02.23.07

Artistic photography with Gimp

Posted in Photo & Images at 1:29 am by admin

A little tutorial for modify a photograph

Some days ago, I bought a MacBook Pro, and my first geek day was dedicated totally to install and play with the mac version of GIMP or compiling it under Fink, but, finally I decided to use GIMPShop.

This afternoon I tried to use this fantastic program to make my first artistic photography (under mac) :

This one has been done using layers of the same base pict, but setting the mode of how GIMP compose the layers.

I want to explain a little how to make an image like the previous one.

The original image is:

After loading it into GIMP, the dialog/window called “Layers” must be actived. Now, right-click the thumbnail showed in Layer dialog and select “Duplicate Layer“, rename this new layer as “Inverted Grey Mask”. As it indicates the name, we must invert the image. With regular versions of GIMP, we can do this action using the menu Layers -> Colors -> Invert, but in GIMPShop, the command is under Image -> Adjustments -> Invert . Once inverted, right-click the thumbnail of layer, and now, select “Add Layer Mask” and check “Greyscale copy of layer“

At this point, changing the mode associated to the masked layer, we can play to familiarize with the effects available, and we can see how the final image is modified.

Well, we need another copied layer from the base , renaming it as “Grey Mask”. This new will be used without inverting colors.

Now selecting mode “Multiply” for the inverted, and “Divide” for the normal we can begin to see some interesting results. We can improve the effects enormously bluring the mask images. To do this, click on the desired mask thumbnail (the border indicating which thumbnail/images are selected must jump to the clicked one), and select Filer -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur , the values for vertical and horizontal will depend of the size, I use a value of 20×20 for a photos of 3000×2000 . Another modifier “nice” to be used in layers is its opacity.

Finally we will add another layer (Copied of first one, as usual ), and in its mask we will use the “Neon” edge detect filters instead of bluring. Using high values in the filter dialog we can exaggerate the results. The Neon filter generate a colored edge-detect with showy colors, is better to normalize it de-saturating de mask layer after Neon ( Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate ).

In next 4 images, we can see the progress, activating each layer (clicking on the eyes in Layer dialog)

This is everything! I hope that you like it.

Permalink