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.
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| Psst! Hey! Look at that! |
A Comparison of Inkscape with GIMP
After writing an article for GIMP called How to Create Layered Text with a Shiny Highlight in GIMP, I wondered what the difficulty level would be for doing the same thing in Inkscape. I decided to follow along with the original instructions from Shiny, Double-Beveled Text by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson in the March 2004 issue of Photoshop User instead of reproducing the exact steps I used in GIMP.
The instructions below describe how to create this image using Inkscape version 0.48.2 r9819:
A GIMP Practice Exercise for Layers and Selections
I recently read an article called Shiny, Double-Beveled Text by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson in the March 2004 issue of Photoshop User and thought it would be cool to reproduce the steps in GIMP as an exercise in translating Photoshop techniques into GIMP techniques. If you follow these instructions, you'll get some practice with creating and manipulating layers, using a mask on a layer, and creating and altering selections to achieve various effects.
One of the steps involves creating an outer glow. I describe a manual method for that, but if you already have a plugin that does outer glow you can use it instead.
The instructions below describe how to create this image:
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:
A Gimp 2.8 Tutorial
A pinwheel is defined either as a toy that has a set of thin vanes that are arranged like a fan on the end of a stick and that spin like a wheel when air is blown on them, or as a type of firework that spins like a wheel. A pinwheel pattern is, similarly, a pattern that takes the form of vanes arranged regularly into a circular shape.
This novice-level tutorial describes how to create this pinwheel pattern.
from this vane-like image of a wing that was cut from a photo of a Mallard duck.
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 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.
