CHAPTER 5. IMAGE CROP AND RESIZE 53
Adobe Photoshop is a commercial product costing around $700. Many
schools make the educational version available to their students. The edu-
cational price is typically half or less compared to the regular price.
Gimp(more properly, The Gimp) is a free alternative to Photoshop, and has
many of the same features. Gimp is popular among open-source advocates
and people with small budgets. (Free is a really good price.) Appendix 26
(page 246) has more.
Since students are typically “poor, starving students,” I have chosen to
demonstrate photo editing using The Gimp. Also, it helps that I can install
it on any machine I want for free. Because Gimp is free and has capabilities
roughly equal to Photoshop, Gimp is the photo editor that I most frequently
use.
Training: It is also said that the most expensive part of any computing
system is the training. Nothing is really free. Training is usually required.
Capabilities between the two editors are quite similar, but Photoshop prob-
ably has better support in terms of how-to books and documentation.
5.2 Cropping Removes Pixels
Cropping removes part of an image. In this example I use Gimp 2.8 and show
the steps I took to create a 1000 by 288 banner for a WordPress website.
In this picture, I put a red
box around the part of the
webpage that is the header
image. I intend to replace
it with my own image. I
want to find out its dimen-
sions.