[Courses] [gimp] Lesson 1: Cropping and Rescaling an Image

[Akkana Peck]

Patricia Peck writes:
> I've been fooling with this, and I think I've got it, but I had some 
> problems.  At first typing 1 in the image window didn't work at all, so 
> I tried '1' with the single quotes, and it jumped to full size before 
> the final '.  Then I couldn't figure out how to get it to go back. 

The quotes aren't needed.  I shouldn't have included them --
that was confusing.  Just hit the 1 key in the image window to
zoom the image to full size.

If it wasn't working before, it's possible that the image window
wasn't focused.  Depending on how you have your window manager set
up, you may need to click in a window before keys you type go to
that window.  Most window managers turn the frame of the active
window a different color from other windows, so you can know which
one will get any characters you type.

> There doesn't seem to be an "undo" for that one.  Finally I hit on 

Zooming is just a view, not anything you change in the image.
So Undo doesn't affect it.  But you can always zoom in or out
with the View->Zoom menu or with the keys.

> Also for me, in 2.0, the key bindings seem to be + and -, not + and =. 
> Was this a typo, or am I weird?

Not a typo, but maybe I wasn't clear.  - always zooms out.
To zoom in, it's either + or =, depending on what version of
gimp you're using.  On most US keyboards, + and = are on the
same key; the only difference is whether you have to hit shift
or not.  Early versions of gimp used = instead of + because it's
easier not to have to press the shift key; but they changed that
in later versions of gimp, perhaps because it's easier on some
non-US keyboards.

But if you don't like the bindings, you can change them!
I was saving that for a later lesson, but I'll mention it now
because it's so nifty.  In gimp, if you pull up a menu for
something you do often that doesn't have a key binding already,
move the mouse over the menu item (but don't click), then hit
the key you want to use (e.g. hit = or + or whatever), the
binding for that function magically changes!  You can see
it change in the menu as you type the key.

This works automatically in gimp 1.2.  Gimp 2 still has this,
but it's harder to find: go into Preferences, click on Interface,
and check "Use Dynamic Keyboard Shortcuts".  Now you can go
back to the menu and assign keys to any function.

> >Try it now!  Try changing the Width to 600, then hitting tab.  
> 
> I sorta forgot the tab, and found by accident that you can change the 
> width to 600 and click OK and the other numbers will change then, right 
> before the image changes.  Either tab or no tab seems to work fine.

Yes, absolutely!  I didn't mean to imply that you *have* to hit tab;
you can change one number and hit OK right away.  I usually hit tab
just to make sure all the numbers look kosher, before I hit OK,
but it's not actually needed.

> This is fun.  I've got to get out there and take pictures to mess with!

:-)

	...Akkana