So you want to make your own banner for your blog? And you want to use those free stock images you see floating around the web. Then this article is tailored just exactly for your needs. Without further ado, let’s get this project started!

First, go get yourself this free photo editing software called Gimp.

Second, prepare your image. It’s better to use an image with 800x600 dimension. Wonder why? Because we are going to crop a part of the image and use it for our banner and we want to get a bigger view of the whole image. Just be careful with the image license agreement.

Next, is to right click on the image then open it using Gimp.

Click the Rect Select tool
select

Set the size option to “fixed size” then adjust the Width and Height values in “px” according to your desired output size.
fixed

Use the Rect Select tool by dragging it to the area of the image which you want to crop then go to edit and select cut.
crop

Select File then click New…
new

Adjust the size of the new image according to the exact size of the “fixed size” (see step5).
size

Go to edit then select paste to place the cropped image to the new blank image.

Save your file and that’s it! Now you have a custom banner for your blog!