The default value for this is Cubic, but to retain the best quality it would better to use Sinc (Lanczos3). This icon shows that the Width and Height values are locked with respect to each other, meaning that changing one value will cause the other to change in order to keep the same aspect ratio (no strange compression or stretching in the image).įor example, if you knew that you wanted your image to have a new width of 600px, you can enter that value in the Width input, and the Height will automatically change to maintain the aspect ratio of the image:Īs you can see, entering 600px for the width automatically changes the height to 627px.Īlso notice I have shown a different option under Quality → Interpolation. You’ll also notice a small chain just to the right of the Width and Height entry boxes. If you know one of the new dimensions you’d like for the image, fill in the appropriate one here. In the Scale Image dialog, you’ll find a place to enter new values for Width and Height. This will then open the Scale Image dialog: To resize the image to new dimensions, we need only invoke the Scale Image dialog:

Notice that the information at the top of the window shows the current pixel dimensions of the image (in this case, the pixel size is 1225×1280). View of the GIMP canvas, with information at the top of the window. The thing to notice for this example is that by default the window decoration at the top of GIMP will show you some information about the image. When you first open your image in GIMP, chances are that the image will be zoomed so that the entire image fits in your canvas. The image we’ll be using to illustrate this with is The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared.

This is a very simple task to accomplish in GIMP easily. In this case you will often want to scale the image down to a smaller size more suitable for your use. It’s a common problem that you may have an image that is too large for a particular purpose (embedding in a webpage, posting somewhere online, or including in an email for instance). In keeping with the spirit of the predecessor to this page, I will be using images from the Astronomy Picture of the Day ( APOD), provided by NASA.Īll you need to know to follow these quick examples is to be able to find your image and open it:įile → Open Changing the Size (Dimensions) of an Image (Scale) ¶ Changing the Size (Dimensions) of an Image (Scale).Hopefully this will lead to learning even more powerful image editing capabilities that GIMP is capable of as well.įor quick access, these are the four main points I’ll cover in this quick tutorial:

It is my hope that these few examples will help to solve those small, quick modifications that you may need to apply to an image. Even if you don’t have time to learn advanced computer graphics, GIMP can still be a very useful and handy tool for quick image modifications. So you installed GIMP on your computer, congratulations! GIMP is a very powerful image manipulation software, but don’t let that intimidate you.

Gimp