

Is this overkill for making a basic, greyed out screenshot? Probably. Did I learn a lot about how to work in GIMP? Absolutely. Hope you did too!