Posted: 16 Feb 2005

This tutorial will explain how to get edges off an image using The Gimp.



With your image loaded, you want to select the entire image by pressing CTRL-A. That should add a running dotted-line around the edges of your image.



after that, we'll want to round the corners. This can easily be done by using a pre-written script-fu script called "Round".



There are many ways to get there. The easiest way for me, is to go to the top menu and follow Script-Fu -> Selection -> Round.

After that's done, you'll want to enter the rounding value. For this image, 0.2 worked just fine.



After you press OK, you'll see the corners on your selection round themselves out. It's kind of hard to see, so I put a red circle around the rounded part of the selection in the upper left-hand corner of the image. All four corners of the selection will show rounding.



Now it's time to shrink the selection a bit. To do this, right click anywhere on your image and follow the menu to Select -> Shrink.



For this image, I chose 10.0 as the value. Yours may vary, depending on how you want it to look.



After you click OK, you'll see the selection shrink from the borders of your image.



Now we've got the rounded corners, but we want all the edges to have a nice faded look to them. To accomplish this, we simply feather the selection by right clicking on the image and following the menu to Select -> Feather.



In this case, it's probably a good idea to choose the same value you did to shrink your image. I chose 10.0 to shrink, so I chose 10.0 to feather.



When you click OK, you won't notice any difference on your image. This is normal. What you'll want to do now is invert the selection by right clicking on the image and following the menu to Select -> Invert.



When that is done, you'll notice the selection on your image has inverted itself. What was previously selected, is now not selected, and vice-versa.

Now you'll want to delete what is selected, so navigate to Edit -> Clear after right-clicking on your image. (you can also press CTRL-K to do the same thing)



As soon as that is done, you'll have a nice image!



Feel free to play with the different settings in the feather and round settings, to come up with the perfect image.