2. Advanced Image editing Aim: In this lesson, you will learn: Tejas: We have some pictures with us. We want to insert these pictures in a story that we are writing. Jyoti: Some of the pictures need modification before we can use them in the story. We are searching for an application for editing pictures. Moz: There are many applications available for editing images like Gimp, mtPaint, etc. Let us explore ‘mtpaint’ which is a simple image editing application with various utilities. Tejas: OK..lets explore mtPaint...! (double clicks on the icon of mtPaint) Jyoti: Let us use File-> Open option to open one of the pictures we have and explore different options available. 6 Jyoti: Can we change the colors in the pictures to make them more colorful? Can we add text to this picture? Also can we select some portions of the image (picture) for the story? Moz: Yes. You can do all these and many more. These are part of the image editing features. Image editing concept Image editing is typically done in two ways: 1. Changing the image by manipulating the attributes like size, colour, contrast etc, Concept 2. By adding new attributes like shapes, text or even doing some new painting. Moz: Let us now see the first type of image manipulation one by one. To select a specific portion of the picture, you can use the ‘Crop’ utility. Crop an image To crop an image: 1. Click on the ‘Make Selection’ icon from the toolbar. Skill 2. Select the required portion of the image. 3. From ‘Image’ option on the menubar, select ‘Crop’ to crop the image. Only the selected portion is retained. Tejas: Suppose we want to reduce the size of this image. Can we do it without loosing some part of the image. Moz: Yes. You can. This is called scaling of the image. Change the Scale of an image To Scale of an image: 1. From ‘Image’ option on the menubar, select ‘Scale Canvas’. Skill 2. In the pop up window, enter the desired width and height of the canvas and click OK. The canvas is set to the new size.selected portion is retained. 7 Jyoti: We have also seen some pictures which are in black and white. We want to make this Kho kho picture black and white and insert it in in our story. Moz: Pictures in black and white are called grayscale images. These images are composed only of different shades of black. Explore whether grayscale option is available in mtPaint? Tejas: Yes. I found it..! It is under the ‘Effects’ option on the menubar. Jyoti: I clicked it..and see how the same picture looks in grayscale ! Moz: This are some of the options, we have used for manipulating the image. We will now see some of the options by which you can add other interesting things to the image. Tejas: We want to add some text to these pictures. Let us try the toolbar option: Adding text.............. 1. Click on the ‘Paste text’ ( ) option on the toolbar. 2. In the displayed window, enter the text to be inserted. Also select the font, font size and style. Then click ‘Paste Text’ button. Skill 3. The typed text appears in 4. Move the text box and place it where you want. the middle of the image. Then either right click the mouse or press the ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard. The text is now placed in the desired spot. 8 Moz: Apart from inserting text, we can also add shapes in images, as shown below. Basic picture Picture with shapes added Adding shapes to the image ------------- To Scale of an image: 1. From the toolbar, choose the ‘Make Selection’ button ( ) 2. Select the area in the image where you want to insert a shape. 3. Now click the desired shape from the toolbar. Skill 4. The selected area is filled with the clicked shape. Jyoti: We have a picture of Tejas running down the street...I would like to add some interesting thing to this image. Can we add some speed lines to make him look running faster? Moz: One way to introduce this is using the ‘Smudge’ option on the toolbar. When you use this option and drag the cursor, the colour in that area is smeared or blurred. 9 Jyoti: Wow! now the picture is full of life with ‘Smudge’ effect. Tejas, looks like you can run really fast. Moz: Yes. There are many such tools like flood fill, draw straight lines, draw and fill shapes etc. which can be used to bring life to your images. Now that you are done with the editing of the images, save them. Jyoti: If I press ‘Ctrl+S’ now, it will overwrite on the original image, and I will lose the original image. So let us save this image using ‘Save as’ which allows us to change the filename and also retain the original image. Moz: Good thinking Jyoti! Alternatively, you could have also made a copy of the image with another name before you started editing this image. Tejas: While saving, under the ‘File Format’ option, I see so many options like GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, etc. Which file format should we use to save the image? Moz: File format is usually decide based on the final usage of that image. This image that you have made is going to be used in your story which would be a document (to be seen on a computer). So the suggested file format for could be JPG. Now check what was the extension of your original file. Tejas: Original file extension is JPEG. Moz: mtPaint by default will save your file in JPEG format unless you want to change it to another format. Jyoti: What is the difference between these formats? Moz: You must have seen that the word processor files also have different extensions like .txt, .odt, .doc etc. Similar to this the image files too have different formats based on quality and the information the file has. For good quality of a print...use the file which is bigger in size. Small file size will be having lesser data. On the other side use file which is smaller in file size for the web. They would be easier for the download (for on screen display) on the internet. Tejas: But all of them look good on screen. Moz: Yes, but they will perform in different ways if you don’t choose the appropriate file format. For example, a image with big file size will take a lot of time to display on the internet, compared to an image which is smaller in file size. Similarly, an image which is smaller in file size will give an unclear printout and an image which is bigger in file size will give a clearer printout. This is because, the image with bigger file size has more information stored in it. Hence, first consider the purpose for which you are using the image and save it in the format most suitable. For this you can experiment by saving in different formats and check out the difference in the file sizes. 10 A • Commonly used image formats are: GIF, JPG and PNG • Most images online which use limited colors are saved using the PNG format. PNG files are of smaller size and hence quicker to download. • GIF files can be saved with a maximum of 256 colours. Info Due to the small file size it is widely used format for images on the Internet. • JPG file format is capable of displaying millions of colours at once. Hence photographs are always best saved in JPG format. Jyoti: I am curious to know how does the computer save an image? How does it remember the colours and shapes in an image? Moz: Let me explain with a simple example. Suppose I give you an image drawn on a graph paper and you have to copy the image and colour it on to other blank graph paper. How do you go about it? Tejas: First we mark the location and the size of the image on the blank graph paper, based on the image given on the graph paper. we match the squares with colours of the image that has been given to us and create the image on the blank graph paper. Moz: You have actually described the file format of an image. Each square on the graph paper is a pixel on the computer. The pixel has the information of its location, and also the colour. An image is displayed by the computer using the information of the pixels. When you magnify an image you can notice the details of the pixel. For example see the following figure 1. While storing such an image, the computer actually stores the information about the pixels which are black and the pixels which are not-black (white). In the figure 2, the alphabet ‘R’ is magnified to show the colour pixels. 11 A • A computer screen is made of a grid of several dots called pixels. Each pixel has its own address. • The address of a pixel is denoted using its x and y coordinates. Info • Pixel also has information about the colour information it is supposed to display. • In a grayscale picture, each pixel is either black or white. • While storing images in colour, a color is typically represented by three (RGB – Red, Green, Blue). A pixel has the RGB values of the particular colour it is supposed to display. Jyoti: Wow! This is getting more and more interesting.