Graphic Design - Gimp Example

So this is just an example to help solve the issue of the layer boundaries in gimp messing with editing images. Let us start with two pictures, a picture of Yoona from Girl's Generation and Psy doing his Gangnam style.

First we use the normal editing techniques, in this example, the picture is not clearly defined enough for the magic wand tool/fuzzy select tool so we can't use that to quickly get rid of the background on the image we want to superimpose on to the other. So we can just use the lasso tool, and invert to get a rough selection of what we want to get rid of.

Then we have to create an alpha channel so that we can make our background transparent.

Then we cut the section out

Then use the erase tool to get rid of the extra background space and crop the picture. As you can see the layer size is clearly defined here.

This is where the issues begin. As you can see by the yellow box, the boundary of that layer is much smaller than the actual picture because we copy and pasted it in. 

This becomes a major problem if we want to enlarge the picture like so. In order to remove that background simply select the layer that you want to work in and change the visibility to that layer only.

 This results in an inaccurate boundary when we try to view the picture as a composite.

So in order to get this to work properly, all we have to do is select the layer with Psy, and create a new layer from visible by right clicking on the layer and selecting the new from visible option.

This readjusts the size of the layer to that of the whole image so that you can now scale properly, and so we finish this up by anchoring the layer after scaling. The reason why you need to anchor the layer is because the way scaling is coded into gimp is that a temporary manipulatable layer is created. This means you aren't actually on the main layer you are trying to work on until it has been anchored.

And here is the final result! Psy photo bombing Yoona.

Computer Science - Gimp Unwanted Feature

While using GIMP, I realized that sometimes there'd be times in which the layer I was working on was't well defined.

Notice how the yellow box doesn't quite line up with the edges. What is happening here is that the yellow box defines the boundaries of the current layer you are on. Unlike as in other image processing software such as photoshop where the boundary size is fixed to the canvas size that you define for the entire image.

This is to allow for different layer sizes so that you can minimize the amount of data each layer requires. The reason for this is because Gimp's functionality was designed on much older computers, and so minimizing the size of the image could be seen as a feature. However, none of its modern competitors have incorporated this feature because it significantly adds to the complexity of manipulating the image, with little to no benefit since the computing power of the average computer has gone up significantly. I will go over an example of an easy way to change how you use gimp in order to more easily use gimp, especially when copy and pasting is done, which completely messes with the boundary of a layer.