torsdag 9. juni 2016

Basic Tutorial With GIMP

New darkness rising in The Force Awakens
Hello everyone and welcome to the basic tutorial of using GIMP. We are taking a close look on how GIMP can improve your photos in easy ways.

First we need to upload a photo from a good camera. I have two different compact photo cameras. One is a 14.1Mpx Casio Exilim Z-2000 with many different scenaries, the other one is an 18.1Mpx Panasonix Lumiz TZ40, also with many scenaries, including HDR (High Dynamic Range). A feature that has also become very popular with Ultra HD TVs and new Ultra HD Blu Rays for fantastic use of colours and black level. A holy grail for movie lovers like myself. In term of photography, HDR can vastly improve a unique photo with many different colors. Say if the scenary was of an old tree house and the heaven full of different colors. You want to make that photo more "alive", so HDR is the thing in that situation. Multi-exponation.

An original photo before editing in GIMP

GIMP - The Basic Tutorial


You hopefully have a nice photo you want to edit, making the photo more alive and beautiful, without affecting the excellent quality of the photo.

You can also improve a poor-taken photo in easy ways. I will explain the basic procedures using GIMP, based on my own self-taught experience.

As you see to the right, there is an original photo ready to be edited. Right after it has been uploaded, i choose Image from the menu and move the pointer to "Scale Image". From there i choose to scale it down to 800 x 600 resolution, as the original size of over 4000 x 4000 becomes way too big. 800 x 600 is the most supported resolution most sites want to use for showing off high quality photos.

Scaling the image to 800 x 600 with GIMP
After scaling the photo to the decided resolution, it's time to adjust levels and curves to balance the colour and brightness. This to make the photo more alive and beautiful without affecting the quality of the image.

From the menu, you go to Colours and choose Levels first with the pointer. I usually adjust the levels to 20, giving the right balance of colours to the image, and choosing "Set Levels as Curves" from the same window. The long button near the end of the little AmiCygnix window. See screenshot.

Here you adjust the color levels in GIMP
The screenshot to the right shows you how to adjust the color levels to make the colours match the image more correctly. Before adjusting, the original photo can look a little weak in colours. You want to make the colours clearer, then you adjust the color level. Here i set it to 20, and you notice quite a difference in colour strength.

At the same time, you click "Edit these settings as Curves", which takes you directly to the Curves menu, as seen on the screenshot below. My advice here is that you slightly adjust the middle point of the curve as close to the center of the lines. That should give the right level of brightness to the photo. You will notice improvements.

Here color curves is balanced in GIMP
Soon there will be time to do some other small improvements. This time you click the menu with the right mouse button to "Colors", and move the pointer to "Auto", and another sub menu shows up. There you choose "Color Enhance", and GIMP will scan the image to see if it will need the Color Enhance to improve the image or not. 

This one greatly improves the image and makes it more alive and realistic.

You are now ready to save the image into your destination. I have a drawer called Foto on the partition called Diverse, formatted with latest SFS2, just like my other partitions. 

Same image after some editing in GIMP
Now go to the menu saying "File" and choose "Save As". I save my photos as JPEG, which is used mostly by photographers around the world.

I should point out that i use WarpView to compress images into Progressive JPG format, with 100% quality. Makes life easier with big photos, keeping the file size as low as possible. Cool, eh?

Now you have learnt something cool the basic ways with GIMP. Excited yet? There is more to come. Lets now try with a portrait of a person. The procedures are the same using Scale Image, Levels, Curves, but NOT Color Enhance. Instead we are going to use the Beautify Plug-in tool in GIMP.

Here you choose how to save an image

Beautify and Skin-Whitening with GIMP


The greatest features i love with GIMP are what i would call "make-up effects". You might wonder what Beautify, Skin-Whitening and Simple Border do.

Beautify is the most impressive feature, which is a powerful plugin for GIMP with many impressive effects, especially useful for portraits, macros and old photos, giving them new life.

Skin-Whitening is used for portraits. It's like putting on a little brighter mascarena on your face. This can be chosen in three levels of white or pink.

Portrait after using Beautify and Skin-Whitening
Beautify has many cool effects to really give a different or improved look of an image. Everything from basic color effects to Studio effects, and more.

In the section called LOMO (no, it's not a Gay-thing), you will see several unique effects. Two impressive effects are HDR and Classic HDR. While they are so-called "Pseudo" effects, they can truly improve old rather "weak" photos with new perspective!

You can also give an old image a more retro-style look, depending on your taste. Back to portrait. As seen on the portrait of myself above, it's in an ordinary situation, so no Elegance here.

Beautify has numberous cool styling effects
Seen on the snapshot just below, it shows Beautify's many unique styling effects. Here i went into the Studio section and chose "Little Fresh".

This was AFTER i chose to use Skin-Whitening with moderate pink color to make the color of my skin more natural looking in suitable situations.

The Elegance effect, as you will come over when using one of many different styling effects with Beautify, is a styling effect suitable for "party-like" images, or in portraits where you are dressed in very beautiful clothes in beautiful situations. It could be a portrait from a wedding, an important meeting, a romantic date or simple a nice, cool party. Elegance is perfect for such situations, and truly gives such an image a luxurious look, if you know what i mean? Try yourself!

Skin-Whitening in GIMP
We're now close to the end of the tutorial. Perhaps you want to put a nice, simple border on your beautiful portrait? How to do that, you think?

Very easy, go to the menu called "Filters" and point at "Beautify". A sub-menu should show up. Choose Border - Simple Border. From there you can choose what kind of border you want to put into your portrait. Very nice, isn't it? It will be like having a true portrait hanging on a wall.

Give you portrait a nice border 
VOILA! You have made your first steps into the basic of photo editing in GIMP!

Exciting, isn't it? Now that you have learnt the basic, you should try to take some really good pictures and edit them. Perhaps you even have some old photos you want to improve?

With GIMP and its' plugin Beautify, you get a really powerful photo editing tool, able to use many impressive effects to give you the kind of look you want in your pictures at highest possible quality. Better still - it's 100% FREE!

It should be noted that GIMP can only be run if you have AmiCygnix installed. AmiCygnix is a Linux-like environment that can be installed into AmigaOS4.

See Elipson's blog about installing AmiCygnix, to learn how it's done if you haven't.

This ends the basic tutorial for GIMP. Next blog update, we'll take a look at how to manipulate two different images into one. A feature very popular in the Amiga scene where we love to put the beautiful Amiga Boing Ball into different images!

Thank you for reading. I hope this tutorial will be very helpful. Happy editing ;)

Written by
Helge Kvalheim

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