Panes

Layers, colours, tool settings and everything else that sits around the canvas live in panes. Panes are tabs in docks at the sides of the window. You can rearrange them, stack them, float them, and save the arrangement.

Docking

• Reorder tabs by dragging a tab along its tab bar.
• Stack a pane above or below another group by dropping its tab on the top or bottom quarter of that group.
• Float a pane by dropping its tab outside the docks. A tab's menu (right-click) also has Detach into Floating Panel, Dock Left, Dock Right and Close.
• Show any pane from Window ▸ Panes.
• Workspaces: Window ▸ Workspaces saves the current arrangement under a name and recalls it, and offers ready-made ones: Default, Painting, Retouching and Vector. Window ▸ Reset to Default Layout puts the current persona's panes back as they were.

Each persona has its own arrangement; see Personas.

1. Layers

The Layers pane shows the document's layers as a tree, top of the stack first.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Layers                                        │
│ Mode: Normal ▾      Opacity: 100 %            │
│ [Lock Pixels] [Lock Alpha Channel] [Lock Pos] │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 👁 ▾ Vector Layer                             │
│ 👁     Star                                   │
│ 👁     Rectangle  ◐ mask                      │
│ 👁 ▸ Clip group                               │
│ 👁   Background                               │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

• The header applies to the selected layers: the Mode, the Opacity, and the locks Lock Pixels, Lock Alpha Channel and Lock Position.
• Modes are GIMP's: Normal, Dissolve, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, Addition, Subtract, Hue, Saturation, Color, Value, Grain Extract and Grain Merge.
• Each row has the eye for visibility, a thumbnail (and the mask's, if it has one), the name, and a symbol for the kind of layer: vector layer, shape, live shape, compound, symbol instance, fill layer, placed image, reference layer, clip group, artboard, text, link or adjustment layer.
• Double-click a name to rename the layer. On a vector shape, double-click opens its fill and stroke settings.
• Layer effects show as rows under their layer. Double-click one to edit it.
• Buttons at the bottom make a new layer, group or adjustment layer, raise and lower, duplicate, merge down, add or apply a layer mask, and delete.

Dragging layers

• Drop between rows to move a layer, or onto a group to put it inside.
• Drop on a layer's thumbnail to make the dragged layer its mask.
• Drop on a layer's name to clip the dragged layers to it.

Vector and SF Symbols explains masks and clipping, and the rules for vector layers.

2. Layer Effects and Layer Styles

The Effects pane (Window ▸ Panes ▸ Layer Effects) lists the non-destructive effects on the active layer. Its Add Effect menu adds one, and you can turn each one on or off, reorder, edit, bake into the layer, or delete them.

Most filters can become effects. In a filter's dialog, turn on Keep editable and the filter is added to the layer as an effect instead of changing its pixels. Ready-made effects include drop shadow, inner shadow, outer glow, stroke and bevel and emboss. Layer ▸ Effects copies, pastes, clears and bakes all of a layer's effects.

The Styles pane (Window ▸ Panes ▸ Layer Styles) holds saved sets of effects. Apply one to a layer, or save the layer's effects as a new style with Layer ▸ Effects ▸ Save as Layer Style….

Layer ▸ New Adjustment Layer adds an adjustment (Curves, Levels, Brightness-Contrast and others) as a layer of its own, which changes the layers beneath it.

3. Channels, Paths and Selections

Channels

Shows the image's colour channels and alpha, each with visibility and a lock against painting. Saved selections are kept here as channels. Buttons make, duplicate and delete channels, and turn a channel into a selection (replacing, adding, subtracting or intersecting).

Paths

GIMP's paths, in the Raster persona. Stroke Path… paints along a path with a line or the current brush, Fill Path… fills it, and Path to Selection turns it into a selection. The pane also imports and exports paths and combines, offsets and simplifies them. In the Vector persona, curves are shapes in the Layers pane instead.

Selection Editor

Shows the selection as a mask, with commands to change it. Selection to Path turns it into a path; ⌥-click it for Advanced settings that control how closely the path follows the selection.

4. Tool Options and Tool Presets

Tool Options shows every setting of the active tool. Its ↺ button resets the tool to its defaults. Settings are kept per tool and survive quitting.

Tool Presets saves a tool with its settings under a name, to pick again later.

5. Colour

Colour

• The foreground and background colours. X swaps them and D resets them to black and white.
• Four views, chosen with the symbols at the top: Wheel (a hue ring with a triangle), Disc, Sliders, and None for just the swatches.
• The sliders work in HSV, RGB, Lab or CMYK. Each track shows the colour you would get along it.
• A hex field accepts 3, 4 or 6 digits, with or without #.
• A row of recent colours.

Swatches

The document's own palette and its global colours, plus a picker to show any palette from the library. A global colour can be linked to shapes; change the global colour and every linked shape follows.

Palettes

The library of palettes. Import GIMP .gpl, Adobe .aco, .acb and .ase, and other palette files; export as .aco, .ase or .act. New Palette from the Image's Colours makes a palette of every colour in the image (up to 256). Use as Document Palette makes a palette the document's working palette.

Image ▸ Palette ▸ Restrict to Palette… keeps the foreground and background colours to a palette and finds pixels that are off it. Lift Palette Restriction ends it.

Working Palette

The document's palette in big swatches, for pixel art. See Personas.

Colormap

The palette of an indexed image, in index order.

6. Brushes and Other Resources

• Brushes: the brush library, sorted by medium (see Tools). Each brush shows who made it, with a link. Optional brush packs are in Settings ▸ Resources ▸ Resource Packs.
• Patterns and Gradients: for fills, strokes and the Gradient tool. A fresh install has a core set; GIMP's full sets are optional packs.
• Dynamics: how the pen drives the brush. Inputs (pressure, velocity, direction, tilt, wheel, random and fade) map to outputs (opacity, size, angle, colour, hardness, force, aspect ratio, spacing, rate, flow and jitter).
• Fonts and Text Styles: the fonts on your Mac, and the document's paragraph and character styles.
• Templates: the image templates offered by File ▸ New.
• Assets: reusable objects, sorted into categories.

Right-click a resource for Open as Image, Copy Location, Show in Finder and tags.

7. Photo Panes

Develop

A develop stack for photos, applied as one non-destructive effect:

• White Balance: Temperature (1000–12000 K), Original Light and Tint.
• Exposure: Exposure and Black Level.
• Tone: Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and the Radius they work over.
• Presence: Clarity and Vibrance.
• Split Toning: a hue and saturation for the highlights and for the shadows, and the Balance between them.

Clone Sources

The sources for the Clone and Heal tools. Add as many as you need, from this document or another open one, and give each its own scale (with an aspect lock), rotation and horizontal or vertical flip.

Scope, Histogram, Sample Points and Pointer

• Scope: waveform, RGB parade, vectorscope and histogram of the document.
• Histogram: the tone distribution per channel, linear or logarithmic, with statistics.
• Sample Points: the colours at points you place on the image.
• Pointer: the position and colour under the pointer, with a loupe.

8. Everything Else

• Navigation: a small picture of the image with the visible area; drag it to move around.
• Preview: the document at real size, 1× and 2×, with crisp pixels.
• Undo History: every step; click one to go back to it. Snapshots name the document as it is now, to come back to it later even when the undo history has moved on. Document History lists recent documents.
• Transform: the selection's X, Y, width, height and rotation as numbers, and its constraints.
• Pathfinder, Symbols and Symbol Masters: see Vector and SF Symbols.
• Assistants: the drawing assistants in the document, with visibility, lock and colour.
• Slices: see Personas.
• Macros: record what you do, then play it back on this or another document.
• Animation Playback: plays the layers as frames.
• Buffers: named clipboards.
• Images: the open documents.
• Operation Browser: every GEGL operation, with search and a live preview. Show all operations includes the ones the menus leave out.
• Error Console: the engine's warnings and errors.
• Dashboard: memory, the tile cache and swap, and what the canvas is fetching.
• Device Status: your tablet or stylus, and the current tool and brush.