This lecture will help you get off on the right foot and hopefully will answer questions about the best way to use this course.

No matter which imaging program you are using, always make sure to adjust your levels. In some programs it's called adjusting the tone, value, or gain. It's the values in your image and it's crucial for ensuring your images are as crisp and vibrant as possible. Images that don't have levels adjusted often look muddy, blah, and amateurish.

This lecture will give you a quick rundown and heads up on a very important concept and feature that you will find in almost all imaging programs: Layers. In a nutshell, they are like little transparent acetate sheets where you can draw and then stack over and/or under your main background layer. There are many benefits to using layers. Learn
more in this lesson.

Learn some essential features you can use to create multiple variations of the same image. Brightness, Contrast, Hue, and Saturation control the lightness and darkness of your image, whether it's black and white or trumped-up technicolor, as well as some cool tinting effects.

In this lesson I'll show you how to scale, rotate, flip, and transform individual layers as well as your entire image if it only has one layer. Please note that actual full image resizes (dimensions, resolution, as well as file size) is covered in the NEXT lesson.

Being able to resize, reformat, crop, and adjust file sizes for your images is a MUST HAVE skill that will free you from waiting around for others to do it for you for a fee. Many websites require images that are under a certain physical size, dimension, or file size. Learn once and for all how to do it yourself quickly, easily, and painlessly.

In this lecture I'll show you a quick and easy way to drop out your background using free online tools. Check also the resources for the links.

In a perfect world, people wouldn't care about a little blemish or demonic glowing eyes in a photo. But if you'd like to present your subjects in a professional, flawless way, here are a few essential tools that will help you out.

In this lesson, I'll show you how to whiten a smile and how to apply lipstick, makeup, or other enhancing painting techniques you may wish to add. You can also use these same techniques to tint your background, some clothing, skin tones, etc.

Secret agents, take note. If you need to blur your face out in a photo or the face of someone else, you need this lesson. You can also use these techniques for blurring out backgrounds or logos.

You have the PERFECT image... except for that one annoying thing in the background (a hand, a person, a sign, a fly on the wall, whatever...) Let me show you some tools you can use to make your image the masterpiece it deserves to be.

Don't stop at editing images in Gimp. Have a look at some of my favorite FREE and intuitive tools that will have you making social media graphics, web sites, animations, and more. Get a taste of what is possible in under 10 minutes and be up and running ASAP. [This lecture comes from my full course, Skyrocket Your Creativity: 7 Easy Ways.]

In this extra lesson, I'll show you a quick and easy free tool made by the Adobe Photoshop people that will allow you to fix and enhance your web images for free. Use this tool to brighten images, increase contrast, crop, adjust, and more.

This lecture will show you where to go to add more functionality to GIMP and get it to do more for you.

This is a lesson from my new social media course, Skyrocket Your Social Media Impact: For Artists & Idealists. I'll explain how you can and cannot use images online.

I like to practice what I preach. Here are all the Flickr Creative Commons images I used in this course along with titles, authors, and attribution licences.

I'm so happy that you took this course. Thank you for visiting my online classroom. Please don't be a stranger and I hope to see you again soon.

Students will learn more about my other courses, services, staying in touch, and more.