Jhnet

Basic Photo Improvement in The GIMP

Croping

Use the 'Crop' tool found in the main toolbox to shrink down your image. Simply drag over the area you wish to crop. You can make adjustments by moving your mouse near to the edge of the crop marks where a bar will appear you can drag with your mouse to adjust the image. If you want to apply the crop, press Enter (Or Return) on your keyboard. To cancel it, press Esc.

Rotation

To rotate your image, head to the Image menu, choose the Transform submenu and click one of the appropriate rotation options.

Levels

You can use the levels tool to make whites in your pictures more white and blacks more black. The levels tool essentially allows you to turn the dark greys that should be black into black and the light areas that should be white into white.

Despite it's compex looking appearence, the levels tool couldn't be easier to use. To start off, head to the Colours menu and choose Levels. You will get a window that looks like the one on the left. The graph shows the concentration of the shade of gray indicated underneeth. You can see that in this case, there is a large spike in black-grey near the start. This is useful because quite often, the level will tail off at each end to nothing, where the graph tails off is usually what colour 'black' (or 'white' at the far-right) is in your photograph. To correct this simply drag the white and black triangular sliders. The changes are previewed on your image so you can use the graph and your best judgement to adjust the values. Once you're done, click OK to apply the change.

In the above sample I have made very extreme adjustments to the levels to create an interesting and atmospheric effect.

Hue & Saturation

The Hue & saturation tool allows you to very easily enhance, change or even remove the colour from your pictures. It can be found in the Colours menu as Hue-Saturation.

Again, this tool is much easier to use than it looks. The most basic use of the tool is to make changes to all colours. To do this, make sure 'Master' is selected and then use the three sliders at the bottom of the window. The top option, Hue, allows you to 'offset' the colours in your picture (give it a go to see the effect!). The lightness option allows you do controll brightness. The saturation slider allows you to fade the intensity of the colour from minimum (grayscale (aka black and white)) to maximum (over saturated).

If just one particular colour needs to be changed, you can select individual colours to tweak. This way you can very easily take all the reds in the picture and make them more orrange while changing the blues to grey.