GIMP Quickie No. 2 – Creatively Rescuing a Poor Photo

Original Photo

• Shot with a hand-held camera at the Tulsa Zoo through dingy glass in low light.
• Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III
• Lens: Canon Zoom Lens EF 70-200mm 1:2.8 L IS II USM
• Settings: manual mode, f/5.6, 1/100 sec, ISO 800, 200mm, no flash
• Image size: 5760 x 3840 px

Original Snowy Owl Photo

GIMP Quickie No. 1 – Photo Painting Effect

Original Scarlet Macaw Photo

Changing Brightness and Contrast Without Affecting Saturation

A Color Experiment

A while back I was made aware of an article on DPReview.com entitled Reducing Contrast Without the ColoursFading (using GIMP) wherein Tom Axford talks about the need for reducing the contrast in or otherwise brightening an image to make it look better in print. His original technique involved using an HSV model to make adjustments to a value layer without affecting the saturation of the colors in an image.

Intrigued by the concept, I decided to perform an experiment to see exactly what effect brightness and contrast adjustments have on colors. I created three squares, one each of red, green, and blue — red being lighter, green being darker, and blue being of medium intensity.

Using Color to Define the Focal Point of an Image with GIMP

Making the Balloons Pop!

Have you ever wanted to emphasize a particular part of a photo to make it stand out against a busy background? This intermediate-level GIMP tutorial describes a technique whereby you create a zone of color surrounded by a grayscale background to focus attention on the area of interest.

Specifically, I'll describe how to create this image:

A Non-Destructive Adjustable Way to Sharpen a Photo

Honing Your Photo-Sharpening Skills

A while back I read an article on gimpedtutorials.com called How to Make Images Super Sharp in Gimp 2.8. It's a shame this tutorial no longer exists because it contained some really useful techniques. Fortunately, I saved a list of the steps and have been using one of the methods fairly often to sharpen my photos. The nice thing about this method is that it involves using new layers and layer modes and doesn't make any changes to the original image. It's also easy to adjust the sharpness by simply sliding the layer opacity up and down until I like what I see.

I'll use this photo of fuzzy little prairie dogs to illustrate the steps for sharpening an image.

Psst! Hey! Look at that!

How to Replace the Sky in a Photo

A Simple GIMP 2.8 Tutorial

Have you ever had a nice outdoor picture of something, say a building, where the exposure on the building was good, but the sky looked drab, washed out, or overexposed, and you wondered what you could do to make the sky look better? You could replace the sky either with a simple solid blue color of the appropriate intensity or with a linear or radial blue gradient. Sometimes that's fine, but sometimes you'd like a different effect to make the image more interesting.

In this tutorial I'll describe a technique you can use to create this image:

from this image:

One Method for Adjusting an Underexposed Photo

A GIMP 2.8 Quick Tutorial

I was perusing my zebra photos one day and came across one showing a zebra running away from me at full tilt. The photo was really underexposed, but I liked the dynamics of the image, so I loaded it into GIMP and started playing around with it.

What follows is a description of how I created this image:

from this image:

GIMP 2.8 Tutorial: Which Tool Should I Use to Cut Out an Irregular Image?

GIMP Casual User Series — The Free Select Tool

Have you ever wanted to cut an irregular image out of a photograph, perhaps to put on a web page or use as part of a collage, but didn't know how to go about it or which tool to use? If so, read on for an exploration of GIMP's Free Select Tool.

For this tutorial I'll be using GIMP 2.8 and a photo of a yellow hibiscus flower, which you can download by clicking on the picture. (When you get to the full-sized image, drag it and drop it on your desktop.) It is assumed that you have some basic knowledge about GIMP, such as how to invoke it and load an image, how to navigate the menus, and how to save a file. By the end of this tutorial you should have a good feel for using the Free Select Tool to cut out images.

GIMP 2.8 Tutorial: Which Tool Should I Use to Crop a Photo? — Conclusion

GIMP Casual User Series — Comparison of Photo Cropping Tools

 
This is the final article in the series about which tool to use to crop a photo. If you've been following along, you'll have seen that there are three tools that can be used in GIMP to crop photos: the Crop Tool, the Rectangle Select Tool, and the Ellipse Select Tool.

GIMP 2.8 Tutorial: Which Tool Should I Use to Crop a Photo? — Part 3

GIMP Casual User Series — The Ellipse Select Tool

Do you have minimal experience with GIMP, but would like to know more about the best tools to use for trimming photos? Are you interested in learning about the various options that make these tools easier to use? Would you like a method for making a decision about which tool is best for which type of job? If so, read on for an exploration of the third tool in this series— the Ellipse Select Tool.

Giraffes Cropping Grass

For this article, as in the previous ones, I'll be using GIMP 2.8 and a photo of some giraffes, which you can download by clicking on the picture. (When you get to the full-sized image, drag it and drop it on your desktop.) It is assumed that you have some basic knowledge about GIMP, such as how to invoke it and load an image, how to navigate the menus, and how to save a file. By the end of this article you should have a good feel for using the Ellipse Select Tool, along with all of its options that are applicable to cropping photographs.

GIMP 2.8 Tutorial: Which Tool Should I Use to Crop a Photo? — Part 2

GIMP Casual User Series — The Rectangle Select Tool

Do you have minimal experience with GIMP, but would like to know more about the best tools to use for trimming photos? Are you interested in learning about the various options that make these tools easier to use? Would you like a method for making a decision about which tool is best for which type of job? If so, read on for an exploration of the second tool in this series— the Rectangle Select Tool.

Giraffes Cropping Grass

For this article, as in the previous one, I'll be using GIMP 2.8 and a photo of some giraffes, which you can download by clicking on the picture. (When you get to the full-sized image, drag it and drop it on your desktop.) It is assumed that you have some basic knowledge about GIMP, such as how to invoke it and load an image, how to navigate the menus, and how to save a file. By the end of this article you should have a good feel for using the Rectangle Select Tool, along with all of its options that are applicable to cropping photographs.

GIMP 2.8 Tutorial: Which Tool Should I Use to Crop a Photo? — Part 1

GIMP Casual User Series — The Crop Tool

Do you have minimal experience with GIMP, but would like to know more about the best tools to use for trimming photos? Are you interested in learning about the various options that make these tools easier to use? Would you like a method for making a decision about which tool is best for which type of job? If so, read on for an exploration of the first tool in this series — the Crop Tool.

Giraffes cropping grass

For this article, I'll be using GIMP 2.8 and a photo of some giraffes, which you can download by clicking on the picture. (When you get to the full-sized image, drag it and drop it on your desktop.) It is assumed that you have some basic knowledge about GIMP, such as how to invoke it and load an image, how to navigate the menus, and how to save a file. By the end of this article you should have a good feel for using the Crop Tool, along with all of its options that are applicable to cropping photographs.