GIMP PATH Colours

Question

I am trying to use an SVG from GIMP to use in Blender, but I want the whole image not black and white which some tutorials have suggested then to import into Inkscape and recolour it there. How can I just import an image into GIMP then export it with full colours. I have tried to invert from path and only got box which showed GIMP, exported the box and Blender successfully imported the SVGs. Is it a settings thing or is the developer(s) of GIMP not thinking things on features people want?

Answer 1

Gimp is fundamentally designed to handle raster graphics, and not vector graphics. Gimp has a limited support for vectors/paths only as far as they are useful to create bitmap shapes. You cannot export an image (File ➤ Export) to SVG in Gimp. The only way to create an SVG in Gimp is to export a path (that has no color information attached in Gimp).

If you want full SVG support you need an editor designed to create SVG and this editor is Inkscape, not Gimp.

Answer 2

GIMP isn't an SVG editor. It's a raster image editor. It has extremely limited vector capabilities. It can't be used to edit an already existing SVG. It can import an SVG, but it will rasterize it, and it will no longer be vector. If you want to edit SVGs, use Inkscape, or some other vector image editor such as Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, etc.

Also note that although you can export paths as SVG from GIMP from the Path dialog menu, there is no way to apply any stroke or fill attributes to that path in GIMP. All you can get out of GIMP is a path with a simple black 1px stroke. No colours are possible.

Of course there's nothing to stop you from opening the SVG in a text editor such as Notepad, or Notepad++, and adding your own stroke and fill attributes manually, or you could open it in Inkscape, and apply strokes and fills there.

Here's an example of SVG output from GIMP opened in a text editor (Notepad++). The highlighted line 9 is the one you would need to edit to change the fill or stroke attributes. To set a colour for the fill/stroke, you can use hex codes such as "#ff0a88".