CHAPTER 2 (Web hosting reviews) IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS If you
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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