Tired of simple white borders for your digital photos? GIMP has a simple filter that adds a frame around the photo to make it look like it is a film slide – complete with black frame, sprocket holes, and labels.
Turn your digital photo into a film slide using the Slide filter in GIMP.
Adding a border around a digital photo adds visual interest to make it look more interesting, and can focus the viewer’s attention on the main subject as well. If you’re feeling fanciful, you can easily add a decorative border around your photo to turn it into a film slide. Here’s how.
The original photo in landscape orientation. Photo from morguefile.com.
With your photo open in GIMP, select the Filters > Decor > Slide command from the main menu.
The pop-up dialog box for the Slide filter.
The “Slide” dialog box for the filter pops up with various options to customise the appearance of the slide.
The Slide filter can also be applied to a photo in portrait orientation.
Filter options
The “Text” option allows you to enter a label for the slide. You can use it to caption your photo. Or you could type in “Kodak” to emulate a real slide. For “Number”, type a number from 1 to 37.
The “Font” and “Font color” options lets you specify the font face and colour of the text and numbers adorning the slides of the slide. Leaving them to the default values produces the most realistic results.
Leave the “Work on copy” option checked so that a duplicate copy of the photo will be used for the slide effect and the original is left unchanged. Press the “OK” button and GIMP churns out your slide as a new image which you can save as a JPEG file under a different name.
Points to note
If the original photo is in landscape orientation, the black frames with sprocket holes and labels will be added to the top and bottom sides of the photo. If the original photo is in portrait orientation, the frames will be added to the left and right sides.
The colour of the sprocket holes will be based on the current background colour in the colour swatches in the Toolbox. So if you want the holes to be white, remember to reset the background colour to white by pressing “D” on the keyboard, before applying the filter.
If the aspect ratio of the photo is anything other than 3:2, it will be cropped into that ratio. If you want to control exactly how the photo is to be cropped, crop it yourself to 3:2 first before applying the filter. This will ensure you don’t end up with half a face being cropped out of the photo.
Letting the filter crop to 3:2 aspect ratio may have a blinding effect.
Use the crop tool to do your own cropping to crop it exactly the way you want it.
Tags: GIMP, image editor, photo editor, tips