How to make a simple, stylish poster with GIMP's tiling feature

How to make a simple, stylish poster with GIMP's tiling feature

What I like the most about GIMP is its plain versatility, and ease of use. Especially with the new single-window mode, GIMP has truly become the cozy corner of the digital world where we ptohography-enthusiasts can work peacefully and quietly, all while enjoying a cup of hot coffee and pressing keys on our laptop.

So, posters have become very common nowadays, and while there are different varieties of posters, in my opinion the simple but artistic one created with GIMP's tiling feature is one of the best. What's especially great about this process is that, it only takes a maximum of 5 minutes, even for absolute beginners, and the process is complete, cultivating a beautiful end-result for you for sharing on Facbook, Google Plus, DeviantArt or just print and hang it in your room.

NOTE: Here I have used the shrunk version of every screenshot and image, to reduce the time this page takes to load. So the actual quality isn't displayed here. It's only a minimized version for having a quick look at the thing. 

First of all, it would be better if you have the latest version of GIMP with single-window mode. If you have any previous version installed, just update your repositories and upgrade the system, and you'll get it.

The image I selected, taken by me at Victoria Gardens, Calcutta (India)

So, start GIMP and go to Windows menu and select 'single window mode' if it isn't already selected. Now, open your favourite photo using GIMP's File=>Open dialog. For this tutorial, I've selected the photo to the right. So, first of all, you might see that the Brightness-contrast of the photo is not normal, so we should have to fix that. For this, go to Colours=>Brightness-Contrast and change the levels of brightness and contrast that you'd like. Remember that this changes the values for the entire photo as a whole. Also, as you slide the sliders to change the values, instant preview is shown on the main window, one of the best features of GIMP. If you've accidentally selected any odd value and hit enter, don't panic. Just press Ctrl+Z to undo and effect and retry.

Ok, now that your photo is 'fixed', as per your wish, let us begin with the poster-creation process. Please note that this isn't simply using 'posterize' feature of GIMP on the whole image at once. It utilizes tiling. For this, go to Filters=>Map=>Small Tiles, and click enter (it is by default set to produce 4 tiles, 2 in each row and column), the best to start the process with. So, by now your window looks something like this:

More or less, isn't it? Click to zoom. 

Now, in order to 'express' each of the four smaller images properly, you'll need to add different effects on each of them, separating each from the rest of the poster. For this, there can be many different approaches, but I've personally chosen alteration of colour to be the first process, since it is the easiest. For this, select the 'rectangular select tool' from the toolbox to the left, and then draw a box containing (exactly) the first image. So, the first tile is selected. Now, let us modify its colours a bit.

Go to Colorurs=>Colourify. Now, with the first tile selected, this shows you a preview of how your tile would look like, after 'colourifying'. Let's select a light reddish or scarlet one for this time, to make it seem unreal and abstract. For this, click 'custom colour' and select a light reddish one as per your choice. Hit enter when you've got the colour of your choice.

(You may select anything else you like. I am only mentioning what I did).

Now, select the rectangular select tool once again, and accurately select the second tile, to the right of the first. Go to Colours=>Colourify again, and select the yellow option, to make it appear golden. Do the same thing for the other two boxes, the bottom-left one being sky-blue and the bottom-right being green.

The final result should look this this, giving it an abstract window-pane like effect, with multiple views of the same scene.

After adding colourify effect. 

Now, the time is to add a nice border (optional). For this, select the entire image and go to Filters=>Decoration=>Add border. Select the x and y values of 14 each, and select the colour black. Now, repeat the same process and add another border, a golden one with the same values. This is because black and gold, like red and gold, often enhance one another.

Now, without a slogan or two, no poster is complete. For this, select the text tool and add any text of your choice. Here's what I've done. Use the text tool from the left, and add any text you want, but make sure you've selected a good font, a proper size and certainly a proper colour. I selected the 'Purisha' font to give it a dynamic feeling, and the colour as white to contrast with the background colours. Here's the final result:

Texted properly

Also, make sure you use the Move tool from the toolbox to move the text-box anywhere on the poster. Additionally, add a copyright text if you like. :)

Now, click on each of the 'layers' displayed in the top-right portion of the screen. Right-click each layer and select 'merge down' to have one single, unified layer. 

So, now that the poster is complete, let us export it. For this, select File=>Export and assign a new name to your creation. Make sure you have the extension selected as .jpg, and finally click export. The quality prompt will be displayed, and select 100 as the quality. Not compromising with the quality. You can always shrink the size if you like, to reduce the space occupied by the poster.

IMPORTANT: After exporting, you'll see that the image might occupy a very large size. 13.4 MB in my case. This is partly because the image I originally selected was a large one. It is really inconvenient and not advised to upload such  large file to your Facebook page or anywhere else on the web. But the benefit is, if you have a sufficiently powerful color printer, you can get a very large poster. :D

So, you may once again use GIMP to shrink it, to reduce its size without necessarily reducing the quality. But in my opinion, there's an easier option, Nautilus's image resizing plugin. For this, open your terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter 

After that, restart nautilus using the command

pkill nautilus 

And now, right click on your exported image, select 'resize image' and then select a proper measure for resizing. I guess 1280x960 pixels would be a nice one.

So, here's the final result after resizing.

The final yield. 

Ok, so the poster is ready. Be sure to make a wide range of such posters, and share them with the world, because as they say, sharing is caring. ;)

Till then, happy GIMPing. :)