Hello and welcome to this video series on the Gimp! And on this segment of the videos, we are going to be touching base a little bit on the user interface, or the main window, or the toolbox. So let's go ahead and jump up into this and open up our software. On mine, I have the GIMP Tip of the Day pop-up and if you didn't want this on yours then all you have to do is untick this box here and it won't show up anymore. One thing I want to point out is this box-looking thing here that contains all the tools, it's called the Toolbox.

And we're on the main window. One thing I want to point out is that whenever you first install the GIMP on your PC, a lot of times this bottom box down here or dock is empty. And what I do and what most folks do is they put their tool options down here so instead of having to double-click on each one of these tools and pop and open a box up here which they call the dialogs for each tool that you want to check in to. Then you just dock them right here below and it saves desktop space and a little more user-friendly too.

Now for some reason, the version of Camtasia that I'm working with now and this version of GIMP I don't want to see eye to  eye. So I cannot really show you how to do this because it just doesn't work. But if you were to do this on your pc, then you would see what I’m talking about. Actually, there's a lot of different ways to do this.

What you have to do is go to file, then go to dialogs, and up here to Tool Options  and it will open up a  box up to the side here. This box or dialog would say tool options up here. What you do is as you see how my mouse changed from pointer to a hand, you left-click on your mouse, hold it down, and then drag this over to this dock in this empty box here. Now you would have this as I do now.

So that's just one way you can get this in here and it just saves your desktop space without having to have this dialogs all over the place. Now, one thing I want to point out is you can have that dialogue here. You can have this one dialog or dock with several different dialogs up here on the top. By the way, this is another way where you can add to your particular dock and station here. You got a little arrow here, go to add tab, and it shows all the different dialog possibilities here. So see if I can add layers to this. There we go. So it does work. So we've got the channels, dialog, we've got the layers dialog, and you can just keep on adding if you'd like. I like undo history because this way if I make mistake, which I’m prone to do from time to time, then you just click on this tab and it takes you back a step. So if you make several mistakes, then you just go back until it goes to the part of your project that there's no longer a mistake and then you just start from scratch at that point on.

And another thing too is that this little space right in here below these boxes and above this line, if you're to take one of these tabs here like I cannot do this. I’ll just drag this tab down here then this little section down here would light up and you would have another box. It's just a matter of keeping your desktop somewhat uncluttered so you can work within. Like for example, this is how I do it. I would have just my project, my header, or my eBook cover in amongst in between these two dialogs or docks and do my work here. Whatever palette is up here that I’m currently working on is what this would we referring to. For example, let me go and open up one here. As you can see, this one is working on this guy right here. And if I do another one, it is now working with this one.

So whatever is in the forefront or whatever palettes I’m working on at that time, this is going to show up here. So I’ll click on this and you can see it's this guy here become this. And you see this guy here. So you can have multiple projects going on at the same time. Like for example this is your header, this is your eBook cover, or your footer. It's definitely possible to do that. But I’m kind of getting off topic. I'll cover a little bit more of the functionality of the program in a later video. Well, for the time being I just want to point out some of the functions of the dialog, the palette, and the docks. Thanks a lot for watching this video and have a great day!