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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS In GIMP 2.4, this has been replaced by Save XMP, which can save some but not all of the EXIF information. Full EXIF handling may be restored to the GIMP in a future version. EXIF can embed a thumbnail of the image in the file. Many cameras include this thumbnail, which adds several kilobytes, but most programs don t do anything useful with the EXIF thumbnail. Unchecking Save thumbnail prevents saving this extra information, making the resulting file smaller. Comment is a place to put text you might want to add to an image. You can use this to include your name, a copyright notice, or details about where the photo was taken or what it portrays. GIF and Indexed PNG Quality Settings GIF and indexed PNG quality settings are quite different from JPEG. Since these indexed formats use a fixed number of colors, you can make the files much smaller by reducing the number of colors they use. To do this, you need to know about image modes. Most images edited in GIMP are full-color images, denoted as RGB in the title bar of the image window (back in Figure 1-4). But images that are destined to be saved as GIF or indexed PNG should be converted using the Image . Mode . Indexed… menu item, which brings up the dialog shown in Figure 2-8. Figure 2-8. Convert Image to Indexed Colors dialog When converting an RGB image to indexed mode, you first need to choose a palette, the set of colors that will be represented in the final image. You can choose a predefined palette, such as a web-optimized palette, or one chosen from the custom palette menu; you can choose a black-and-white palette, if you know that the image contains only those two colors; or, the most common case, you can let the GIMP create a palette based on the colors actually in the image. You specify the number of colors, up to a maximum of 256, and the GIMP will try to approximate any other colors that exist in the image by using combinations of the colors in the palette.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Alas, even at 100%, JPEG still loses some data every time you save; using a setting of 100% will produce a file two or three times larger than using a setting of 95%, and the quality won t be any better. There s really no advantage in using quality settings above 95%. If you want to save without any loss, you re better off using formats such as PNG or TIFF. Finally, JPEG has some other settings in the Advanced area of the Save as JPEG dialog (Figure 2-7). Figure 2-7. Advanced JPEG settings Optimize gives you an additional reduction in file size without any further reduction in image quality. It s on by default, and there s no reason to change that. Progressive is a useful setting for images that will be uploaded to the web. It makes the image load in a different way, so people viewing the image will see a poor-quality version right away, which gradually improves, instead of seeing the image load line by line starting from the top. Smoothing, Use restart markers, Force baseline JPEG, Subsampling, and DCT method control details of the JPEG format. You shouldn t need to change these unless you want very fine control over the way the JPEG file is saved. Save EXIF data is a good option to know. The JPEG format includes a way of holding information about the file in a format called Exchangeable Image File Format, or EXIF. Most digital cameras add EXIF information about the date the photo was taken, the resolution, and the camera s settings such as lens focal length and whether or not flash was used. The GIMP cannot show or edit this EXIF information (that will probably be available in some future release), but some versions can preserve the information so that you can view it with other programs. If you don t want the EXIF information preserved, deselecting this box will make the file slightly smaller. (You can see exactly how much smaller by watching the File size value at the top of the dialog.)
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS JPEG Quality Settings JPEG s quality adjustments come by compressing the image more or less thoroughly. JPEG s compression takes advantage of tricks of human perception; it tries to degrade quality in ways that won t be very noticeable. By experimenting with the Quality setting in the Save as JPEG dialog (Figure 2-5), which appears as soon as you ve specified a file name ending in .jpg, you can find a balance that gives you a very small file size but still a pretty good-looking image. Figure 2-5. JPEG save options Begin by making sure the checkbox for Show Preview in image window is checked. This lets you see the effect of changing the quality setting. The file size is also shown in the dialog. The GIMP s default quality setting is 85, which is a good choice for photographic images stored locally; but you may find that you can get away with settings as low as 50 with surprisingly little degradation. Figure 2-6 shows an example of how the quality can change with different compression settings, but I encourage you to try this on one of your own images, to see the differences in quality and file size. Figure 2-6. Comparing JPEG quality settings You may be tempted to move the slider to 100% for images you store locally. Surely that would be best for images you re storing, and would prevent loss of data from JPEG compression?
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Other Formats There are more image formats. Lots more. Too many more. Here are some of the most common: Raw: Not actually a format, raw is a term encompassing all the various proprietary formats used by camera manufacturers. The GIMP supports some of these formats (usually requiring external plug-ins); other formats are held as trade secrets by the camera manufacturer, and your only option is to use another program to convert the image to a more standard format before editing it. BMP: This is Microsoft s Windows Bitmap format. BMP files are quite large and don t offer any advantage over PNG or TIFF. Save to BMP if you need to (for example, for a Windows icon), but otherwise it s usually better to choose a different format. PCD: This is Kodak s proprietary Photo CD format. It includes several resolutions within one file (so files tend to be very large) and is not lossy. The GIMP doesn t handle PCD directly, though there s a plug-in available to read it. You re usually better off converting PCD files to something else. PSD: This is Adobe s proprietary Photoshop format. It saves layers and other information, analogous to XCF in the GIMP. PSD is really two formats: the GIMP can read the older version, while the newer one is a closed standard that can t be read by the GIMP or most other programs. ICO: This is the Microsoft Windows Icon format. It can contain several resolutions in one file. This format is useful not only for Windows icons, but also to create a favicon for your website. These show up if someone bookmarks your site, as well as next to the web page address in some browsers. PDF and PostScript: These are vector graphics formats, not raster (pixel) graphics like the other formats discussed so far. Instead of representing an image as a rectangular collection of pixels, a vector image is a collection of drawing instructions involving points, lines, and curves. The GIMP can t edit vector graphics directly, but it can import PostScript or PDF through a plug-in that converts the image into a raster image. If you re planning to save your image as PostScript or PDF, you re usually better off using a program intended for editing vector graphics. SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics is another format that is growing in popularity on the web. The GIMP can import images from SVG, and in the future it may be able to export them to SVG as well. In addition, you can use the Path tool (which you ll meet in Chapter 5) to make simple vector graphics that you can save as SVG, and you can import paths from SVG. Experimenting with JPEG and GIF Settings Some image formats let you adjust settings to trade quality for smaller file size. In some cases (for instance, small buttons on a web page) it may be important to make the file as small as possible, and a slight loss of quality may be worthwhile. JPEG and GIF both have quality adjustments, but their methods are very different.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS PNG PNG, pronounced ping, once stood for PNG s Not GIF, though it s now sometimes referred to as the Portable Network Graphics format. It s a relatively new format, originally intended as a replacement for GIF because of legal issues regarding the GIF format. PNG can be used for full-color images, like JPEG, or for indexed images, like GIF. In full-color mode, it s not nearly as efficient as JPEG; a PNG will be much larger than a JPEG of the same image. However, it s not lossy: if you read a full-color PNG, make a modification, and write it back out, the quality will be just as good as it was before. This makes full-color PNG a very good format for storing original copies of your own images if you might want to edit them later. Indexed PNG is just as efficient as GIF (sometimes more efficient) for images such as logos and icons with a small number of colors, and it can support more than 256 colors. Nearly all web browsers support PNG, so it s safe to use PNG images on web pages. PNG supports transparency, like GIF, and it also supports partial transparency so you can have translucent areas. However, some browsers (such as Internet Explorer) don t support PNG transparency, so transparent PNG images on a web page may not always display properly. PNG doesn t support animation. There s a format called MNG that adds animation to PNG images, but no web browsers support it yet. For animated images, GIF is pretty much the only choice. XCF This is the GIMP s own format. When you re editing an image and you have a lot of layers and paths and other information you want to save, this is the format to use. Otherwise, use some other format. XCF files are usually quite large, and can only be read by the GIMP, not by other programs. Since XCF files are so large, you can compress them using the GZIP or BZIP2 formats filename.xcf.gz or filename.xcf.bz2 and GIMP will handle the compression and decompression when it reads or writes the file. TIFF Tagged Image File Format (with a file extension of either .tif or .tiff) is another full-color, non- lossy format. Like full-color PNG, it s not very compact (don t use it on web pages many web browsers can t display it anyway), but it s fine for keeping originals of images you might want to edit again. The reason I recommend using PNG instead of TIFF, aside from web-browser compatibility, is that TIFF isn t a single standard, but many different standards with different interpretations. A TIFF written by one program may not always read correctly in another program. The GIMP will read most TIFF files, but sometimes it will have a tiff about certain types of TIFFs. One advantage to TIFF over other full-color formats is that it handles a wider range of colors. For the technically-minded, it can handle 16 bits per color channel. This is important to some professional artists and graphic designers. However, the GIMP doesn t handle 16-bit color anyway (that s planned for a future release), so if you re editing in GIMP, you don t get any benefit from using TIFF.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS JPEG For sharing full-color photographs, the best format to use is usually JPEG. Pronounced jay-peg, the name comes from the group that defined the format, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Usually, a JPEG file will have an extension of .jpg . JPEG images are highly compressed and are encoded in full color, so it s a very efficient format for photographs or other images with a wide range of colors. The drawback to this format is that the compression is lossy. That means that every time you read a JPEG file, make a change (however minor), and write the file back to disk, the image quality degrades slightly. Don t use JPEG for images you plan to edit over and over. But as a for mat for exchanging photographs with other people, JPEG excels. (There s no quality loss when you copy the file from one place to another, only when you edit it and write it back to disk.) You may be wondering, My camera stores images as JPEGs. Does that mean I m losing quality? The answer is yes. That s why many cameras provide a non-lossy raw format (discussed in the section, Other Formats ) as well as JPEG. However, JPEG files are so much smaller that you can store many, many more images than is possible with raw mode on the same memory card. Use raw format if you re worried about it, or if you re bothered by the image quality of a JPEG; but for most people, the slight quality loss caused by using JPEG on a camera, plus editing an image once or twice and saving it again in JPEG format, will not be noticed. The space savings are worth it. GIF The Graphics Interchange Format, pronounced giff with a hard g as in graphics, is an indexed format. This means that it uses a fixed list of colors instead of encoding every color separately. This is very efficient for images with a small number of colors, like a five-color corporate logo. GIF can represent up to 256 colors (256 is 2 to the 8th power, so this is also called 8-bit color). Typical photographs have many more colors than that, so saving a photograph in GIF format will usually result in very poor quality. Even worse, with 256 colors, the file will usually be larger than a full-color JPEG version of the same image! The lesson is clear: don t use GIF for photographs, only for simple icons and logos. The GIF format offers two very useful features: transparency and animation. With trans parency, you can make an icon with a clear background. If you display it on a web page, or on a button in a program s user interface, whatever s behind the icon (even if it s another image) will show through. GIF doesn t allow for partial transparency; a pixel is either fully transparent or not transparent at all. GIF animation allows you to create images that move. Most web browsers support animated GIF images. (Whether this is a good idea is unclear; some users dislike animated images on web pages, and will avoid websites that use them. But they have their uses.) To learn how to create GIF animation, see Making Simple GIF Animations in Chapter 3.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-4. The Save dialog The Save in folder popup offers a list that corresponds to the bookmarks you ve set up in the GIMP s Open dialog. You can get a file selector that gives you more choices by clicking on the expander next to Browse for other folders. The Select File Type expander lets you choose an image format. Normally, you won t use it: just type the extension as part of the file name (e.g., mypicture.jpg to save in JPEG format) and GIMP will use the appropriate format. The expander is there in case you need to see a list of formats the GIMP can handle, or in the rare case that you need to save a file with an extension that doesn t match the file type you need to use for example, if you want to save a JPEG image but name it image.gif instead of image.jpg . You ll learn more about file types in the next section, Image File Types. Once you Save As…, the GIMP considers your entry to be the new name for the image. From then on, you can save and any changes will be saved to the new file name, without overwriting the original file. The file name is visible in the title bar of the image window, so you can check easily to make sure you re saving to the right file name. The GIMP has one other save option worth noting: Save a Copy… This works like Save As… in that you can choose a file name different from the one you re currently using. The difference is that Save a Copy… does not change GIMP s notion of the current image file name. After you Save a Copy…, subsequent saves will still use the original file name. This is very useful when you re making repeated edits to an image, and you want to save it in a format that preserves all your work, such as XCF; but you want to share the final result on the web in a more efficient format, such as JPEG or GIF. Image File Types The choice of file types used to hold images GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF is baffling. What do each of these file types mean, and which format should you use? When choosing a format for the web, or to send images by email, the most important criterion is usually file size. In order to view the image, each user will need to download it. This is especially important if anyone in your intended audience might be connected via a slow modem, or if you re sending images by email and some recipients might have an email account with a disk quota. Also, many email systems will simply refuse to transfer files that are too big. The other important criterion when choosing an image format is image quality. There s typically a tradeoff between file size and quality: you can compress an image to a smaller size only by sacrificing some quality.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Caution The + and keys on the numeric keypad may not work. If they don t, use the ones on the regular keyboard. On some earlier versions of the GIMP, zooming in used = instead of + (on most US keyboards, = is the unshifted version of +, and so is easier to type). Remember, you can always change these key bindings, as described in Chapter 1 in the section User Interface and Keyboard Shortcuts. Scaling an image is easy, and it s an important operation when you re sharing images with other people. For many images, scaling may be the only operation you need. But if you plan other operations that may affect image size, such as rotation or cropping, do them first. Scaling should usually be the last thing you do when you re editing an image; that way, you have the greatest control over the image s exact final size. The exception that proves the rule is a very slow machine. If you scale the image first, subsequent operations will go much faster. However, you ll find that this matters only with very slow machines or very large images! The Scale Tool Most of the time, Image . Scale is perfect for rescaling an image. But there s another way of scaling: the Scale tool. You ll find it in the Toolbox next to the Rotate tool, or through the menu Tools . Transform Tools . Scale. This tool lets you scale interactively: with the tool selected, click anywhere in the image to activate it, and then drag from any corner of the image into the image. The Scale tool is a bit trickier to use than Image . Scale… for a couple of reasons. First, you have to remember to click in the tool to start the operation. Second, it only scales the current layer, not the whole image, and it doesn t change the image size at the end. Third, by default it doesn t maintain the layer s original aspect ratio. You may end up with a funhouse mirror version of your image where everything looks tall and skinny or short and fat. Keep aspect in the tool options can fix that (there are also options to keep height while varying width, and vice versa). For digital photo operations, you probably won t want to use the Scale tool. But keep it in mind for later when you re using lots of layers and doing crazy things to them. It might be just the ticket then, as it does have the advantage of giving a live preview of what the image will look like when scaled. Sometimes that s awfully helpful. Saving Files Image editing is just like any other type of document editing: once you ve made any significant change to a file, you should save it. It s smart to save your work frequently, in case of a computer crash or other disaster. The GIMP uses Control+S as the keyboard shortcut for File . Save, just like most word- processing programs. If the image already has a file name, that s a quick way to save your work. If you ve edited an original image, modified it, and now want to save to a new file name, use File . Save As… (Figure 2-4). You ll also see this dialog the first time you save a new image.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Note Which quality setting is considered Best can vary with the GIMP version. However, you re always safe choosing whichever option is labeled (Best). Usually, when you click Scale in the dialog to make a digital photo smaller, and the GIMP rescales the image, the window will resize to be tiny (Figure 2-3). Don t be fooled by this: the image probably isn t as small as the GIMP is showing you. Figure 2-3. The image window is now too small! What happened? Since the original image was too large to fit on the screen, the GIMP showed it as zoomed out in the example in Figure 2-3, it is shown at only 33% of actual size. After the image is scaled, the GIMP keeps the same zoom setting. So now, even though the image could easily fit on the screen, you re still seeing it at 33%. The solution is to zoom after rescaling. Use the Zoom menu in the image window, the menu under View . Zoom, or the keyboard shortcut +, or type 1. Typing 1 (the numeral one) in the image window always zooms it to full size (100%). Typing + (plus) zooms in (makes the image appear larger); (minus or dash) zooms out. When preparing images for the web, you ll probably want the image window at 100% so you can see exactly what your audience will see.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS If you actually do want to scale the two dimensions independently, clicking the chain link icon breaks the chain and unlinks width and height, so you can change one without changing the other. Welcome to the Hall Of Funhouse Mirrors. Clicking on the chain link again will link them back together. Even if you work in pixel dimensions, you may want to use the units drop-down menu (initially in pixels) in order to scale an image to some multiple or fraction of its current size. With the units menu set to percent, you can set the width or height to 2 to make the image twice as large, or to .5 to make it half the size. (You only need to set width or height, not both; if they re chained together, the other will adjust automatically.) THE UNDO COMMAND: A GIMP USER S BEST FRIEND If you re curious about how the chain link icons work, or how the image might look when scaled to a particular size, you can try it without any fear of losing your data. The GIMP s Undo command is your friend! Get familiar with it early on. It s very useful to be able to try things while knowing you can always undo your changes and go back to the previous image. Undo is in the Edit menu, along with Redo and an item called Undo History, which brings up a window showing you the history of commands you ve used recently. You can also undo the last command by pressing Control+Z. Undo is so frequently useful that it s well worth learning that keyboard command. The GIMP can undo several operations in a row, not just the last single operation. By default, it remembers the last five operations. You can change that number in Preferences (File . Preferences, under Environment). A larger Undo stack takes more memory, so it may be best to stick with the default setting unless your machine has quite a lot of RAM. There s also a preference to limit the amount of memory the Undo system will use, though the preference for the number of Undo operations takes precedence, so you know you ll always have at least the number of Undo operations you specify in Preferences. Try Undo now: type something into the Scale dialog, perhaps even with width and height unchained from each other, and click the Scale button. Then undo the Scale operation, using Control+Z or Edit . Undo, so that you re confident it works. What Size Should You Choose for Your Images? For photos intended for web pages, it s usually best to keep the largest dimension of the image at 640 pixels or less (400 300 images are free on eBay!). If you have a lot of images, or if many of the people who will view your images have slow network connections, smaller is better. The Resolution section in the Scale Image dialog allows you to specify the number of pixels per inch (or other units, if you choose). This doesn t change the size of the image; it s merely a note that gets added to the image so the image size can later be converted to physical units (such as inches). Most of the time, you won t need to look at these values. The Interpolation Quality controls details of how the image is scaled. Linear, which is the default in at least some versions of the GIMP, does not produce the best quality, but it s fairly fast. Unless you re on a very slow machine, you ll probably want to change this to one of the higher- quality settings, such as Cubic or Lanczos (Best). These settings will run a little slower, but they ll produce much better-looking images, especially if you ever scale images larger instead of smaller. I recommend changing this value permanently, in the Preferences dialog under Tool Options, so you don t have to think about it when you re actually using the Scale dialog.
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