On 01/17/2011 10:31 AM, Jeremy Nell wrote:

I am new to Gimp (converted from Photoshop because I migrated to Ubuntu). Gimp is great and I'm enjoying its speed and power. But I am struggling with a few things, some of which I'll mail to this list and hopefully get some feedback.

When scaling an image, Gimp keeps the original image underneath the one being scaled. I guess this is so that I can visually compare the difference in size before applying.

However, this becomes less intuitive when you're dealing with, say, a detailed drawing. When scaling, lines appear everywhere and it becomes messy. I don't seem to have an option to hide the full-size image underneath; the closest is to give it a grid or outline, neither of which are helpful in this scenario. Even making the underneath image 50% of its opacity would be more helpful.

Or am I doing something wrong?

More like the latter I think... From what you describe, you are using the Scale tool, that is really meant to adjust layers over each other (and this will produce a smaller layer without reducing the global image size).

If you want to scale the whole image. you should use the aptly located and named Image/Scale image :-)

Advice: in Edit/Preferences/Tools make sure that your scaling method is the right one: normally the best one is Sinc, but since it takes some CPU (though it's really OK with most images on recent PCs), the default method is a somewhat less CPU-intensive one.