Tag Archives: GIMP

Sneem Sunset – 3 photo panorama

The picture above is a panorama made up of 3 hand-held shots taken in Sneem, Co. Kerry.

Stitching them together in the GIMP was fairly easy – adjust colours and brightness, line them up using semi-transparent layers and then use a layer mask and a gradient to make the joins mostly invisible. The tree branches were a bother though – I had to clone out some of them!

I really should document some of this stuff as this was a good example – because of the sunset each photo had very different light qualities and it was important to fine tune and match those colours.

Levels Tool – white, black and grey to the rescue!

Everyone who’s done any processing of photos will know about the Auto button of their Colour Level tool. It’s something that probably appears in every decent photo manipulation application and it’s invaluable for correcting colour casts on photos. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work very well.
The GIMP offers 3 buttons next to the Auto function and with these three buttons it’s possible to pick out elements of the image under examination that are either black, white, or grey! Click the white button, then click an area of the photo that should be white. Do the same for grey and black if needs be.
I only (re?)discovered how useful these were this evening when I was trying to colour correct a photo taken indoors, but with the white-balance set to "cloudy". The picture appeared too rich, Auto levels made it green but by clicking the white button and then on a fridge in the background the photo was suddenly almost perfect! I’m not going to post that image but here are two I made earlier…

Cartoonizing Photos With The GIMP

This is fun! After reading this tutorial on making cartoons from photos I tried to emulate his technique in the GIMP. The dialogs are slightly different but here’s what I did..

  • Layer->Duplicate Layer
  • Select the new layer, Filters->Edge-Detect->Edge, select Sobel, Amount should be 2.0, and Black should be checked.
  • Invert the edge-mask layer, it’s in Layers->Colors->Invert
  • Back in the Layers Dialog, change the Layer Mode to Divide

Play around with Layer mode settings, desaturate the top layer, blur or otherwise mess up the bottom layer. Endless fun can be had! Feel free to post links to your own creations in the comments below!

Later.. on advice I got rid of the portrait, I’ll upload another tomorrow!

Mac GIMP? Mac Crap?

You’ve probably already seen this review via the mention on slashdot but I couldn’t let it go by without commenting on it. In the usual Slashdot manner I haven’t read the article yet so I’m not going to defend the Mac version of the GIMP.
All I’ll say is that every photo I publish here is processed using the GIMP. It’s not substantially worse than Photoshop for many tasks, just different. Personally, I can’t stand using Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I don’t like the way they work, they’re not intuitive to me. I like the GIMP right-click to do everything approach. *shrug*
Different strokes for different folks.
Later… This made it to the GIMP User mailing list too. (but the archives are broken.. sorry!)
Here’s an interesting tip I gleaned from that thread:

Well, when you press the TAB key while in Image Window – all other GIMP windows will disappear (except for other image windows if you have multiple images open).
If you press TAB again the Toolbox will appear, after pressing it next time, all previosly hidden windows will come back.

Gimp Hits 2.0

I took one day off and Microsoft are fined (a not so huge amount in terms of their cash-pile, and there could be further ramifications for the Free Software movement.) the previous day, and GIMP 2.0 is released! I’d link to gimp.org but that site’s down and out. Here’s the usual Slashdot discussion on the matter including links to a Windows Gimp binary release. Apparently it’s much improved on previous versions!
Here’s the list of mirrors in case you want to download the source tarball now. Some mirrors haven’t updated yet, but gd.tuwien.ac.at has!

Plug-In: User Filter – use Pho …

Plug-In: User Filter – use Photoshop filters in the GIMP. Here’s some filters that worked.
If you try to compile the User Filter on Red Hat 8.0 (and maybe other modern distributions of Linux) you’ll probably get an error message in the file uf_file.c
Change line 44 from
fpos_t ofs;
to
long ofs;
The program should compile now if you run make.

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