Basic help with Gimp
 

I've gotten pretty good at using the Gimp for photo editing and such. In fact, I can do just about anything with it except for the really simple things I need all the time. Here are the simple things I can't figure out:

1) Make a square/rectangle outline (2 dimentional)
2) Make a circle/oval outline (2 dimentional)
3) Just draw a frickin' line. The straight-line tool where you click and drag the mouse to make a line.

Pretty simple stuff you would think. I can do this stuff in KolourPaint. Can I do it in Gimp?

1. Select a rectangle with free select or fixed, fill it with a color, shrink the selection by a number of pixels and use ctrl+k to cut it. What's left is a nice border.
2. Same way
3. Use a draw tool like the pencil or the brush, click onces where you want to start and use ctrl+shift to get straight lines and click onces for the end point. You can also turn on the grid to aid.

Since we're asking easy questions, here's one. I have absolutely no experience with The Gimp, or any graphics editor.

What I want to do is take a .png file I have for an icon and reduce it's size by about 25% without losing quality in appearance. Can I do that?

When you reduce the size by 25%, you're reducing the number of pixels in the image. There's probably going to be some inevitable loss!

But to minimize the loss in quality, do this:

1. Open the file in The Gimp.

2. Under the "Image" menu, select "Scale Image".

3. Select the new desired size. ALSO SELECT "CUBIC (BEST)" FOR THE SCALING METHOD. The default scaling method might be bilinear. Bilinear's good, and you probably wouldn't notice the difference, but it's not "the best".

4. Choose "Save As" under the File menu to save the image under a different file name.

Thank you Moloko. Much help indeed.

One correction though. To do the straight line, you press Alt+Shift. Not Ctrl+Shift. I played with it a little bit and figured it out.

It is Alt+Shift...oops.

(Enjoy)