CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Tip If (Web design)
CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Tip If you already have an area selected, there s a faster way to crop: use the Image . Crop Image item in the image window menus. The dialog also offers a button for Auto Shrink, which attempts to shrink the crop rectangle to a hard boundary. On photographs, this usually won t do anything because there are no obvious edges to tell the GIMP which parts can be removed. The Crop dialog s X, Y, Width, and Height fields can be useful for making small or very specific corrections. If you know the size you eventually want the image to be for example, 640 480 you can simply type those numbers into Width and Height, and then use the Move handles to drag the rectangle to the right place. Or you can use the arrow buttons next to one of the fields to adjust that value by small increments. You may find the arrow buttons confusing; in particular, the fact that clicking up on the Y position makes the crop rectangle go down, and vice versa. It happens because up on the Y position increases the Y coordinate, and pixel coordinates increase downward: the (0, 0) position is the upper-left corner of the image. If this confuses you, don t worry too much about it; just watch the crop rectangle when you make changes and notice in which direction it goes, and you ll be fine. The arrow keys on your keyboard adjust the X and Y origin of the crop rectangle by single pixel values. The Control key combines with the arrow keys to change the width and height. Adding the Shift key to any of these combinations changes the values by a larger increment. When you have the rectangle adjusted precisely to where you want it, hit Enter or click inside the rectangle to make it final. In 2.2 and earlier, you can also use the Crop button in the dialog. The Crop tool s options are fairly simple, though the Resize option doesn t do what you probably expect it to. What it actually does is to reduce the size of the image canvas while leaving the layer size unchanged. These terms will become clearer when you read about layers in Chapter 3; for now, use Crop rather than Resize, and leave the other options at their defaults. Current Layer Only restricts the crop to only the selected layer. You may find that useful once you begin to use multiple layers. Fixed Aspect Ratio is the only tricky option. It only works once a crop rectangle is already active in the image. In order to crop an image and retain the image s existing aspect ratio, first click in the image, then when the Crop dialog appears, click on From selection to set the crop rectangle to the whole image. Then select Fixed aspect ratio in tool options. After all that, dragging on one of the resize handles will constrain the shape of the rectangle. With any luck this will become easier in future versions of the GIMP. Brightening and Darkening A common problem with camera images is their being too light or too dark. The GIMP has three very powerful level adjustment tools to correct such problems: Brightness-Contrast, Levels, and Curves. You can find these tools in two different places in the menu system: the top-level Colors menu (Layer . Colors in earlier versions of the GIMP), or Tools . Color Tools. Brightness-Contrast The simplest level adjustment tool is Brightness-Contrast (Figure 2-12).
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