Andre Noel

On my last post I wrote about the “Liquid Rescale Plug-in” for Gimp and published an image that I resized. Now I’ll show how to make it step-by-step.

First I choose a picture. The original size was 2048×1536 pixels.

Then I choose Layer > Liquid Rescale…

I changed the width to 1500 and “OK”:

Well, this is no good. The image was resized, but the plug-in didn’t know what was important on the image.

So I backed up the original and created a new transparent layer to identify what was important on the image:

On this new layer I filled with black what I want to preserve (I think it would be any color).

The new layer after painting (the white part is transparent):

Following, I selected the photo layer, then I choose Layer > Liquid Rescale…, but now I set my new layer as the area to preserve.

Finally, I executed the script and voi là!

OBS: I did the same thing on my three years old computer running Ubuntu Feisty (Athlon XP 2000+, 512Mb RAM DDR), and on my new computer on my work, running win XP (Pentium 4, 3.0, 512Mb RAM DDR2). On my computer the process was really really really faster.

Some time ago I saw this post about a super horizontal/vertical resize algorithm which preserves the proportions of what is important on an image. Yesterday I was reading unread posts on Planet Ubuntu when I saw this post of Jorge Bernal where he says that already exists a plugin for GIMP of this algorithm (this is why I love free software).

Well, I installed it on my computer and made a test with my picture. Look the “before” and “after”:

If you want to play (and I think you will), download it for your plataform. After install it will be available on “Layer” menu.