Resizing an exact amount for a book cover

[BookLover]

So I really love the amount of creative power and complexity that comes with GIMP, however it doesn't seem like this software was meant to be used for book art design.

So in order to submit a cover for printing, i need an image file that's exactly the same size as the pages within. I've found some nice high-resolution images (which took care to make sure are exempt from copyright infringement) to be used on the front and back of the book, yet when i scale images, the program seems to want to stick to the exact same aspect ratio as was used by those who originally put the picture up online. However, this shouldn't be a problem if the image is larger than the book size i want to create...

For example:

the image is 18.375" X 12.250", the image is pretty and high resolution, and am happy to put it on my book cover/back, but i need to shrink it down to 12.250" X 9.250". If i for example manually change the width in the image to 12" (from 18.375"), gimp automatically changes the height to 8", and if i were to change the height to 9", it would change the width to 8"...

I understand that i could use the crop tool, but if i can't manipulate the image to specific size, then the program is not useful for this purpose.

[rich2005]

You can break the link between width and height in the Image -> Scale dialogue and change each value independently

A very recent similar post https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Changi...5#pid19685

You do realize that your image will distort. All depends on the image how acceptable that is.

[BookLover]

(09-05-2020, 04:37 PM)rich2005 Wrote: You can break the link between width and height in the Image -> Scale dialogue and change each value independently

A very recent similar post https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Changi...5#pid19685

You do realize that your image will distort. All depends on the image how acceptable that is.

I actually figured out with the crop tool you can shrink the image to exactly what you want, i've done that and it should work out fine. The thing that I need is to maintain the resolution so my book doesn't look fugly and customize the image to the interiors...

What kind of distortion occurs with breaking the link? Obviously you distort pages when you make them larger (pixellation expansion...), but what about using that tool to make an image smaller? Is cropping the only way to maintain the quality of the image.

[rich2005]

First thing. Gimp is a raster editor and works in pixels, scaling up or down some of those pixels will be thrown away or will be guessed.

Then there is print resolution. Photographic quality rule of thumb is 300 pixels per inch (ppi) Your high quality 12.25 x 18.375 image might be 882 x 1323 pix @ 72 ppi or 5513 x 3675 pix @ 300 ppi. That has a bigger bearing on quality as anything else. What is the size in pixels of the original image ? What is the size of the image in pixels now?

You can not scale the image with the crop tool could be the scale tool or unified transform from the toolbox. What is the publisher requirements, they should give some guidance. 12.25 x 9.25 at some printing resolution ?