GIMP Plus

A tutorial after a long time, in this tutorial you will learn to add a ” Sleek Frosted Glass Caption bar to a photo ” . Here’s the final outcome of the tutorial.

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Before starting this tutorial I would like to say a few words to you . First of all I AM BACK! .Its over one and half year I had written or updated anything on GIMP Plus or any other place on the web. The culprit , studies.I was preparing for an Entrance Exam named IIT JEE which grants you to admission to the most prestigious colleges of India and the World , Indian Institute of Technology.I am happy to say that my hard work has paid off and I have succeeded.

Lets get back to GIMP , before leaving the web world , I had done a lot with the GIMP, created free Icon Packs , wallpapers ,templates ,tutorials and much more. I had also done quite a lot of freelancing jobs. Now when I am back , I see a lot of changes , unfortunately sad ones , in the GIMP world. There are very few regularly updated GIMP Tutorial websites left on the web sphere. The cause most probably being there is very less profit in the field of GIMP.Not many people are willing to provide private ads on GIMP blogs.Even the adsense ads pay very less. The same is with GIMP Plus , I have to spend around 250$ a year to maintain GIMP Plus alone and I have not managed to even get one tenth of the amount in two years.Also writing a good quality detailed tutorial takes around 4 - 8 hrs , which is quite large span of time.

But still I will try to maintain a blog which is regularly updated and full of High Quality GIMP Tutorials.

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Step 1

Coming back to the tutorial, start by opening a photograph of your choice with The GIMP.In my case I have used a Taj Mahal Photo found by Google Image Search.

Step 2

Create a rectangular selection touching the side borders at near bottom of the image of appropriate size and fill it with white in a new layer named “White Strip” as shown below.

Step 3

Set the layer opacity to 20% or 30% as per the background.

Step 4

Switch to the background layer or photo layer.With the selection on go to Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and apply it with a radius of 20px.You should have the following result by now

Step 5

Now go to Select Menu -> Grow and Grow selection by 1px.Create a new layer called “border” and put it behind the white strip layer and fill it with white.Change its opacity to 40%.With the selection on, go to filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow and apply it with the following settings.

Step 6

Now select the white strip layer and delete the selected part from the border layer to have the following.

Step 7

You image is near ready. Just add the text with grey color and reduce the transparency to suit the caption bar suitably to get the final image.

Enjoy! Comments and queries are welcome