Episode: 1081
Title: HPR1081: Preparing Pictures for Posting with the GIMP
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1081/hpr1081.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:36:53

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Hello, this is Frank Bell. This is going to be a short targeted podcast about how to prepare
pictures for posting to a website or blog using the new image manipulation program, commonly
known as the game. As background, I'm an average snapshot photographer and have been since
I got my first camera going on to 40 years ago. I post a lot of pictures to my blog and I like to
make them as interesting as possible when I do. My goal is to enhance the picture and bring out
where I found interesting when I took it, not to transform the picture. In other words, I won't be
telling you how to put Martian's head on John's body. This will simply cover how I prepare a
picture for posting, but I also believe this process would be useful for most own photographers
who want to share pictures with family or friends. Gimp tutorials are a dime a dozen. If you
enter Gimp Tutorial and Google, you will get more links than you can shake an electron at. So
why am I trying to hand it one? So I want to start by telling you about my first experience with
the game. As a newly minted Slackware user, with Slackware 10.0, starting to learn my
whereabouts, I opened up the Gimp. I took a look at it and I said to myself, you can't make
heads or tails of this. I closed the program back up and really did not look at it again
for several years. So what was it I found intimidating about the Gimp? Now these things I'm going to
say next are not complaints. They are observations. The Gimp is a powerful program. They can do marvelous
things. When I opened PaintShop Pro for the first time because I had to use it at one of the jobs
I had, I had the same reaction, but with PaintShop Pro, I had someone sitting at my side to show me
how to get started using it. So I ultimately became pretty good with PaintShop Pro.
The first comment I will have that I think new users to the Gimp find intimidating is that the menus
are redundant, especially among the main menu items of filters, tools, and colors. For example,
much of the item that's under the colors main menu is also under the tools main menu,
under a colors sub menu. That confusing because for a new user who wants a simple path knowing where
to go to find what is challenging. Another challenge to the new user is the technical terminology.
It's a technical program, and it uses technical terminology such as saturation, components,
color curves, and thresholds. But Joe Brow or Frank Bell on photographer has no idea what it means
to desaturate an image. I can quit the item I can watch it happen, but I still don't have
understanding that tells me when and why I would use that command. I think the Gimp illustrates
an old story that a friend of mine told me back in the very early days when using computers
was first moving out of the IT department and into day-to-day business life. He said to me, Frank,
if the cell can tell you that the program is simple to use, it's not going to do what you want.
If he tells you it will do what you want, it's not going to be simple to use. If he tells you
they are simple to use, and it will do what you want. He's lying. As I mentioned earlier,
online tutorials for the Gimp are a dime a dozen, so why do I think I might have a contribution?
Most of the online tutorials I have seen suffer from either engineer items or expert items.
Engineer items means that they will give you excellent descriptions of the individual pieces of
the program, the various menu items and how to use them, but they don't give you a good picture
of how all those things fit together to create a finished product. Because that's how engineers
build things, one piece at a time. On the other hand, there's expert items where someone is so
good at doing something, he cannot remember what it was like to be ignorant, and therefore
cannot explain what he's doing to someone who is ignorant, that is someone who is new to whatever
the process is. And of course, there is nothing wrong with ignorance, ignorance can be cured.
Stupid on the other, but I digress. The best tutorial I have found on the Gimp and one I recommend
highly is a series of video tutorials at a website called MeetTheGimp.org. The link will be in
the show notes. Everything I've learned about how to use the Gimp, I have learned from MeetTheGimp.org.
And I think part of the reason is that the person creating the tutorials is a teacher and he knows
how to present information. They generally run 20 minutes to half an hour long. The explanations
are extremely clear, I recommend them highly. If you watch the first three or four of those
tutorials, your friends will think you are an expert in the Gimp. The approach that I take in this
podcast is to prepare a picture for posting to my personal website as I record what I do along the
way. The system I'm using is a Dell Inspiron 1545N laptop with two gigabytes of RAM running
slackware current. The current numbered release of slackware is 13.37 slackware current is based on
considered changes to that release for the next release. The picture is a picture of a small
on the blossom of a Porta Laca flower on a window box on my front deck. The original picture file
is 3,283 kilobytes or slightly over three megs in size and is 4,288 pixels wide by 3,216 pixels
and I took it with a Fuji Fine Pix 3200. My desired outcome is a picture that is 500 pixels wide
because I quite arbitrarily settle on that as the standard for the widest images on my website
and I rarely deviate from that unless a higher cost requires me to. With the primary focus on the
wasp and the wasp position on the flower large enough for people to see the wasp as clearly as I can
render it. As I go through this I will save the picture at various points along the way and I
will post the original and then the various saved pictures as well as the final to my website
and have links to those in the show notes so if you wish you can follow my progress.
I already have the picture open in the gap in order for me to see it it's at 12.5% of size.
I'm going to increase it to 25% and it really is too big for my screen so I'm going to take it
back to 12.5% so I can see the big picture. Now as I go through these menu items I will not
go into menu items I don't use you can learn about them elsewhere I'm simply going to focus on a
how to to adjust the sharpness the brightness and contrast and then the crop and then to resize the
picture to my finished product and that is the sequence I have found most useful over the years
in working with this so I'll start by going to filters enhance and sharpen and why sharpen
isn't under tools I do not know but it's not now the sharpen opens a small window by default
to the left which focuses on a small portion of the screen right now all I see is green because
it's the long in the background but there are square bars located at the bottom and the right
side so I use those scroll bars to navigate down to where I can see the most important part of
the picture for me which is the wasp there is a sharpness scale underneath that little inset box
and I can use that scale and move it back and forth and then in that little box that will show me
a preview since I'm ultimately going to scale this picture down to a smaller size I can have a
little roulette with how sharp I want to make it because in the big size picture that I'm looking
up right now little imperfections if I over sharpen it they are quite visible are not so visible
when I finally crop and resize the picture down to the desired result so I pick a picture of
sharpness a degree of sharpness I like click okay and it applies and in the big picture there's
hardly any noticeable difference at all but just for grins and givers I'm going to save a copy of
this the name I gave the original is hpr wasp1 and I'm going to call this hpr or wasp sharpen and
save a copy and I click save and because I'm saving it as a jpeg an export window pops up so I
need to export it since I'm not saving it in the inherent default gimp format the next step I'm
going to do is adjust the colors so I click colors and go to brightness and contrast now I have jupa
just as easily had clicked tools color tools brightness contrast and I would have gotten the exact
same dialogue there are two different routes to the same place generally and I took this picture
as a fairly bright spring day and what digital cameras do if they're on auto focus is they tend
to try to find a happy medium that's why if you take a picture at the beach with a digital camera
many times it will come out grayer than you remember the scene that's because it is grayer the
digital camera is trying to reach some kind of average between the extreme brightness of the
sun and the lesser amount of brightness of whatever is in the foreground or shadows or what
have you the way to deal with this in a film camera such as my old pintx k1000 which my younger son
lost during his photography class in high school but I got this would be to focus in to the light
meter inside the camera told you you were properly adjusted and then to open up the f-stop
two clicks and that would let the actual brightness come in the same would work in the snow
with my digital camera I was not bothering to manually adjust the settings I have I'm still
learning how to do that with this camera but everything is in there I just need to bring it out
so I adjust the brightness a little bit here and as I adjust the brightness on the slider scale
I can see it transform the actual image in the gap and also a number appears to the right
of the brightness slider scale if I'm doing a series of pictures that we're all taking at the
same time and need to be adjusted identically and brightness I can actually copy that number out
from the slider scale for picture number one and when I do picture number two I can paste that
number back into the slider scale which is a really really neat trick you can say you can say
work if you're working with a lot of the same thing say you've taken photographs the document the
installation of a computer program if you're installing say slackware and you want to do a tutorial
to show people how to install slackware you can't do screenshots because you have bare metal
but you can use this trick to adjust all your photographs afterwards so I generally adjust the
brightness first and then adjust the contrast and when I have it looking like about the right kind
of brightness that I remember from the day on which I took the picture I click OK and I'm quite
happy with this I'm going to save this I'm going to put file and save as and I will call this
hpr ross one b and c for brightness and contrast dot j pj so we're almost there the next thing
is to crop it and the reason I like to do these kinds of adjustments first is because I may want
to come back to this original picture at some future date and do something else with it one
thing I don't have to do with this picture that sometimes I have to do is to rotate a picture so
I'm going to take a little side trip into rotation with forget if you go to the item image on the
main menu there's a sub menu for transform and that includes rotating 90 degrees clockwise
or counterclockwise or rotating 180 degrees it also includes flipping horizontally but that
doesn't include the kind of small variations you need to do sometimes if you weren't holding
you're at the beach you're taking a picture you got distracted by someone walking by and
weren't holding that camera particularly level and when you look at the picture it looks like that
horizon of the Atlantic Ocean which is supposed to be dead level is actually sloping downward a
degree or two where you want to go to make those kind of rotation adjustments is to tools transform
tools rotate and a rotate dialogue will pop up this is not intuitive what I normally do is go
to the top dialogue box which says angle and put in a degree with practice I've gotten pretty good
a guessing whether I want to rotate that picture one degree or two degrees or one and a half degrees
but if I get it wrong I can always undo it and try again and then the angle box you put in
the number of degrees you want to rotate something if you just put in one that will rotate it
clockwise if you put in minus one that will rotate it counterclockwise and this is where you go
to adjust the levelness if you will of a picture if you need to take it with it just an easy
easy bit to make up for the human error getting distracted by that attractive young lady who
is walking down the beach while you were that trying to take a picture of the car carrier on the
horizon this picture though is level enough no one can tell from the portal lock up flower whether
it's a degree or so off so who cares so I put cancel that's how you would rotate a picture to
adjust by degree by one or two or five or ten degrees and begin so the final step or the next
to the last step is to crop the picture so I go to the Gimp toolbox and so far I haven't had
the mess with the toolbox they go to the toolbox and I make sure I have quick rectangle select
tool that's in the top left hand column of the Gimp toolbox and then the cursor turns into an
X I draw a rectangle of the part of the picture I want to focus on I don't like that one so I can
click outside the picture draw another rectangle and after a while I get it looking how I think I
want it to look trying to get the composition so that the boss is more or less in the middle
and then with the there I click image and crop to selection now I'm going to do a check I'm going
to go to the bottom panel of the Gimp window and where the size dialog is towards the left I'm
going to put 50% to increase the size increase the size of my program window so I can see the entire
picture and decide yes that seems to be a pretty good job of cropping but I don't like the composition
given that the wasp is on the right side of the flower most of the flower is in the left side of
my picture the picture is kind of heavily weighted to the left so I'm going to hit controls
eight undo the whole thing reduce the size and click outside the window I'm going to
re-crop and try to place a room war balance between the rocks where I want to be the focus
and the heavy weight of this red flower against the green background of the yard and crop to
selection again and yes this the composition of this looks a little better so I will click this
one and I will say that as hpr lost crop now the dimensions of the crop picture which display in
the title bar of the Gimp window are 1876 by 1180 pixels I am not going to post that on the
purpose of posting something that looks pretty to my personal blog it would take too long
to load from my taste I'm not a professional photographer I'm not trying to sell images I just
want somebody to pause by my blog one day and say oh that's an interesting picture and look
at it for a minute or two and be amused and entertained so my next step is to resize it if I change
the size of the display to 100% it exceeds the size of my screen so to resize it I've got an image
scale image and scale means to reduce or increase the size proportionally and in the width
of the image size and that I use width and height for this I don't use the x resolution or y
resolution I type in 500 and then when I click in the height the Gimp automatically enters the
proper height to keep the resolution in the proportions rather than they had it come out looking
like something in the front house window and click scale it scales down and yes I'm quite happy with
this file say that and I will say this as HR watch resoft and there I'm done with a little bit of
practice you can get down so you can post the whole slew of pictures in 15 or 20 minutes almost
automating this process in your brain again my goal here is to enhance the image not to transform it
I don't want to turn it into a negative I don't want to posterize it I don't want to make it
black and white or gray scale I just want to post a pretty picture that I think people might enjoy
I'll give you what I think is my best example of accomplishing this a couple of months ago my
brother who lives in an area where there's a lot of wildlife lives on a creek in the area of
Virginia known as the northern neck and there are some eagles who live on that same creek and he
likes to take pictures of the eagle and of the ospreys and other wildlife and will email them to
me and along me to post them on my blog so he sent me some pictures and I worked them over a little
bit and posted them and just said you know here's some pictures from my brother on Virginia's
northern neck of eagles and the next day I get an email from him telling him to buy his camera
sets so he emailed back and I said to him you know I did take her with these a little bit
and begin to try to bring out the brightness and the contrast in detail and in the email I got
back from him he said I didn't realize you had edited them that's about the highest complement
what I want to do with the editing can get that it enhances what is there it doesn't change it so
well the person who took the original picture could not tell that the picture had been edited I
will have a link to that particular web page also in the show notes what I will post these
pictures that I have done along the way to my website so you can link them up and I will post
the finished product to my website I'll include the link to that particular post also once again
if you really want to learn how to use the gimp in great detail visit meet the gimp.org I cannot
speak highly enough of that gentleman's efforts to spread the word if you want to email me you can
email me at frank at pineviewfarm.net pineviewfarm is all one word no spaces no punctuation
and my website is www.pineviewfarm.net thank you very much
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