Gimp Tips: Dealing With Jagged Edges

One of the first images that I submitted (to various photo submission sites) was this birthday 

balloon illustration.

From a distance it looks pretty good and most places accepted it. However a few places wouldn't take it because the edges were pixelated (jagged). I'm not sure how I missed that ... but I did. Here is a close up.

Now what do I do? I did some research and found a way to kind of fix it. It was actually not that hard since I had the balloons on transparent layers.

 


I simply duplicated the balloon, and added a Gaussian blur (Filters > blur > Gaussian blur > setting of 4) to the bottom layer.

and merged them together (Select the top balloon layer  > Right click it and choose Merge Down)


You can see here that it's not smooth but the edges are softer so the problem is less obvious. Thankfully, the file is big enough so I can scale it down and it becomes even less noticeable.

   

MagCloud- An Exciting New Discovery for Me

Lorene Troyer

I haven't posted for awhile- I thought I'd share about a company, MagCloud, I heard about while watching a Youtube video by Barney Davey.  I'm quite excited about this company because of a  business venture I'm working on. I need an economical way to get my products printed (since I don't want to invest in a commercial printer just yet).

MagCloud is a content publishing web service. It looks like you can publish your own magazines and digests, flyers, posters etc. The prices seem to be very reasonable. I'm thinking it would probably be a good way for churches and businesses to create economical but professional looking bulletins and other hand-outs.

I read several reviews, most of them were favorable. One complaint was that the paper for the magazine cover seemed too flimsy. After I get some items printed, I'll let you know what I think.