I noticed that one of the tasks I often perform in Gimp comes down to making a different aspect ratio version of a simple PNG (an icon with a simple gradient background for example). They can be resized in a visually appealing way by enlarging the canvas, and simply sampling the pixels on the border of the image to fill up the new space.
My usual workflow:
- Set bigger canvas size without scaling image (for example, twice the canvas width, with original little image in the center)
- Set layer to image size (So I can edit the empty space)
- Select a small "stripe" of the background gradient, copy, paste, drag and press the key so it snaps to horizontal movement.
- Copy/paste bigger and bigger stripes, until I reach the edge of the canvas.
This can be a bit labour intensive. Is there a quicker way to do this, or maybe a way to automate the "stretch this 1px-wide selection to the edge of the canvas" part?