Cropping and scaling (resizing) photos, along with adjusting the brightness and contrast of them, are among the most basic elements of photo editing. In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to use The GIMP's powerful cropping, scaling, brightness, and contrast tools by editing a photograph in our digital darkroom.
You can later apply the basic skills, elements, and principles that you learn in this tutorial to edit and manipulate photos, clipart, scanned images and other digital graphics. You also can use the GIMP to design and create all sorts of stunning computer graphics and images from scratch. However, today's tutorial focuses on editing already existing images with the GIMP.
Originally, GIMP was a Linux/UNIX program. However, it has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform -- that effectively makes GIMP a cross-platform (XP) program. There appear to be some Mac versions of the GIMP now also.
The GIMP and Adobe Photoshop are comparable, digital-darkroom, software products as to features, functions, and usability -- other than some advanced professional and prepress stuff in Photoshop. The basic photograph and image cropping, scaling, color-brightness adjustment, and color-contrast adjustment operations covered in today's tutorial are just as easily done and well-done with the GIMP as with Photoshop.
Moreover, GIMP is free and Photoshop costs $699. Because GIMP is an excellent, pixel-based, image manipulation and editing program and because of licensing and pricing issues, we chose to use the GIMP rather than Photoshop in our digital darkroom.
