Herself's Webtools

Cutting round and rectangular regions from an image is simple in Gimp. The top left tool ( rectangle with dotted line ) gives you rectangle cuts and the round tool with the dotted line next to it cuts round objects from your pictures.

Open a copy of a photo to experiment with.

Select the rectangle tool by clicking on it. You will see Rect Select under the tool bar and under that mode/antialiasing/feather edges/auto shrink and free select. Same as in the image above.

Usually you will want to feather the edges. This takes the edge pixels, ten is the default and fades them to transparent. It makes your selection blend a little better.

In your photo, click on one corner of the area you are selecting, drag the mouse to the opposite corner and then release the mouse button. You will see a rectangle with a dashed line. This is your selection area. You can copy and paste this into another image ( Edit->Copy ) or remove it from your photo ( Edit->Cut ).

To get rid of the selection if you want to do it again or are just done with it go to Select->None on the photo menu bar.

To select a circular region follow the same steps except select the dashed circle as your tool. It will take a bit of practice to get the circle to enclose the area you want. Just practice a bit, you’ll be an expert in no time.

Next: Gimp Basics: Selecting regions with free, fuzzy and color select

I’m going to run a series of several posts on Gimp basics since I have so many people looking for information here. They won’t run back to back there will be other posts on other topics posted here too. This is going to be quick how-tos not in depth. For in depth Gimp information see:

The Gimp 2.2 Docs
Grokking the GIMP
GIMP User Manual

This is what you see when you first open GIMP. You have 3 menus and 29 tools, two color choices and a brush, pattern and gradient to select from. Click on any tool an the bottom part of the window changes to show you the options for that particular too.

File menu gives you the choice of creating a new file, opening a file, opening a web location, open recent, acquire, preferences, dialogs and quit.

To create a new file select New from there you can choose the width and height. Selecting Advanced Options allow you to select to color the background with the foreground, background color, or white or transparent. OK creates the new image.

To open an image select File->Open and find the image you wish to open and click Open.

When you open or create an image GIMP opens it in a separate window with its own menu.

To save your work select File->Save or File->Save as
Gimp will save the file with whatever format you use as an extention. Example. photo.jpg will be saved as a jpg, photo.gif will be saved in gif format. To see available options click Select File Type (By Extension). It will drop down a long list of file types. These are all the file types GIMP can handle.

You should always work on a copy not your original image. Most file types lose information every time you save them. If you are not completely done with your image use .xcf which is the GIMP format. That will save all information including all your layers. Then just save it as a jpg or tiff or gif when you are finished and ready to upload your image to the web.

The most commonly thing you do with your photos for web use is to shrink them. Let’s start with that.

You have 2 options; you can crop your photo or you can shrink your photo. More commonly you’ll do both.

Select from you photo window Image->Set Image Canvas Size.
You can select the width or height and it will automatically keep the other one in the same ratio. If you click on the link it will break and you can change the height and width independent of each other.

When you choose a size a box will appear on your image that is the size to which you are cropping your image. Put your mouse on the photo in the window and move it around to place the crop where you want it. Then select Resize. If you change your mind you can adjust the sizes or just hit cancel.

To scale an image in GIMP choose Image->Scale. A window will pop up and you can choose the size you wish to shrink the image to. Again you choose either width or height and GIMP will adjust the other to the same ratio. Or you can click the chain next to them, it will break and you can adjust the width and height independently. Click Scale when you are set.

There are many options you can choose from and download one of the GIMP manuals if you want more information on them. This is just going to be quick how tos.

You Tube tutorial The Gimp Interface

By now I expect you are using Google Analytics, StatCounter or another tool to watch and see who’s coming, from where, what pages they load and why.

One of the best ways to build traffic to a website of any kind is to give your audience what they are looking to find. Especially if it is something no one else has covered. As an example, I put news stories about house plants up on the house plant site occasionally. With in a week of posting a news story I started to get lots of visitors from people looking for a specific plant. This was a plant I had only mentioned in passing. I had no information on it. It was just included in a list of plants in the news article. A quick Google search showed no one else had discussed care of this particular plant either. So I immediately hunted down pictures and information on this plant. It now gets a steady stream of visits every day.

What pages do your visitors visit most often? Are those pages as good as they could be? If not; rewrite them, redo them, do what ever is needed to make them sparkle.

What labels are your visitors using the most? Add more articles on that topic. That’s telling you either you’ve done a better job than others covering that topic or no one else has given people what they are looking to find. The net is a big place. Anything you can find that is not covered or covered well you should be all over. If you are not unique no one will find you.

If people are frequently searching for something on your website put links to those pages right on your front page. Put those sidebars to good use. No one is going to hunt around your site to find something when he/she can hit the back button to Google and hit the next search result that had been returned.

You’ll find some pages that get visited often but that no one stays to read. Take a hard look at those pages. What is missing? Are they too slow to get to the information someone desires? Are those pages not indepth enough? Or are they too indepth and the reader is looking for a quick and dirty version? Rework those pages too. The metrics for ranking websites are changing and time spend on a site is going to matter more. Also you don’t want people not finding what they want. Or the next time you come up in a search they will skip any pages from your site in the search results.

So when you go through your logs don’t just look at the body count. Put in a little time digging and you’ll find your traffic will grow.

More information:
Know who is visiting your website