Touch up and enhance your digital photographs using GIMP – the free photo editor. This is the first of a 14-part series on the basics of using GIMP for the absolute beginner.
Picture 1: This photo of a dog ornament in a flower pot was taken in Tsumago in Japan. A wrong white balance setting in the camera resulted in a strong blue cast
Today is the first day of 2011. What better way to start a New Year than to pick up a new skill – like using a free photo-editor to edit your digital photographs?
Wow your friends when you next show them your vacation photos by enhancing your snapshots with a photo editor on the computer.
Digital cameras nowadays produce pretty decent photos even for a novice photographer. But a few fast and easy tweaks in a photo editor on a computer can make them look as if they were taken by a pro.
Picture 2: GIMP can be used to remove the blue cast in the original photo. However, the colours remain dull and uninspiring.
Does your spouse look like a visitor from Pluto in those snapshots? Use the photo editor to remove that awful blue colour cast in the photo (see Pictures 1 and 2).
Do those vacation photos look dull and flat because they were taken on an overcast day? Make those snapshots pop by intensifying the colours and increasing contrast with a few clicks of the mouse (see Picture 3).
Free photo editors
Beautifying or correcting your digital photos does not need to cost you an arm and a leg. There is a plethora of free but capable photo editors available on the Internet.
Picture 3: The colour and contrast of the photo has been enhanced to make it "pop".
www.picnik.com is an online photo editor while Google’s Picasa is a desktop based editor that comes with an image browser. Both of these enable simple tweaks and addition of special effects to digital photos through easy-to-use interfaces.
GIMP is my favourite recommendation to those who want more powerful photo editing features but is reluctant to dish out the moolah for the industry standard Photoshop CS5 (S$1091).
Over the next two weeks, I will be posting a short how-to each day on the basics of using GIMP – a free photo editing software that you can download from the Web.
What is GIMP?
The name GIMP is an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”. It is a free desktop-based photo-editor with features and interfaces similar (but not identical) to Photoshop. It runs on Windows XP SP2 or newer, Mac OS X and Linux. Go to www.gimp.org/downloads and follow the links to the relevant installers for different operating systems.
Picture 4: The photo was tightly cropped around the dog ornament to make it fill the frame.
Using GIMP, you can do simple tasks like straightening a crooked photo, or cropping out distractions in the background to fill the frame with the main subject (see Pictures 4).
Powerful tools, like Levels and Curves, enable fine control of exactly which part of a photo to tweak for colour and contrast adjustments.
For advanced adjustments and compositing, a few photos or different parts of the a single photo can be put on separate layers and manipulated independently of each other.
Tomorrow, we’ll get ourselves orientated to GIMP’s interface, and set it to work straightening a crooked photo.
Tags: GIMP, image editor, photo editor, tips