GIMP Version: 2.8.4
Operating System: Windows
GIMP Experience: Beginner Level

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Hi everyone, I have joined the forum in the hope that someone maybe able to help me or to find out whether what I am trying to do isn't possible! I have downloaded gimp to try and improve the quality of a photograph. I have been reading around but can't find exactly what I need to do (or if there is anything I can do). At a later stage I will try and improve the colour, shadowing etc but at the moment I am trying to find out if I can smooth out some pixilation on the photograph. I have cropped out a small part from the middle of a photo and am trying to enlarge it to approx 4.5"x3" but when I do that there is some pixilation (think this is the right word!) on the photo. I have read that to improve this with photoshop you would use bicubic smoother and in gimp just use 'cubic' but I have no idea what to do with the settings in cubic to try to improve the image. I've clicked on 'image' then 'scale image' but have no idea what to do next! If anyone had any tips that would be great - I've clicked the help menu but can't seem to find specifically what to do.
Thanks for any help!
Lucy

G'MIC (gimp plug-in you can download/install if you don't have yet) has the most complete set of smoothing techniques to improve an enlarged picture.
Give it a try.
(or post an example image of yours and you will find a lot of collaborative chatters to help you)

Hi, Thanks for your reply. Since posting I have made a bit of progress using the 'selective gaussian blur' to smooth out the pixels a little. But now I have got another query! So only part of the photo has pixilation on it, the other part is OK. I don't want to blur the part that is OK so I have chopped the part that needs the pixilation removing and smoothed the pixels with the selective gaussian blur but now I can't work out how to put the chopped part back into the original photo? Not sure if that makes sense but hopefully someone may be able to help? Thanks Lucy

Normally you don't "chop" the parts you want to work on. The right techniques are either:

Working all on the same layer:
1) make a "selection" (lasso, scissor...) of the part you want to work on
2) often, "feather" the selection (ie, make it progressive along the borders)
3) apply the "fix" (blur, color change, whatever...) that will apply only to the pixels in the selection (and only partly yo the pixels in the feathered area, so the fixed part will blend smoothly in the rest ...)

With a separate layer:
1) make a "selection" (lasso, scissor...) of the part you want to work on
2) often, "feather" the selection (ie, make it progressive along the borders)
3) copy to a new layer (Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste, Layer/New layer, or in "fingers only" mode: Ctrl-C,Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Shift-N)
4) remove the selection (Select/None)
5) apply the fix to the new layer. You can be a bit more brutal on the settings because you can
6) adjust the opacity of the fixed layer to set the amount of fix later

another way is to use the "blur/sharpen tool: selective blurring using a brush"
it's the tool which resembles a drop, the last but two in the tool-dock
with that tool you operate directly on each single area you want blur using a brush (a soft one is preferable)

i feel the question of upscaling hasnt yet been answered

i didnt know you could do that with the usual scaling, and get a good result
but then again a buddy told me there are filters for that, but it can take quite a lot of time for the computer to calculate

is that correct ?

and are there any in Gimp/G'MIC ?

Thankyou both for your replies. I am unsure how I would make a 'selection' and then 'feather' the selection? Please could someone explain this is more detail?

Thanks very much for the links!
PS I'm interested to see if anyone has anymore info on the upscaling aswell!

under G'MIC you find two experimental filters to double the size of an image:
under Testing
- under Garagecoder
--xbr2x
-under Iain Fergusson
--iain-2x

Hi everyone, I'm making good progress with improving my photo and am pleased with how its going. I've used tips from everyone so thank you again for the help. The only thing is I'm unable to get the G'MIC plug in to work and would like to try this to see if I can make more improvements. I used a tutorial on you tube to install it but it isn't appearing in my filters menu. I downloaded the one for windows 7 64 bit which showed in my downloads as gmic-gimp_1.5.6.1_beta_win64. I double clicked on the file and there were 4 files within it. I then copied and pasted these into gimp 2.8 plug ins folder but when I opened gimp there was an error message that said 'the application was unable to start correctly (0X0000076). Click OK to close the application.' At the time the error message popped up the start up box of gimp was saying querying new plug ins on it. Gimp then opened OK but no GMIC option was under the filters. Would anyone know how I can sort the problem out? Thanks

There are some tutorials in our text tutorial section on how to install GMIC in Windows
viewtopic.php?p=29781#p29781

Hi, Thank you for your reply. I've removed my original download and re-started from the instructions given on the link you gave. However, once I download the plug in and then click open how would I go about installing it to ' C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\.gimp-2.6\plug-ins' please or in my case the 2.8 version? The following file ' gmic-gimp_1.5.6.1_beta_win64' is in my downloads but I don't know how to then install it? Thanks for any help.

In Windows you should have a separate .gimp folder. It will be your user folder. If someone doesn't answer first, I will close Linux and go to my windows drive to see how I have it set up there.

im on win7 64 as well, lucymay

installing fonts, scripts and plug-ins mostly works without installing in the usual windows double clicking exe file sense

you just copy and paste the files into the folder, and thats it
at least thats how it always worked for me, but i now see you already tried that

In my Windows, I go to C:\Users\Molly\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins Just drop the files in there. I think there will be a gmic and an exe file. In Linux there is just the one file...GMIC

Hi, Thanks for the reply Molly - I'm not able to get that to work though. When I copy and paste the files into the gimp-2.8\plug-ins folder and open gimp I get the error message 'the application was unable to start correctly (0X0000076). Click OK to close the application.' Think I might give up for now! The image is coming along nicely but just want to get rid of a couple of shadows which will hopefully be more simple. Please can someone tell me how to get my gimp to look like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bpLea6NXQ as I'm trying to follow these instructions but I don't have the 2 separate boxes at each side. Mine just has the photo and the things along the top! Thanks again!

lucymay, are you saying you have no toolbox, no layertabs, just the image and the menu ?
no docks ?
how do you do anything at all ?

if you accidentally closed them, you can find them under 'Windows -> Recently Closed Docks'

you can change docks under 'windows' in the menu
if you just hid them, you can press 'Tab'

To reset Gimp window positions.
Edit | Preferences | Window Management | Reset Saved Window Positions to Default Values