Rotate & Crop - a novice's question

Despite having experience with Photoshop, I’m finding it tricky to rotate and crop photos in GIMP. Here’s my issue: I want to level the image (straighten the horizon line) and then crop it. While I can rotate and crop as separate steps, I can’t seem to crop a rotated image and have the resulting edges align perfectly with the horizon or vertical lines in the photo.

I believe in GIMP it will be two actions required to rotate and crop. But the comment here has me confused. If you have made the horizon straight then it should align with the edges. It suggests that you may have distortion that is not corrected or you have not correctly rotated the image. Could you provide a screen shot.

BTW, using the measure tool to straighten the image I can get an automatic crop of the layer, but the canvas is not cropped. So not a perfect solution for you.
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Perhaps way off base, but in GIMP you can rotate the layer/image and the view on the screen. Those are completely different things. The former changes the image, and a crop will get the edges aligned to the screen (as you still view the image at 0 degrees), the latter just changes the way you look at the image, and all cropping operations will look rotated as well (as the image is still in its original position…)


The “view rotation” is useful when drawing with a graphics tablet, to get a more comfortable working angle with the pen. GIMP is still a drawing program, which happens to be very useful for photo editing as well (same as Krita, which has really concentrated on the painter side).

Thanks for the information. I get it. I rotated an image under the view menu which didn’t change the image at all. I shall use the “transform” under the image menu instead.

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Thanks for your info.

All the transform tools have a “clipping” option. The default is adjust but you probably need to set it to Crop to Result. Then probably to tidy up using Image → Fit Canvas to Layers.

For just a straighten, the measure tool is quick.
The Unified transform tool will rotate, apply perspective, scale, in one and save on intermediate interpolations. It is worth getting to know it.

This 50 second demo, first the measure tool, then the united transform. Note the use of Direction → Corrective (Backward)

https://i.imgur.com/dfxofIk.mp4

Thanks. I will look into it.