Gimp: Cropping

I appreciate all the comments and feedback I've received from others. Just to clarify, I am not a professional Gimp user. I am slowly learning myself and I enjoy sharing tutorials with fellow artisans who may have trouble or unsure of how to photo edit. This Gimp series is for beginner users :)

Today's lesson will be on cropping a photo. Cropping means to cut it, make it smaller, remove outer parts of an image. If you have something in your picture that you do not like, you can crop it out.

Here's our before picture.. too much white space! I'll teach you how to "cut out" the white space. Note: You can click on any picture to enlarge.



1. Open Gimp. Open your picture by clicking on File --> Open. Locate your picture, then choose Open. Another method is to right click on the picture, and choose "Edit with Gimp".

2. On the Toolbox (left side), click on the "Rectangle Select Tool" (first row, first option)


3. Click on your photo, and create a box around the area that you want to KEEP. (Tip: you can drag the edges on the side to make it bigger or smaller)


4. Now, click on Image (on the top) and select "Crop to Selection".
Now we've cropped out the useless white space that was in the picture. Here's the after picture. No more excess white space!


If you would like to see a specific Gimp tutorial, or have a question about editing a photo on Gimp, please leave your questions/comments/suggestions below or you can send me an email directly.

Next week, I will show you how to cut an image out of background.