Image Effects, and Touchups

The last few days I have been working with the photos taken at the wedding to do some neat effects and color level correction inside of the GIMP. I found a surprising number of tutorials on the subjects, and I have attached some examples to this post below for people to see: (click on the image for the full-sized version)

To start with, a very simple effect can be used to create richer, more vibrant colors inside of a photo. This effect is achieved simply by duplicating the layer, and then setting the layer method to overlay. No other correction is applied to the image above.

This image builds on the effect of the overlay from the previous example. In this image, the layer is duplicated, then set to overlay. The duplicate layer was then blurred with a settings of 10 on the Gaussian blur filter. Layer color levels were corrected to set new black and white points and adjust the gamma.

This example takes the same concepts of the previous, but uses different black and white points, and a larger Gaussian blur value. This image was then run through a “high pass” filter by desaturating the image, adjusting the color levels again, and then adding this back to the original.

In this image, new skin was painted onto our lovely bride by duplicating a layer, and then using the Gaussian blur filter. A layer mask was then added to the blurred layer, and the new skin painted into the appropriate areas with the brush tool. To finish this image off, I adjusted the hue to be slightly less, giving the skin more of a bronze color.

In this example, I combined the two different effects of the flowers color enhancement, and the skin correction to achieve the result above.

Other neat effects are possible with photos, such as selective coloring. In this example, we duplicate the image, and then convert it to grayscale, then back to RGB. We then copy the duplicate image, and paste as a new layer back onto the original layer. We add a layer mask and paint the flower color back into the image using the brush tool.

This is another example of the same effect used above.

This is something that mimics a sketch. I took the original image, and applied a “high pass” filter to it by converting the image to grayscale, and then desaturating the image and then removing artifacts with the brush tool.
So, as soon as I get copies of larger images to go through, I will update my gallery. Thanks to Matt Todd for taking excellent wedding photos! Without them, I wouldn’t have much to work with. Also, I will use all of these images to create a DVD slide show of our wedding and honeymoon using ManDVD

I got all of the information for these effects from the tutorials located at the links below. Some are GIMP specific, some are using Photoshop. The concepts are the same, so the learning curve shouldn’t be bad.

Official GIMP tutorials:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

GIMPGuru:
http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/

GUG Tutorials:
http://gug.sunsite.dk/?page=tutorials