Whether at home or at work, I rely on Gimp a lot for my image processing needs.
Out of the box, Gimp has a lot of powerful features but, as it is an extensible software, people can add plugins to it to make it more powerful. Yesterday, I came across two excellent Gimp plugins, Liquid Rescale and Resynthesizer, which I would like to share with you.
Liquid Rescale: this open-source plugin resizes pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts. In the example above, the picture has been enlarged while the lady has been preserved. I’ve spent some time with the plugin last night resizing some of my pictures in both the x- and y- directions and the results are impressive.
Resynthesizer: this other open-source plugin restore missing parts in an image. In the example above, the image was rotated and, consequently, some parts were missing (the lower left portion for instance). Resynthesizer can create the missing part from surrounding pixels very quickly. I’ve done some tests last night and the generated portion seamlessly flows into the existing part. Here is an excellent tutorial.
Installation
I run Fedora and both plugins are in the official repositories. For me, this command did it:
yum install gimp-lqr-plugin gimp-resynthesizer
I suppose Debian and its derivatives should have the plugin too. As any open-source software, installation from source is also a possibility.
Have fun!
Hi Avinash,
great information. Indeed for other distros like Ubuntu it’s very simple to install, too:
$ sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry
Thanks for sharing!
While I don’t doubt that GIMP is powerful, I never got used to it. If one day I find myself forced to use it, I will, but for now I am happy with Photoshop and Lightroom. I say I am happy not because I am using paid products, but rather because I have invested time in learning Photoshop and Lightroom, and I would rather spend my free time taking/making photos rather than learning a new software.
I have used the equivalent of Resynthesizer but not that of Liquid Rescale (Liquify under Photoshop?). Have you tried enlargement? I am just curious if they effect is visible on large prints.
Changing subject: Were you happy with the latest game at Anfield? :-)
You’re right about the software. I’m more of a Gimp person but I’m perfectly aware that most people use Photoshop.
As for Liverpool vs Manchester, as you can guess, I’m happy. Watching the England game right now and Gerrard has just scored. Life is cool :-)