Stressing The Gimp

Colour palette creation

2010-08-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

So there is this magazine that you have got to layout or the webpage which is longing for a new design. But how to you keep colour consistent? Not all colors match against each other.

For this purpose you could create an image in that just serves as canvas for color picking.

So lets start with some random base color. Open up an image(not to big 640x480 should do it) and fill the layer with your desired colour your layout shall be based upon:

Next we add a new layer and fill it with a black/white gradient from left to right and set its mode to "Multiply". Create a horizontal guide to ease the creation of a straight gradient:

This way we already got the colours variations from normal to dark. Let's proceed with the normal to white variations. To get there we duplicate the layer containing the gradient, set its mode back to "Normal" and remove its black part via "Layer" -> "Transparency" -> "Color to Alpha" and the select pure black as the colour to be removed:

But we not only want variations of the colour but also of suplement colour. Therefore we duplicate the layer that has its mode set to "Multiply" and set it to "Difference":

This yields in three layers that can be combined freely to achieve many many matching colours when getting pickes with the color picker. Just ensure that you check "Sample merged" in the picker's tool-options.

This "rigg" could be extended by adding a gradient that slowly fades to grey from the base-colour as an example.

Adjustable old film effect

2010-08-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

We will be creating an effect that tries to fake some kind of darkening on the edge of an old film-roll and some noise.

So let's make a start with the following image:

We duplicate the layer and apply the Gaussian Blur Filter as follows:

Now we create a new white layer and apply a radial gradient to it right into the middle of the layer:

To get the right position for your gradient you should use some generated guides. Image -> Guides -> New Guide (by percent). Create two of them at 50%. One vertical and horizontal each.
Now scale the layer in width to about 160% of its size:

Apply the Curves-Tool and a Gaussian blur as follows:

Add a layer mask to our blured layer and copy the layer containing our modified gradient into it:

To get the darkening on the edges we select the whole image via Ctrl + A, select the mask, copy its content via Ctrl + C and paste it back into the image and create a new layer from the floating selection. Invert this new layer and set its mode to "Multiply".

The final step is to add some noise to the darkening layer. Therefore we will be resizing it to 50% of its size, add some HSV-Noise (Filters -> Noise -> HSV Noise):

Now scale it back to its original size but with "Interpolation" set to "None". This way the noise wont get blured and it will stay as crisp as possible.
If you like you still can add some sharpening filter to the layer with the noise.
The cool thing about this setup is that you still can choose the amount of blur and darknes by just modifying the layers' "Opacity"

How to make proper use of 'Unsharp Mask'

2010-07-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

At first sight this tool might produce some nice sharpening-results and thus is used very often. Well it can indeed produce nice sharpening if used properly and with care.
Most people tend to make to much use of this tool.

For the sake of demonstration we will be using the following image. It provides a nice contrast and is slightly unsharp.

Instead of applying the effect once we will be using it three times. So please create three duplicates of the base layer. Make the top two layers invisible and apply 'Unsharp Mask' to the second layer from bottom:

Don't be scared about the rather hight value of the 'Amount' slider. We will be reducing this otherwise later.

No let's proceed with the next layer. We apply the same effect just with some reduced Radius:

The top Layer should get the same effect with only a radius of at most 2 pixels. But this massively depends on your overall image-size.

The last step is to blend all layers into the original by settings their 'Opacity' to about 30% each. But you should fiddle around a bit with these settings until you somehow found a good mixture. CG is much about trial'n'error while learning.

Result:

This was just one short entry to somehow push you into a new direction. What you should alwas remember that one effect alone will never ever produce any good result. It is always the combination and the choice of effects that matters. Not so much intensity or complexity of one single effect. Complexity is achieved by adding several single and simple effect and the interaction of theses effects is what blows your mind .

Awesomeness of THE CHANNEL MIXER

2010-07-21T05:30:00.000-07:00

The Channel Mixer function is a really nifty tool when it comes to changing the mood in an image, roughly changing the color situation in the image or applying some really freaky color-mess in a pic.
The third one is rather easy. So I will leave this to your own experiments.
The mentioned change of color can be done with one or two layers. So we take an image like:

We duplicate this layer and fire upon the top layer the Channel-Mixer(Colors - Components - Channel Mixer) dialogue and apply following settings:

Now we are done after setting the top layers mode to "Hard/Soft Light". Both modes yield good but very different results:

As you might have noticed the Channel Mixer also produces good results in converting an image to greyscale since it offers more space for tweaking.

Now we want to exploit the region of color modification guided by our friend the Channel Mixer.
We will be using the same pic as above. Make a fresh start and duplicate the layer again, and fire up the Channel-Mixer again with following settings and output:

You should be very careful with the sliders. They work as follows: in the red channel the red-slider is at 100 by default because the red channel is filled with 100% - guess what - yes - red. but with the channel-mixer you are now able to mix other colors into the red-channel. so if you ADD some blue in the red-channel you should substract some in the the others.
This will somehow shift the amount of blue to other regions in the picture and thus creating another mood. This is very powerfull since you can combine it with layer-masks and layer-modes to achieve more complicated effects. But this is up to you. Another hint might be to size up the Channel-Mixers windows since the preview also scales up in comparison to most of the other effects in Gimp

Speed effects for photos

2009-08-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

Do you know this situation? You just shot a really nice pic and you don't really see any reason why you should retouch it and just want to make it look even cooler without spending hours of work. So here I will come up with some VERY quick methods to make some pics look neat. As always it depends on the actual image and your taste which one fits to your shot or even if any. I will show all of them with the same pic so that you can clearly distinguish the different effects these methods have on the images. The shot was taken by Cara Gutman. The different methods must be done independently. So with every new point you should start with a vanilla image.

1. Duplicate the image layer twice, select the top one, increase its brightness by 60, desaturate it(luminosity) and set its layermode to screen. Select the middle layer, increase its contrast by 60 and set its layer mode to value:

2. Duplicate the image layer, add an layer mask that contains a greyscale copy of the layer itself and duplicate the layer with the mask again. Set the top layer's mode to screen and the middle one to multiply and invert this ones layer masks colors. Increase this mask's contrast by 100. Now select the other layer mask and increase brightness by 30 and contrast by 80. Finally apply "Filter" -> "Noise" -> "RGB Noise" with "correlated Noise" activated and an amount of 0.35 to the layer mask of the "screen" layer:

3. Duplicate the image layer, add an layer mask that contains a greyscale copy of the layer itself. Now increase tha masks contrast by 40 and colorize the layer with the settings you want. You have got to fiddle a bit around to find some fitting settings:

That's it for now. Thanks for reading this very little guide.

Creating a dirty and cool background

2009-07-30T02:23:00.002-07:00

You might have seen them on some music covers or concert posters. Often they have got a very grungy and dirty background that looks soooo cool. Often you can't distinguish the different parts of the images because they are somehow composed together very good and only by looking at it very closely you see the components of the background. I will try to show you some techniques how to achieve an effect like that:

Therefore we need some material to start with since we won't start from scratch. You can find a very huge amount of photos on CGtextures.com. I picked the following ones as an example. I recommend you to always download the biggest format available but in this guide I used the medium sizes to be able to get some more material since it isn't for print anyway. The free 15MB/day are more than enough to start with. So these are the pics I chose from CGTexures.com: (again these are not my photos and copyright is at their website.)
mat1
mat2
mat3(image1)
mat4(large)
mat5(large)
mat6(large)
mat7

Now we can open up a blank image at the size of 1200x1600 and open our whole material as layers via "File" -> "Open As Layers". In this dialog you should be able to select more than one image and they will be loaded at once one after another. Now make all layers invisible except the one you want to have as the background layer. Move this one to the bottom and duplicate it:

Move one of the two upwards until its top edge touches the upper edge of the image. But this looks rather crappy because the lower part of the moved up layer creates a very hard edge. So wee need a layermask to hide this part of the layer. But first duplicate the upper layer again and make the duplicate invisible. We will be needing this one later on. Now create the layermask and select the gradient tool. Choose the colors black and white and apply a linear gradient to the layermask that it looks as follows:

But still the blending does not look really good. Now we need our invisible and duplicated layer. Make it visible, desaturate it(Luminosity) and boost the contrast a bit, that the scratches get out even clearer.

Select the gradient tool, set its mode to Multiply and apply a cradient that the layer looks as follows:

Press "Ctrl" + "A", "Ctrl" + "C", select the layer mask and hit "Ctrl" + "V" and set the "Floating Selections" mode to "Substract". Now you can anchor the Floating Selection via rightclicking on it and selecting the entry. When you look at the layermask you see that the gradient now also contains some scratches from the layer and the blending doesn't look that smooth anymore. You can delete the greyscale layer if you want but you dont have to. Just make it invisible. Make sure that only the background is visible and create a new layer containing this background via rightclicking and selecting "New from visible". Now rename this layer to background and make all the others invisible.

Lets move on to the next component. Select the layer that contains the splatter, rotate it 90 degrees and size it up proportionally until the width is about 850px. Apply a layermask with the greyscale copy of the layer and invert the layermask:

Use the curves tool on the layermask to tweak the mask your needs. Now select as layer mode "Multiply" and use the "Hue-Saturation" dialog to lower the saturation a bit and the lightness pretty much until you can clearly see the splatter.

For now we can put in the next part and you should select the "RustScratches0003..." layer and move it above our splatter if it isn't yet. Again we should use basicly the same method to blend the layer into the rest of the image. We create a layermask that contains the greyscaleversion of the layer, invert is and tweak its tones. But this layer has got the bad property that the lower part of the layer has got the same value as the scratches. this might lead to the following result:

But there are basicly two methods to get rid of this problem. First: manual work -> sucks. Second: Flipping the layer vertically and moving this edge to the top of the image, or above -> rules:

I think you got the basics now. What we need to do now that we assembled the parts together we need to somehow forge them to one whole piece sind the different parts not really fit to each other. This can be achieved by applying some color corrections to the layers, rearanging the layers, duplicating them and playing with the different mixing modes.

This is what I got after some playing around:

Here you can download the *.xcf file.

Retouching a portrait - Part 3: Eyes and final touch

2009-07-26T02:37:00.000-07:00

The second part of this series can be found here.
This time we will be fokusing on the eyes. On a portrait they are always the eyecatcher hence we should deal carefully with them and try to get the best out of them. Since we already created the appropriate layers we just have got to apply some filters color corrections and set the proper layer mode. At the end we will be applying some extra sharpening to the edges and add some general color adjustments.
This is what we got for now:

Set the layer mode of "Eyes #1" and "Eyes #2" to screen and you will see that the eyes will get brightened as hell. It is a bit to much but first we want to sharpen the eyes a bit. To do that we make a selection around the eyes so that we dont have got to wait that long for the filters to be applied:

Now we apply th following filter to "Eyes #1": "Filters" -> "Enhance" -> "Unsharp Mask" with the following settings:

Select the other eyes-layer and apply this "Unsharp Mask":

You can leave the opacity of the "Eyes #1" layer as it is and decrease the other eye layer's to about 50%-60%. It is a matter of taste and you should try it out on your own. So we are finished with the eyes. Again: this is the very basic stuff you can do. There are A LOT of further possibilities to tweak a face even further! Maybe I will pick up some special aspects in later articles.
This is what we got so far:

Now we right click on the top layer and select "New from visible". Now clear our selection and duplicate this new layer and invert its colors. Apply to both layers the following filter "Filters" -> "Edge-Detect" -> "Neon":

Now set the top layer's mode to "Addition" and again rightclick on the top layer and select "New from Visible" and then delete the two layers we used to create the third one. Desaturate this new layer (lightness) and blur it with the Gaussian Blur Filter with radius of 25px. What we have now should look like something like this:

Make this layer invisible and again create a new layer from visible. We now want to sharpen this layer and apply our blured layer that is invisible as layer mask. First we use the Unsharp Mask as follows:

Now add a layer mask to this layer and copy the b-w layer that contains the edges into the layermask via first right klicking onto the sharpened layer and selecting "Add Layer Mask" and clicking add second selecting our blurred edge layer and pressing "Ctrl" + "A", "Ctrl" + "C" selecting the layermask and pressing "Ctrl" + "V" third rightclicking onto the floating selection and choosing "Anchor Layer". You can adjust the amount of sharpening with the opacity of the layer that contains the sharpened image. If you want you can now create another layer that contains the whole image and apply some color corrections. But I am rather satisfied with my example image. So I will skip this step.
For now we are finished with our little workthrough in photo retouching. I will be covering some special parts in later tutorials. So stay tuned!

Colorizing a greyscale image

2009-07-25T03:54:00.000-07:00

Some people tend to apply a greyscale filter to their pics while taking the photos. So they don't even have got a colored version of their shot. Sometimes this is a pitty since you can always convert it to greyscale on the PC afterwards with nearly every simple imageviewer. So first I would recommend that you always shoot just in color mode and convert it afterwards to greyscale. But now we want to discuss some methods to colorize a greyscale image. But don't expect to much since we have got to add all color manually and it won't be looking realistic at all.

This will be our example image during the whole tutorial:

1. Colorize with layers
First we create at least two white layers on top of our greyscale layer and add a layermask to them. Into these layermasks we paste a copy of our greyscale layer. This will have the effect that only certain parts of the image will be colorized with a certain color. We have control over this by manipulating the layermasks. Now we need to set the layer mode of our white layers to "Multiply" and colorize both white layers with two different but still matching colors. this can be done via: "Colors" -> "Colorize" and now you need to lower the lightness below zero since we want to colorize a white layer. By now you should have something like the following:

But both color layers apply to the same region of the image. You can change that by simply inverting one of the layermasks. So one layer will colorize the shadow parts and the other one the brighter parts. But the mids are still affected by both layers. We can avoid that by applying the following curves tool to both layer masks:

This will seperate the layers' areas of effect from each other and increasing the color contrast a bit more. this is the basic setup. Now you can start to fine tune both layers colors via "Colors" -> "Hue-Saturation". You can also try different layer modes or add some more colors by adding more color layers. Moreover you can tweak the layermasks to your needs. What I really like about this method is, that it is completely non destructive except the modifications you apply to the layer masks. You simply revert to the original by deleting the layers or making them invisible and you can tweak and change every step afterwards. This is my result with no more additional tweaks:

2. Curves Tool
As you might know you can use the curves tool to edit the RGB channels seperately. And as soon as one of the three channel contains at a certain location a different value than the other two it gets colored. So if you apply different curves to the channels you can achieve a colored image. This might read more complicated than it actually is. Let's start with a new image and duplicate the "Background" layer since this method is somehow pretty destructive and you will need a lot of testing and fiddling around. What comes in handy is that Gimp now keeps track of which settings you used with the curves tool and you can reselect them based on the time you applied them. You can also store them permanentely in the curves dialog. There is just one simple step: "Colors" -> "Curves" and then select the appropriate Channel with the dropdown menu and go for it.
This method is not very complicated to follow technically hence I will just show some results with the curves settings I used:

Especially the last pic shows that it's rather easy to even include several colors with one step but it's hard to keep control over the three channels. It would be easier if one could see all five curves for the channels at once while editing them. Both methods explained need a bit of experience until they do what you intend but this applies to many stuff so keep testing!

Retouching a portrait - Part 2: Skin

2009-07-23T05:04:00.001-07:00

The first part of this series can be found here.

The most important part of a portrait is the skin. Our next goal is to achieve a very smooth and perfect look that still does not look articial. Therefore we need the two skin layers with those fancy masks we created in the first part.

We created two different layers for the skin to vary the intesity of the bluring we are going to apply now. Select the "Skin #1" layer and apply a gaussian blur with 15px radius. Select the "Skin #2" layer and apply the gaussian blur with about 25px radius. You might find that especially the left edge of the nose is a bit to blurry so select both layer masks and paint them on this line black with a fuzzy brush. The sharp edge should reemerge. Do so for any other area you might find being blurred to much or being unneccessarily blurred at all. Afterwards you might have a result similiar to this:

As you can see there are some light spots that are a bit distracting. We can get rid of them by applying the curves tool to the "Skin #2" layer with the following settings:

This step makes the skin a bit paler but that should be okay since lighter skin looks a bit cleaner. But it is a matter of taste. You can also leave out the last step if you don't like the result. Next step will be to add a little color to the cheeks. To do that create a quick selection:

Go to "Select" -> "Toggle Quick Mask" or simply hit Shift + Q. We are going to blur the selection very much. I would recommend about 250px with the gaussian blur filter. The selection might have gotten a bit to small. But we can increase its size with the curves tool and the following setting:

Now we blur again with the gaussian blur with about 150px radius. Hit Shift + Q again, create a new transparent layer, rename it to "cheeks", place it at the top of our layer stack and select the "Color Picker Tool". Now select the "Skin #2" layer and pick a color that lies in our selection and modify it as follows:

Select the "cheeks" layer again and fill the selection with the "Bucket Fill Tool". You might realize that this is far from being optimal. You can use the following "tools" to improve the result:
-change the opacity of the layer
-play around with "Color" -> "Hue-Saturation"
-play around with "Color" -> "Curves" while modifying the alpha channel
This is what I can come up with:

I just lowered the opacity to 65% and boosted the saturation a bit. Now we need to apply some structure to the skin. Therefore we need to duplicate our "Skin #1" layer, move it on top of our stack and fill the whole layer with plain white. Then we blur the layermask a bit let's say with about 40px radius. Now select the layer and apply a noise via: "Filters" -> "Noise" -> "HSV Noise" with these settings:

Now your image should look something like this:

We should duplicate the "Skin #3" layer. Now apply the gaussian blur to the "Skin #4" layer with about 2px radius. Now we need to apply the Embos filter to this new layer which can be found at "Filters" -> "Distorts" -> "Emboss..." with the following settings:

Since the image looks rather messed up by now we need to change the layer modes and opacities of the two new layers. I put the two setting together in one screenshot:

That's about it for now. You can see that there are still many rough edges all over the pic which just can be removed with a lot of manual work and fiddling around which I just left out for times and spaces sake. To be continued...
The third part of this series can be found here.

LAB color space experiments

2009-07-22T14:52:00.000-07:00

A pixel in an image mostly has the following information stored: 2D coordinates for the location and a 3D or 4D vector for the color/alpha value it has. The color is often described by the amount of red, green and blue the color contains. So we are in the RGB color space. But there are other methods to describe the color a pixel has. For example the LAB color space (wikipedia). You might wonder what sense it does make to switch from the familiar color space to another that is harder to get a grip on it since the filters and color manipulation tools stay the same. Well if you read through the wikipedia article you might realize what is special about this color space. Especially for optimizing the light distribution in the image the LAB color space is the most powerful way to do that. But let's start some tests. We will compare the results of the same operations in the two different color spaces.
We are going to start with the following pic as an example:

First we create two duplicates of the layer and select the top one that is visible. Now we apply the following color manipulation: "Colors" - "Curves" and something like this:

Make the layer invisible and select another layer and do the following: "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Decompose" and choose these settings:

The created image contains three layers "L", "A" and "B". The important layer for us is the "L" layer. Select it and apple the same curves tool settings to this channel as you have done before. You can choose the last settings from a dropdown menu in the curves tool dialoge. Now let's recompose the image via: "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Recompose". Now you can close the LAB image without saving and return to the original one and see the result of our work in the LAB color space:

(After curves tool in RGB color space)

(After curves tool in LAB color space)

As you can see there is a huge difference in the results that we achieved. Both versions are somehow way to extreme but you can clearly see what the difference is. I recommend you to repeat this experiment with some more pics to get a clue what you can expect from this way of working with the images. As usual the best way to get to a certain impression on the image varies a lot with variing pics. I will soon be writing some more really useful stuff on how to efficiently using the LAB color space. So stay tuned!

Selective Coloring In 5 steps

2009-07-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

Finished work

1. Open up the image you want to selective color. I'll be using this rose photographed by HAMED MASOUMI

2. right click on the rose layer and select "duplicate"

3. Go to the "colors" tab on the top and select "desaturate" (we have a great tutorial on desaturation here if you're interested, but the technique is not needed for this tutorial) select any of the modes you like, I chose "luminosity" make sure the desaturated layer is on top of the color one.

4. Apply a layer mask with the "white" setting...

Then select the object you want to leave colored. You can do this with the pen tool or whatever method your comfortable with.

5. I like to feather my selections with .2 percent so go to select>feather>.2 after this is all done, select the layer mask and fill with black. You should know have your standout colored! you can use the fuzzy brush to rough out some spots but all in all, you should have a nice picture.

Desaturating properly

2009-07-20T04:31:00.000-07:00

This guide will explain how to achieve a good grayscale version of a colored image. Since the normal "Desaturation" option that can be found in Gimp via "Colors" -> "Desaturate" isn't that sophisticated and customizeable we will be using the Channel-Mixer instead. This one can be found at "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Channel Mixer". But first things first.
We need a image that we want to desaturate. I will first go into detail with the first image to state an example and show some further results with other pictures. So open up an image like this one for example:

Now go to "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Channel Mixer" and check the box that says "Monochrome".
(It might come handy if you also activate "Preserve luminosity" to avoid over exposed spots in the pic)

Now you can convert the three color channels into greyscale an the values will be added which will be representing the brightness of a pixel. The cool thing is that the Channel-Mixer also accepts negative values for the channels which will result in a substraction of brightness. What is important while looking for the right settings is that different colors in the pic will be represented by different grey-values to maintain the difference in color in the desaturated image. Let me show you an easy example what I mean:

The three different colors are made to the exact same grey since in the HSV color profile they have got the same V-Value which stands for the brightness and this value is simply taken for they greyscale which let's one asume that it also has been the same colour as before.
I fiddled a bit around with the channelmixer and this is what I can come up with concerning my example picture:

(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from left)

As you can see the difference in this pic isn't _that_ huge but let's check out what we can do with the following pics:

(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from left)

(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from top)

Especially the last example shows the advantages in some cases. The conventionally desaturated image does barely show the clouds. But the image achieved with the Channel-Mixer preserves a certain contrast in the important parts of the image (i.e. sky). But still it massively depends on your source image which method results in better greyscales. You need to find it out via trial and error and much experience.

Retouching a portrait - Part 1: preparing the image

2009-07-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

One of the most demanding jobs is to retouch portrait pictures to put them on the cover of some magazines or into them. In this series I will explain you my for sure not perfect or special way of retouching an image. Most of my knowledge is selfdeveloped and some parts are taken from various and uncountable tutorials. I will show you the whole production from the start to the end and try to leave nothing unclear.

At first need an image with a satisfying resolution. It should be sharp and bright enough to have some room for adjustments. If it is to dark you might get some color artifacts while editing some parts of the image. The following one could be an example. I will use this pic during the whole series.

I always start with some roughly done skin clean ups. So we use the heal-tool to remove some dots on the skin without leaving any noticeable traces. I recommend to do this step very accurate since we want to achieve a very smooth impression on the skin. The heal-tool is rather easy to use. Klick onto a clean spot on the skin while holding down Ctrl and then simply click on the dots.

The heal tool always gathers information around the brush how the color of the image is there and averages them where you paint. So if you want to overpaint a dot that is located near a border to a very dark part of the image you might paint much darker than the skin should be at this spot. If this occurs just use the stamp tool in this case. So i rename the "Background" layer to "Original" and get started. After the clean up of the skin it should look similar to this:

Now you should magnify the view and redo the step before with some smaller spots. afterswards you should have a much smoother impression of the skin. Now we will start to divide the pic up into different parts. We will create two layers that contain the skin. Two for idfferent parts of the eyes and some more. Let's start with the skin. In this pic I would recommend to use the "Fuzzy Selection Tool" to make a selection that contains the skin. If you are finished it should like similar to this:

Go to "Select" -> "Save to channel" to store the selection. Maybe we will be needing it again. Now duplicate the "Original" Layer and rename it to "Skin #1" and add a layermask from the selection to it. Do this via "Layer" -> "Mask" -> "Add Layer Mask". There you should select "Selection" and "Add". Make the "Original" Layer invisible to get a clue what we actully have in our "Skin" layer. Moreover I marked some critical spots which might be needing some manual work:

Select the layermask we just created, and the two colors we need now are black and white to edit the layermask. Most important issue is the hair. You should avaiod that the skin-layer contains any hair. or you just overpaint the hair it contains. We are going to blur the skin layers very much and blurred hair looks like crap. Then you should take care of some holes in the mask for example below the eyes and above the right eye brow. The face should be fine when the skin layer contains the following parts of the image:

The part near the throat with the scattered hair will need some tricks to get rid of it. We will duplicate the "Original" layer and desaturate it via: "Colors" -> "Desaturate" -> "Luminosity". Now we create a rough selection with the "Free Select Tool":

What we need to get now is that in this part of the image we make all the scattered hair black and all the rest white since we want to integrate this into our layermask later on. The curves tool might be a great help in this case. But first feather the selection at about 10px via: "Select" -> "Feather..." and apply the "Unsharp Mask" filter to our selection that can be found at: "Filters" -> "Enhance". Use some similar settings to those:

Now open up the curves dialog via: "Colors" -> "Curves". You need to fiddle around a bit with them but I could come up with the following:

Still we have got to overpaint the rough parts of the skin to make them pure white:

Now press Ctrl + C, select the layermask of the skin, paste it into this and make our greyscale layer invisible. Now press Ctrl + H to merga the pasted layer and the layermask. Now we need to repeat this procedure with the following section:

You might need some different settings for the steps to end up in a good result but I will leave this up to you. Our skin-layer might look something like this:

Duplicate the skin layer and blur this layermask with gaussian blur about 90 pixels. To watch your result rightklick on the layer in the layer list and select "Show Layer Mask":
Use the Curves Tool to edit the mask as follows:

Now blur the Mask again but just with 30px radius.
Now we can treat the parts at the edges of the skin differently than the rest. We will need that later on.

The next steps will be rather easy. We are going to make some sepperate layers for the eyes, the mouth and the hair. This can easily done by duplicating the "Original" layer, giving it a meaningful name and then painting manually into the layermask. The method fits for the mouth and the rough layer for the eyes. After you have done this your layers could look like this:

What might come helpful as a trick is when you paint the layermask you should first create a black one then invert the colors of the actual layer, then switch back to the layermask and paint with white or gray and you will se clearly where your layermask is white while you can still look at the image and see where you paint.
Now we are finished with the first part. Try to get really into it and try to understand it completely until we hit the next chapter.

Nameless but cool effect

2009-07-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

While playing aorund with The Gimp I stumbled upon a nice method to create an effect I personally like pretty much:

It is simple as hell once you got a grip at it. First create a black image with resolution of 800x600.
Now go to "Layer" -> "Scale Layer" And scale the background layer to 10% of its size:

Apply some noise to the scaled layer via: "Filters" -> "Noise" -> "HSV Noise" and choose the settings like something as follows:

We need to scale the layer back to its original size. Go to "Layer" -> "Scale Layer" and choose the following settings:

Here it is important not to use any interpolation since we want to maintain the pixels as squares.
All we need to do now is apply the sharpen filter with a very high amount like 80+<. Now you should have a result like the first image.
You can achieve different results by varying the noise and the scaling factor. so the size and the distribution of the squares can be modified like this.

Blurry reflection

2009-07-16T01:45:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the first HOWTO on this blog. I will show you how to create a blurry reflection of an object on a dark background as it can be seen in the KDE4 splash screen:

Therefore we need any clipart to apply the effect to like the following Firefox icon:

Now let's get started and create a new image in Gimp with the following properties:

Now fill the background layer with pure black and open the icon or whatever you want as a new layer via "Ctrl + Alt + O":

Now create a guide by clicking on the top ruler and dragging the mouse about into the center of the picture. Align the bottom edge of the icon-layer on this guide with the Move-Tool that can be accessed via pressing "m":

Now we need to duplicate the layer by using the shortcut "Shift + Ctrl + D", flipping the layer vertically and aligning its top edge on our created guide. Be careful not to move the duplicated layer to the left or the right because then the reflection will not look realistic:

Select the flipped layer and apply the Gaussian Blur Filter: "Filters" -> "Blur" -> "Gaussian Blur" with the radius of 15px:

We are almost done. We need to add a layer mask to the flipped to let the reflection fade out to the bottom. Therefore we add a white layer mask as follows:

Layer masks are very useful. They contain a greyscale image where the brightnes of every pixel indicates the visibility of the pixel in the actual layer. So you can edit the transparency of a layer without touching the layer. Instead you can easily revert any changes to the layers transparency by editing the mask. Keep that in mind when you want to make something transparent. We will come back to this method in later tutorials.

The next step is to select the layer mask and add a vertical black to white gradient. To do this make sure that your two selected colors are black and white and select the gradient tool via "l". Now click at the very bottom of the blured layer and drag down to the top edge and make sure that the line you drag is exactly straight. Release the mouse and you will see the layer fade in one direction. If it is the wrong you will have to invert the colors of the layermask by clicking the following: "Colors" -> "Invert". Make shure that you still have the layer mask selected. If you want to change the hardness and position of the fade just use the following tool when having selected the layermask: "Colors" -> "Curves". Play around with this tool and you soon will find out what it does.

Last step is to apply a gradient to the background layer to simulate a slightly illuminated floor. Therefore we select a bit more than the half of the image starting at the bottom with the rectangular selection tool and then fill it with a gradient with a lowered opacity. Make sure that you have the background-layer selected and that the gradient again is perfectly vertical:

We are finished. Again you can use the Curves tool to modify the floor to your needs. The final result might look like this:

Greeting all The Gimp users!

2009-07-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

Opensource means bleeding edge, means rapid progress, means fixing bugs, means being revolutionary when it comes to features, means being creative, means being up-to-date and means being damn good. But all these properties don't really fit when it comes to high quality tutorials for later versions of the most popular graphics application available in the FOSS world. Which is really a shame since it is so powerful. Hence this blog is going to change this. From time to time there will drop in a high standard Tutorial for The Gimp. They will always base on the latest Version available for Ubuntu since this is my production environment. I will start working right away with some simple stuff to get used to blogging and will hopefully get some response to improve my work even more. So long! Bookmark it and step by later! Thanks!