Greetings Gentlefolk Gimpers,
My problem: new book cover, adding faces clipped from other photos to the cover. I want to distort the photos a little (the photos are of real people, probably nice people undoubtedly totally unlike the vile characters in the book). I tried the 'distort' option but no matter the parameters I entered, the image didn't change noticably. I just want to distort them a little, leaving them still looking human but less recognizable. A photo editor I tried to use a year ago had a feature where I could select (rectangle or ellipse) an image and then drag one dimension and stretch/shrink either vertical or horizontal without affecting the other: that would probably work but I can't locate a similar function on Gimp. I'm using Gimp 2.10.6 on 64-bit Windows 10. Any suggestions/comments appreciated.
Thanks and regards. Stay safe, Alex

Try the "Warp Transform" tool.

The new tool is quite different to the old Gimp warp tool. I've used both for doing caricatures. I think you can still select a region of an image and warp that, then merge down to the original image. That was the best way of face distorting with the old tool.

About the only difference I remember from the old "iwarp" tool is that the old warp tool would let you save the distortions in frames. That made it great for animation, unfortunately the new one doesn't. You'll need to do it manually for that.

Thanks, guys,
Tried the 'Warp Transform' but the image didn't seem to change at all. Varied the parameters -- still no change. I'm sure the tool has some function, but so far it has done nothing as far as I can tell. It seems as if there should be a second image that the image 'warps' to, but how do I select that other image? How do I get to pick the point during that warp where the image I want is available? Any further/other suggestions?
Thanks, Alex

It works perfectly, you just don't know how to use it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etkvjiiGs1c

Make sure the preview boxes are ticked in lower toolbox. Also take the size slider up until you see it warping.