GIMP Tutorials

"Smart" Sharpening in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:23:00.003-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to do smart sharpening of your images. Applying an unsharp mask to an entire image is not always appropriate. A really good example of this is when you have an image with a lot of high ISO noise or film grain; applying across-the-board sharpening will enhance the noise/grain and make it even more visible, especially in large prints. Often there will be large areas of the image that you know you don't want to sharpen (e.g. a blue sky--the blue channel tends to get a lot of noise).

This technique does two "smart" things to avoid sharpening noise:

sharpen only the luminosity channel, and
create a channel mask that contains only the edges in the image. Then you can load the channel mask as a selection and apply the unsharp mask to just the edges.

Giving credit where credit is due: I did not come up with this method. I adapted it for GIMP from a Photoshop tutorial on the luminous-landscape.com photography web site (great web site BTW, I recommend it).

New information and comparison with the "warp sharp" script!

The Procedure

You may want to maximize your browser window to properly see this tutorial. I didn't want to shrink the image windows down like I usually do for the other tutorials since sharpening and noise are subtle and really show up better at these larger sizes.

Step 1

Here's the original image loaded into GIMP. It is noticeably soft, probably due to bad autofocus. It really shows up in prints.

Note: be sure to do any other editing that you want to on the image first, especially downsampling or upsampling (resizing). Sharpening should always be the last step that you do.

Step 2

Duplicate the image by pressing Ctrl+D or right-click and select Image -> Duplicate. It might be wise to minimize the original image window now. You can open it later to compare to the result.

Right-click on the duplicate image and select Image -> Mode -> Decompose. In the decompose dialog box, select LAB (or HSV; see Note 1). Check the "As layers" checkbox (see Note 2) and click OK.

This will create a new window with the image decomposed into the Luminosity ("brightness"), A and B channels as 3 layers. This will allow us to isolate and sharpen the luninosity channel which is a) the most important, and b) should be the cleanest in terms of noise.

At this point I usually turn off visibility of the A and B layers in the Layers dialog by clicking on the "eyes".

Note 1: if you happen to have an older version of the compose/decompose plug-in it may not have the LAB option. In that case use HSV (hue/saturation/value) instead. For any reference to the "LAB" image or "luminosity" channel below, substitute the "HSV" image/"value" window. The LAB option was not in my initial version of GIMP (ver 1.2.1), but I got the newer version of the plug-in at the GIMP Plug-in Registry and compiled it myself. Don't worry if you don't have it; HSV works great too.

Note 2: in the older version of the decompose plug-in there is no "As layers" checkbox; instead it will create the three channels as separate windows rather than three layers in one window. It really doesn't matter if you do it this way; the layers way just reduces the clutter on your screen. If you don't have the "As layers" option, I suggest you minimize (but not close) the hue and saturation (or A and B) windows. We'll need them later, but you don't want to accidentally pick one of them in the next few steps.

Step 3

Go to the duplicate image. Right-click and select Filters -> Edge Detect -> Edge. In the Edge Detect dialog box, select a parameter value of the appropriate size for the edges in your image. You may need to experiment with this. For the example image I chose 6.

Now convert the edges image to grayscale by right clicking on it and selecting Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. This image is going to become our sharpening mask.

Note: in some tutorials they recommend converting to greyscale and then running the edge detection filter. The premise there (my guess) is that perhaps you don't want to find noise as edges. My thinking is that there may be an edge in color, but not tonality (e.g. transition between two light colors). Once you have converted to greyscale you may not be able to detect that edge any more. Besides, with a high enough edge detection parameter (here 6) you will avoid detecting random CCD noise as edges.

Step 4

The next step is to adjust the tonality a little so that areas that need sharpening are really white and anything that doesn't need sharpening at all is really black.

Open the Levels dialog ( Image -> Colors -> Levels). Bring the black point up and the white point down to filter out any insignificant edges. You may need to play around with the exact positions of the sliders. Click OK when the image outlines the significant edges in white and most everything else is black.

How much you'll need to tweak this really depends on the image. There wasn't a lot of spurious edges shown here, so a small adjustment was all that was necessary.

Step 5

Now apply a gaussian blur ( Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur) to smooth out the edges a little. A radius of between 3 and 10 pixels (horizontal and vertical) should be enough. In the example I used 7.

Step 6

If you want to you can use Levels again to adjust the white and black points of the mask. I find this is usually a good idea after the blur.

In this example I pulled the white point slider down a bit.

Step 7

Open the Layers dialog. Select the LAB image (if HSV, value) in the drop down box at the top and then click on the Channels tab.

Click on the new channel button () at the bottom of the dialog to create a new channel. Name it "Sharpening Mask".

Step 8

Right-click in the blurred/edges image window and Select -> All. Right-click again and select Edit -> Copy. (Alternatively you can use keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C in succession).

In the Layers dialog, make sure the Sharpening Mask channel is selected. Go back to the LAB (value) window and paste ( Edit -> Paste or Ctrl+V).

Select the Layers tab in the Layers dialog and click on the anchor button () to anchor the floating image.

Step 9

Click on the Channels tab in the Layers dialog. You should see a tiny version of the sharpening mask in the channel icon, indicating that you properly pasted the sharpening mask into the new channel. At this point you may wish to click on the eye icon to make the sharpening mask invisible.

Select the Sharpening Mask channel and click the "Channel to Selection" button (). You should see "marching ants".

You can experiment with feathering the selection here if you want; I usually don't.

Step 10

Important: in the Layers dialog, click on the Layers tab and make sure the luminosity layer (if HSV, Background layer of Value window) is selected, and is the only one selected. We only want to sharpen the luminosity channel.

Apply an unsharp mask ( Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask). You may want to experiment with the settings here. You will find that you can use much higher amounts of sharpening (than if the entire image were selected) without significantly degrading the image.

In the example here I used Radius=1, Amount=2.0 (200% ?), Threshold=0.

Now get rid of the selection (right-click and Select -> None) and zoom in (= key) to examine the results. If you're not happy with the results, undo and try the sharpen step again with different parameters.

Step 11

It's time to reconstruct our original image from the LAB (HSV) components.

Right-click in the luminosity (value) window and select ( Image -> Mode -> Compose). In the Compose Options dialog, make sure that you have selected LAB (HSV) on the left and on the right that the Luminosity, A and B (Hue, Saturation and Value) components are matched up with their respective images.

Click OK; this should create a new composite image.

Final Step

Examine the resulting image, zooming in to examine edge detail.

It may help to unminimize the original image for comparison. If you feel your image needs more/less sharpening, then go back to the LAB window, undo twice and redo the unsharp mask step above.

When you are satisfied with the result you can close all the extraneous windows.

The images on the right are zoomed to 100% and cropped:

Left image: original image
Center image: smart-sharpened image
Right image: sharpened with a typical unsharp mask filter (Radius=1, Amount=1.0 (100% ?), Threshold=0)

The smart sharpened image hardly shows any additional noise over the original image. Notice how the "regular" unsharp masked version at half the sharpening amount has much more visible noise, especially in the shadows on the side of the face and in the door frame of the car.

Check out the shadow noise in the larger images on the smart sharpening shortcuts and variations page.

Tips

If this seems like too long and complicated of a process, you might be interested in looking at some shortcuts and variations that are still better than a simple sharpening step.
Some very well-respected experts on image manipulation (e.g. Real World Photoshop, Blatner and Fraser--great book) suggest that mode changes in and out of RGB are not to be taken lightly. You can lose a suprising amount of information. For example, try the following experiment:

Open a new blank image.
Using the gradient tool, create a gradient from black to white across it.
Convert it to RGB ( Image -> Mode -> RGB).
Look at it's histogram ( Image -> Colors -> Histogram).
Convert it to LAB, by decomposing to LAB ( Image -> Mode -> Decompose), then do a compose on the LAB image back to RGB ( Image -> Mode -> Compose).
Look at the new image's histogram.

Here is what you'll see if you compare them:

Left image: Gradient in RGB
Right image: RGB -> LAB -> RGB

Left image: Histogram of the RGB image.
Right image: Histogram of the RGB -> LAB -> RGB image.

Left image: Zoom 400% of the RGB image.
Right image: Zoom 400% of the RGB -> LAB -> RGB image.

Look at all the information that has been lost in the converted image! There is obvious posterization in the zoomed close up.

You are now thinking to yourself, "Good grief! Why on earth would he suggest changing modes to sharpen the luminosity channel if it has this kind of effect?"

Look at the histograms of the original image and the one smart sharpened on the luminosity channel:

Left image: Histogram, original image
Right image: Smart-sharpened on luminosity channel

You can see that in practice, changing modes does not always have this drastic of an effect.

What should you do? I suggest trying it and look at the histogram! This is the beauty of the digital darkroom. If your image is not that noisy anyway, then no need to change modes, as suggested in the shortcuts. However, this does point out a general piece of advice, which is to use the histogram regularly. It is a great tool to monitor what is happening to your image "numerically" as you edit it.

Other Examples

First image: Original (pretty noisy)
Left image: Standard unsharp mask
Right image: Smart sharpened

This example is kind of contrived. It doesn't really need much sharpening in the first place, and the smart-sharpened version looks over-sharpened. I include it here mainly because it is pretty noisy, so it really shows what happens when you sharpen noise, and how the smart sharpening technique doesn't affect the noise. For details on reducing CCD noise (using this image as an example), see this tutorial.

Left image: Edge sharpened (Amt=1.25)
Right image: Standard unsharp mask (Amt=0.50)

Blending Exposures in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:23:00.001-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to do blend two different exposures of the same scene that you would like to combine to get the best parts of both images. This procedure works best if you have:

(obviously) have shot two different exposures that would be pleasing to combine,
had the camera mounted on a tripod (not strictly necessary, but helps greatly in aligning the images),
the scenes are not too different at the boundaries of the blend. If the scene has changed too much (trees blowing, waves, people or cars moving, etc. between the images), especially at or near the "seams" of the blend, it will make the blend more difficult.

If you have only one image that needs exposure adjustment, you might look at using the "digital" neutral density filter or the contrast masking technique.

The Procedure

The basic technique is to create a layer above the image that contains the other exposure of the same scene. Finally, we apply a layer mask to the this layer which makes parts of the image transparent that we want to show through from below.

Step 1

Here are the two exposures, loaded into GIMP. I am going to sandwich these on different layers and then combine them with a layer mask.

Step 2

The first decision is which one goes on top. In this case I have decided to put the lighter image on top and the darker one on the bottom. The reason is because I hand-held the shots, and they are far from aligned. I'm going to have to move the bottom image until the arch is aligned as best I can get it. Also, the top image is the composition I want anyway, and I'll have less painting to do that way.

Go the image that is going to be on the bottom. Open the Layers dialog (Ctrl+L) and click on the new layer button () to create a new layer.

Step 3

Go to the image that is going to be on top. Select all and copy (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C). In the Layers dialog, make sure the new layer is selected, then go to the bottom image window and paste (Ctrl+V). In the Layers dialog, click on the anchor button () to anchor the floating image.

Step 4

Crank down the opacity of the upper layer so that you can see both images.

If they are perfectly aligned you can skip the next step. Unless you used a digital capture on a tripod, the images probably need to be aligned. (Even if you had a film camera on a tripod, it is difficult to get two successive scans to feed through in perfect alignment.)

Step 5

In the Layers dialog, select the layer you need to move or rotate. In this case it is the lower layer.

Using the arrow keys, nudge the image into alignment. You may need to rotate the image slightly too.

When you get close to alignment, zoom in to get a good close-up view and get the best possible fit.

Step 6

In the Layers dialog, right-click on the upper layer and select Add Layer Mask. In the Add Mask Options dialog, select White (Full Opacity) and click OK.

Step 7

Now I want to paint black (transparency) onto the layer mask wherever I want the lower image to show through.

To minimize painting time, use the hand-select ("lasso" ) tool to select a large, hand-drawn region just inside all the borders of the area you want to paint, as shown at right. Then using the fill tool () fill the selection with black.

Step 8

Next, I select a large opaque brush from the Brushes dialog (Dialogs/Brushes), select the Paint tool () and begin painting into the mask close to the boundaries of the blend.

Notice that I still have the opacity cranked down on the upper layer so that I can see both layers.

Step 9

For the very edges, I switch to a small, feathered brush and very carefully paint the edges.

While I'm painting, I'll zoom in and out frequently ("=" key to zoom in, "-" key to zoom out) to inspect the work. Don't worry too much about the borders, since we'll probably have to touch those up anyway.

Step 10

Now the most painstaking part: blending the seams. This is a little tricky due to the different tonalities of the two exposures.

For blending work, the Clone (), Smudge (), Airbrush () and Blur () are my tools of choice.

Since I'm not sure if these tools have the ability to work across layers (as they do in Photoshop), I duplicate the image (Ctrl+D) and flatten the duplicate ( Layers -> Flatten Image) and work on it. This has the additional benefit that if I ever mess up the blending job too badly I can always easily start over at this step.

Note: see this tutorial on correcting blown out highlights for another example of using these tools for blending and some useful tips on their use.

Here I've used primarily clone and a touch of smudge to blend the seams of the two exposures. I didn't do a very thorough job with this image, since it is more of an example and not something I'm planning to display at any significant size.

Note: notice the chromatic aberration of the lens in the form of purple fringing at the edge of the arch. These tools are great for dealing with that even if I were not blending two exposures.

Final Step

Finished. The image still has some problems with blown out highlights in the sunlight of the rock face. It is also a little too dark in the foreground shadow.

Salvaging an Image with Blown Out Highlights in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:22:00.002-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to salvage an image that has blown out highlights. This is a problem that is familiar to photographers shooting transparency film, which has an effective contrast range of about 5 stops. If you are not careful with your exposure you can easily lose all detail in your highlight areas, with no way to get it back: they "blow out" to clear (white).

Many digital cameras have similar issues, especially consumer level ones. With these kinds of cameras it is worth paying attention to the old adage: "expose for the highlights". I find that if I treat my digital camera as if I were shooting slide film the exposure rules are about the same.

The Procedure

The basic technique is to graft matching areas of the image into the burned out parts using the clone tool and then to use several additional tools to blend the seams of the cloned areas.

Step 1

Here is the original image.

I saw my cat go up into a lemon tree. Thinking there might be an interesting shot there, I grabbed the camera and shot him from several angles, including this shot through a hole in the foliage. When I saw the image later on the monitor I realized what a nice natural three-dimensional frame I had.

The camera was set on automatic exposure. While it did a great job of exposing for the dark cat in the shade of the tree, there are several spots where specular reflections of the bright sunshine overhead blew out. The worst and most noticable is the one off of the leaf at the top of the image. There are some less objectionable, but bothersome burned out areas to the lower right of the cat's face.

Great image...could I rescue it?

Step 2

Using the color picker tool, you can see that there is no usable information left in the highlight. Pure white, of course, is 255/255/255.

If there had been some detail left here I might have tried a variation on the contrast masking technique or the "digital" neutral density filter first.

Step 3

The first step is to create a channel mask to be able to mask out parts of the image we don't want to affect. I'll use this for the main "pixel graft".

Duplicate the original image ( Image -> Duplicate or Ctrl+D).

In the duplicate, select Image -> Colors -> Threshold. In the threshold dialog box, drag to select the very right (extreme highlights) portion of the histogram. Alternatively, you can type in the lower bound, as I did here (250).

This causes all the pixels in the image from 250-255 to go white and all the others to go black.

Step 4

Go back to the original image, and bring up the Layers and Channels dialog ( Layers -> Layers, Channels & Paths, or Ctrl+L). Click on the Channels tab and add a new channel by clicking on the new channel button.

Step 5

Go back to the threshold image, Select -> All (Ctrl+A) and Edit -> Copy (Ctrl+C).

Edit -> Paste it into the original image (it should go into the new channel).

Click on the Layers tab and anchor the floating selection.

You can close the threshold image now.

Step 6

Click on the Channels tab again, and right click on the new channel and select Channel to Selection (Ctrl+S). You may want to also click on the eye beside the channel to turn off visibility of the channel.

Now feather the selection ( Select -> Feather). I used a value of 15 pixels or so in this case.

Finally (important!), click back on the Layers tab and select the Background layer, so the selection and further operations will apply to the image and not the channel mask.

Step 7

Now the real work begins.

We've lost these pixels entirely, so we're going to have to graft some on from somewhere nearby using the clone tool. A description of how to use this tool is beyond the scope of this document (see the GIMP savvy to find out more about this tool).

I cloned from the light part of the leaf just beyond the dark band to the right of the blown out area. This gave me a similar light-dark-light transition. You can see the clone tool options and the brush ( Dialogs -> Brushes) I selected (at right).

Zoom in and clone until you have the area filled with a realistic facimile of the missing detail. Most likely it will have a noticable transition around the edges. That's OK, we'll fix that up next.

Select -> None and zoom out to inspect your work.

Step 8

This step is where the most difficult work occurs. I must by necessity abbreviate this step, since it involves iterations of applying the following tools:

smudge
clone
airbrush (w/color picker)
convolve (blur)

Basically, smudge is your friend after a serious cloning job like this to clean up the transitions. Smudge around all the edges of the clone. The clone tool can also be used again here and there for "mop-up" work.

I use the airbrush and convolve/blur tools to do fine touch up on the smudge job and make it totally seamless with the rest of the leaf.

Tips:

Make small changes so you can undo easily without having to redo a lot of work.
Experiment with the tool options, especially opacity, rate and pressure (double-click on a tool to see the tool options). Some examples I used here are shown at right.
Vary your brushes! You generally want a nice feathered edge for smoothing seams. Some examples I used here are shown at right.
When using the airbrush, use the color picker first to sample a pixel. I average a pixel value as shown in the color picker options, right.
Periodically, zoom in and out to examine your work. The zoom keys are incredibly handy for this ("=" key to zoom in, "-" key to zoom out). When you really think you are done, examine the image at full-screen. Remember that when you print something at 16x20 or 20x30 you may expose flaws in your retouching that you didn't see at small sizes.

Right Image: zoomed view after the clone (previous step) and after this step.

Step 9

I went on to address the specular highlights to the lower right of the cat's face: spots of sunlit grass that burned out. These are not as bad, but I noticed them on a 16x20 print I had made and they bothered me, so toned them down a little.

Here are the original (left image) and finished images (right image).

Gaussian Blur Overlays in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:22:00.001-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to do gaussian blur overlays using GIMP. This is an interesting technique that intensifies and saturates the colors in the image, increases contrast, and adds a slightly hazy, "dreamy" feel to the image.

The basic technique is to create a duplicate layer in the image, lighten it and blur it, and combine it using a layer mode with the original.

Giving credit where credit is due: I did not come up with this method. I adapted it for GIMP from a Photoshop tutorial on the luminous-landscape.com web site (great photography web site BTW; I recommend it).

The Procedure

Here is the original example image, loaded into GIMP.

Step 1

Open the Layers dialog. Right-click on the Background layer and select Duplicate (there is also a button for this in the bottom button bar of the Layers dialog ().

Step 2

Now double-click on the duplicate layer and rename the new layer "Blur Overlay". This step is not strictly necessary, but it is helpful to prevent confusion about what is on each layer, especially if you add some additional layers for other editing purposes, or more importantly, if you save the file with layers and open it six months later.

Step 3

In the Layers dialog, select the Blur Overlay layer. In the "Mode" drop-down box, select "Overlay".
Now go back to the image window and apply a Levels ( Image -> Colors -> Levels) or Curves ( Image -> Colors -> Curves) and adjust it until the overall image has the proper brightness. You'll usually find it necessary to adjust the gamma slider (middle slider in Levels) down. You are only adjusting the upper layer, but you are viewing the cumulative effect of the layer blend.

Tip: If you don't get a good effect with Overlay mode, try Multiply mode (you can even change this while the Levels dialog is active).

Tip #2: while the Levels dialog is active you can toggle visibility of the upper layer to see the original image and compare to the blend. Just click on the "eye" next to the upper layer.

Step 4

Go back to the image window and right click, selecting Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. You will need to experiment to find the best value, but typically a value between 10 and 30 will do nicely.

Voila! If you don't like the effect, you can undo the blur (Ctrl+Z) and redo it (Shift+Alt+F) with a different value.

Click on the "eye" next to the Blur Overlay layer in the Layers dialog to rapidly compare the image with and without the overlay. Similarly, turn off the Background layer if you want to view the overlay to do further work on it.

Tip: Protecting Highlights with a Layer Mask

Although I like the effect, there is one problem with this technique and that is that it also increases contrast: the shadows get darker and the highlights get lighter.

You might be able to apply a contrast mask to counteract this effect, but in most cases it is the highlights that are the most troublesome in that they have lost detail. Fortunately we can apply a simple extension to the above technique to protect the highlights.

Step 5

Duplicate the image (Ctrl+D).
Flatten the duplicate ( Layers -> Flatten Image).

Step 6

In the duplicate, run a threshold filter ( Image -> Colors -> Threshold).

In the threshold histogram, click and drag to the right to select all the pixels at the upper end of the scale. Retry or adjust the selection using the number controls in the dialog box until the display shows most of the pixels you want to preserve as white and all the rest black.

You only need to approximate this, since we're going to clean up the mask anyway.

Step 7

To clean up the mask, I switched to the paintbrush (), hit "x" in the mask image to switch the foreground and background colors (Black/White to White/Black), selected a nice opaque brush in the Brushes dialog and painted the few pixels of the sky white that hadn't been turned white (the darkest parts of the clouds).

Now the black parts. I switched the fg/bg colors back to (Black/White). I could have painted black all over the lake, but I had a faster idea in mind. I used the marquee selection tool () to select the whole area and then using the fill tool () I just clicked in the selection to fill it black in one fell swoop.

I then "feathered" the mask so that it will blend the layers without a harsh transition by applying a 6 pixel gaussian blur to the mask.

Step 8

Invert the mask ( Image -> Colors -> Invert), so that the white parts correspond to the parts of the combined layers that you want to keep and the black parts correspond to the parts that should only reflect the original image (the highlights).

Step 9

Go to the Layers dialog. Select the overlay blur image in the "Image" drop down box (if it is not selected already).

Right-click on the Blur Overlay layer and select Add Layer Mask. In the Add Mask Options dialog, select White (Full Opacity) and click OK.

Now go back to the blurred threshold image, select all and copy (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C). Go back to the overlay blur image and paste (Ctrl+V). Go to the Layers dialog and click the anchor button () to anchor the mask.

Tip: Ctrl-click on the layer mask icon in the Layers dialog to toggle the effect of the layer mask to compare the image with and without the highlight mask.

Step 10

Here's the result. Compare to the original image (right image). I would flatten and apply a smart sharpening (edges) to finish it out.

Tips

Try other layer blending modes. "Multiply" often works well, but creates an even darker image than "Overlay"; you may have to really crank up the levels on the upper layer. One nice thing about Multiply is that you probably won't need the highlights mask.
"Screen" has a milder effect than either "Overlay" or "Multiply" and will generally just intensify the colors/saturation. You may not want to lighten the upper layer at all, or perhaps even darken it. Experiment to see what effects you can get.

Other Examples

Using "Multiply" for the blending mode. (Final image on the right)

Using "Overlay" for the blending mode, plus a highlight mask for the sky and waterfall. (Final image on the right)

Sepia Toning in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:21:00.002-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to sepia tone a color or black and white image. This technique is modeled on the traditional darkroom method of sepia toning in that the sepia color is applied "unevenly" to areas of different tonality. It works much better than most of the simple methods I've seen for image editors and provides great control!
The basic technique is to create a "Sepia Mask" that will apply a sepia color layer according to a layer mask that is based on the tonality of the image.
Giving credit where credit is due: I did not come up with this method. I adapted it for GIMP from a Photoshop tutorial on the RetouchPRO web site.

The Procedure

Here is the original image, loaded into GIMP. It has a bit of an old-time look, so I thought it might work well as a sepia-toned image.

Step 1

You can compare the result we will get below to GIMP's built-in Script-Fu for sepia toning ( Script-Fu -> Decor -> Old Photo) as shown at right.
Come back and compare to this when you get to the end of the tutorial.

Step 2

Duplicate the original image ( Image -> Duplicate or Ctrl+D). You may want to minimize the original now (or close it) so you don't choose it by mistake.

Using whatever technique you like best, convert the duplicate to B&W. I recommend the channel mixer for best results, but you can also convert to grayscale ( Image -> Mode -> Grayscale) or desaturate ( Image -> Colors -> Desaturate).

Whatever technique you use, convert the B&W image back into RGB mode when you're done ( Image -> Mode -> RGB).
In this case I simply did a mode change to grayscale, then back to RGB mode.

Step 3

Double-click on the foreground color swatch to bring up the Color Selection dialog. Dial in the color RED=162, GREEN=138 and BLUE=101 (you can experiment with this color too; this is a good starting point though.)

Step 4

Bring up the Layers dialog (Ctrl+L) and click on the button for a new layer. Give it the name "Sepia Mask" and choose the option to fill it with the foreground color. Click OK.
You should see nothing but the color now in the image window, since it obscures the image in the layer below. We are going to selectively apply this color to the image.

Step 5

Right-click on the Sepia Mask layer and select Add Layer Mask. In the Add Mask Options dialog, choose White (Full Opacity).

Step 6

In the Layers dialog, click on (select) the Background layer. Go up to the image window, select all and copy (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C). In the Layers dialog, click on the layer mask icon in the Sepia Mask layer (the little white square). Then go back up to the image window and paste (Ctrl+V)

Step 7

In the Layers dialog, click the Anchor button to anchor the pasted image into the layer mask.
In the image window, invert the color ( Image -> Colors -> Invert). This layer mask insures that the shadow parts of the image receive most of the color, the mid-tones a little less, and the highlights little to none, much the way a print sepia-toned the traditional way would be.

Step 8

In the Layers dialog, change the Mode (blending mode) of the layer to "Color". This applies the color from the Sepia Mask layer according to the layer mask to the image.
You now have your base result. It might be a good idea to save this under a new name at this point.

Step 9

Once you've got the base image, you can duplicate it (Ctrl+D), flatten the duplicate ( Layers -> Flatten Image) and then experiment with:

Hue and Saturation ( Image -> Colors -> Hue..Saturation)
Color Balance ( Image -> Colors -> Color Balance)
Levels or Curves ( Image -> Colors -> Levels|Curves)
etc. etc!

You can always compare the result to the base image. If you want to start over, just duplicate the base image again and off you go.

Hint: if GIMP had adjustment layers, like Photoshop, we'd just create one of those to experiment with further adjustments. Since GIMP does not have those, we have to flatten the image to apply some of the standard controls and filters. Ergo, work on a duplicate or save the base image..

Here I decided that the image was a little flat and so I punched up the contrast using curves.

Step 10

As a final touch, I ran the "Old Photo" Script-Fu without the "sepia" and "mottle" options. Here is the final image.

Tips and Tweaks

You can reduce the effect of the sepia toning by adjusting the opacity of the Sepia Mask layer.
Try adding some grain or noise to the image (probably before you desaturate).
We used a single, flat color for the sepia color. Experiment with different colors, multiple colors or a color gradient for the Sepia Mask layer.
You can apply levels, curves or other adjustments to the contrast mask to increase or decrease "absorbency" of the sepia color into different areas of the image.
The method by which you get a black and white image makes a big difference in how the sepia toning comes out.

The one on the left was from a grayscale conversion ( Image -> Mode -> Grayscale); the one on the right started as a desaturate ( Image -> Colors -> Desaturate). Notice that there is a lot more blue-channel noise in the right-hand one. This can add a nice "grain" effect (see tip above also) if that is what you are looking for. For this particular image, I prefer the smoother tonality and darker contrast of the left-hand image.

Creating a Contrast Mask in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:21:00.001-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I'll show you how to do create a contrast mask for your image in GIMP. A contrast mask allows you to reduce overall contrast, simultaneously bringing out more detail in highlights and shadows. This may be necessary to obtain a decent print, because prints on paper do not have as much dynamic range as a monitor; if you don't control the contrast, detail in the highlights may blow out and detail in the shadows can block up and become muddy or even black. You can of course modify your image directly in GIMP to decrease contrast, but the advantage of the contrast mask technique is that it allows you much more precise control, and gives better results.

The basic technique is to create a layer above the image that contains a B&W negative of the image. The images are combined in overlay mode: dark parts with light, light parts with dark. All the while your original image remains blissfully unchanged on its layer.

The contrast mask technique does some similar things for the exposure as the digital split ND filter and the blended exposures techniques. If you feel your image has exposure problems you might want to consider those techniques as well. Each one has different strengths. Occasionally this technique gives unacceptable color shifts in certain images. Sometimes it is just the ticket. Experiment to see if it can work for your particular image.

The Procedure

Here is the original example image, loaded into GIMP. The red leaves are a little too dark to make out the detail; if printed, the result would be pretty dark and muddy. At the same time, the yellow flowers have a couple of specular highlights that would probably blow out the detail if printed.

We want to brighten the dark areas a little and darken the light areas a little. In other words, reduce contrast.

Step 1

Open the Layers dialog. Right-click on the Background layer and select Duplicate (there is also a button for this in the bottom button bar of the Layers dialog.

Step 2

Now double-click on the duplicate layer and rename the new layer "Contrast Mask". (This step is not strictly necessary, but it is helpful to prevent confusion about what is on each layer, especially if you add some additional layers for other editing purposes).

Step 3

Select the Contrast Mask layer. Go to the image window and right-click, selecting Image -> Colors -> Desaturate. The image should look B&W.

Step 4

Right-click and select Image -> Colors -> Invert. You now have a B&W negative image of your original. We're going to combine this with the original (light with dark, dark with light) to reduce the overall contrast.

Step 5

Go back to the Layers dialog and in the "Mode" drop-down box, select "Overlay". The result may look better in terms of contrast, but degraded in terms of overall sharpness.

Don't worry, we're not done yet.

Step 6

Go back to the image window and right click, selecting Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. You will need to experiment to find the best value, but typically a value between 10 and 30 will do nicely. After blurring the contrast mask the overall image should now look much sharper.

Click on the "eye" next to the Contrast Mask layer in the Layers dialog to rapidly compare the image with and without the mask. Similarly, turn off the Background layer if you want to view the mask to do further work on it.

The image at top left is the original, the top right is with the contrast mask.

Step 7

It is informative to see how this technique compares to the conventional technique of using the contrast dialog to adjust contrast. I've tried to adjust the contrast to have the leaves appear about the same. I think the image with the contrast mask has a lot more pop! This one looks kind of flat by comparison.

Step 8

To see why this is so, compare the histograms of the images. The top one is for the original image, the middle is for the image with the contrast mask, and the bottom one is for the original image with the conventional contrast adjustment.

Note how the typical contrast adjustment has lost a lot of values at both ends, but the mask technique basically preserved the entire scale.

Step 9

You'll have to flatten the image if you are saving it to a typical image format like TIFF or JPEG (but not if you are saving to GIMP's native XCF format). To do that, right-click on the image and select Layers -> Flatten Image.

Fine Tuning

Now that your contrast mask is created, it's time to fine tune it. Here are some things you can do:

Use the "Opacity" slider in the Layers dialog to decrease the effect of the contrast mask overall.
Apply Levels or Curves to the contrast mask to open up the shadows or reduce the highlights further.
Apply the dodge and burn tools to the contrast mask.
Apply a layer mask to the contrast mask and use it to select only parts of the contrast mask; e.g. if you only want the contrast mask to apply to certain areas of the image (see my example of this below).

Noise removal with selective Gaussian blur in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:20:00.004-08:00

Intention

Digital cameras often have quite some noise in their pictures. Some are worse than others, but it's there. Here I'll show you a way to get rid of that noise using the selective Gaussian blur filter.

The basic idea behind selective Gaussian blur is that areas in the photo with contrast below a certain threshold gets blurred. You could think of it like the opposite of unsharpen mask (that sharpens everything with contrast above a certain threshold.

Step 1

Since the selective Gaussian blur filter doesn't have a preview and is quite heavy to compute (proportional with blur radius), it's easier to only work on a cropped version of you picture. Select the crop tool from the tool box, draw a selection and click "crop".

For best results, this should a part where there's some noise you want to remove and some detail you want to preserve.

Step 2

The next thing is to experiment with different combinations of the settings ("blur radius" and "maximum delta") in the selective Gaussian blur filter.

Normally I find that both settings should be between 5 and 10, where low numbers has less effect and higher numbers more, but this is very depending on the camera. In short, maximum delta should be just high enough for the filter to kick in on the noise and blur radius should be just high enough to remove it (actually blend it with neighboring areas).

For a more in depth explanation of what the settings do see http://www.ftgimp.com/help/C/filters/sel_gauss.html.

After playing with the settings a bit I liked the clean look of a blur radius of 10 and maximum delta of 10. Then I checked what those settings looked like on another crop (which is always a good idea to do), I decided that it was on the very edge, and maybe even too much. There was too much loss of detail in the hair.

An option would have been to back off a bit and use settings around blur radius 7 and maximum delta 6, but then again the only offending area was the hair. I finally decided to go with settings of 8/7.

You'll often find yourself in these arguments with yourself over when it's too much and when it's too little. All I can say is that you develop a feel for it, and I'm still not finished developing that feel. In any case, it's good to know that the first things that start to look funny are often faces and hair.

The result

After 8 minutes my AMD-K6 300 running Linux finished the process, and I got the following (note they are resized to 640x480 from 1280x960, you can get the larger files at the bottom of this page):

First image: Before.
Last image: After (blur radius:8, maximum delta:7).

Reducing CCD Noise in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:20:00.003-08:00

Intention

Images captured by a CCD or CMOS imaging chip will often have some noise present. This noise typically can be seen as RGB "flecks", especially noticable in the in the shadow areas of an image. The red and blue channels are especially susceptible. Higher ISO settings and higher ambient temperatures increase the likelihood of acquiring this noise along with your image.

If you find it necessary to shoot with a higher ISO and you find that you have an unpleasant amount of noise in your image, this tutorial will help you improve the image.

The Procedure

One procedure that works reasonably well is to apply the Despeckle filter. Unfortunately, this filter will soften the image. Fortunately, you can get sharpen the image to partially offset this.

Step 1

Here is the original image. Notice how bad the noise is, especially in the shadows of the face and in the white wall (back right).

Step 2

Right-click in the image and select Filters -> Enhance -> Despeckle.
You can play around with the settings, but you'll likely want to keep the radius pretty small. If you raise it too high you'll destroy details like the catchlights in the eye. The "Recursive" option seems to cause a more aggressive filter effect. Try it if you have an especially noisy image.

Examine the resulting image, zooming in to examine shadow areas. You'll notice that the noise is appreciably less objectionable. You cannot really eliminate it, but it is "smoothed out".

Unfortunately, you may also notice that the image is softer; the despeckle filter actually blurs the image. Fortunately we can offset this to some degree by sharpening.

Step 3

For best results, especially with a noisy image, you'll want to use smart sharpening, explained elsewhere on this site.
This particular image was edge sharpened on all RGB channels. If you find edge ("smart") sharpening too difficult, just apply a little global sharpening to offset the softening.

Step 4

Zoomed out (upper left). Compare to the original (upper right) Look at the arm and the white wall in back right. Much better.

Tips and Suggestions

It may not be necessary to apply the despeckle filter across all RGB channels; as I mentioned earlier, CCD noise tends to show up predominantly in the blue or red channels. You can open the Layers dialog (Ctrl+L), click on the Channels tab and just select the channel(s) that you want to apply the filter to. To examine the individual channels for noise, right click in the image and select Image -> Mode -> Decompose; choose RGB for the decomposition.
Similarly, you can try decomposing to HSV or LAB, running the despeckle filter on one or more parts (e.g. value channel from HSV) and recomposing.
Note: along these lines I have seen it suggested from several sources that decomposing to LAB, applying a slight gaussian blur to the A+B channels and then sharpening the L channel is a good approach to reducing CCD artifacts. I have to say that so far in my experiments this approach has not worked for me; I find the despeckle method far superior.

Other Examples

Selective Colorization

2008-12-09T01:20:00.001-08:00

Intention

In this tutorial I will explain how to convert a color photograph to a B&W one with color restored to selective areas. With the right subject this can give really striking results, as you can see for yourself. This technique is elsewhere referred to sometimes as "hand coloring" :-)

The basic technique is to duplicate the color photograph, convert the duplicate to B&W, and paste it as a new layer on top of the color image. Add an opaque layer mask and then selectively paint transparency into the upper mask, exposing the color photograph underneath.

Giving credit where credit is due: I did not come up with this method. I adapted it for GIMP from a reader comment I saw in a "hand-coloring" tutorial on photo.net (great web site by the way, I recommend it).

The Procedure

Here is the original example image, loaded into GIMP.

Step 1

Duplicate the image (Ctrl+D).
By whatever method suits you best, convert the duplicate image to B&W. Once you have gotten the B&W version that you like, change it back to RGB mode ( Image -> Mode -> RGB).

In this example, I tried the channel mixer, but ended up in this case preferring a simple conversion to grayscale ( Image -> Mode -> Grayscale), then back to RGB.

Step 2

Open the Layers dialog (Ctrl+L). Make sure that the original color image is selected in the Image drop down box. Click on the new layer button at the bottom of the dialog.
Here I've named the new layer "B&W"
Make sure the new layer is selected in the layers dialog.

Step 3

Go to the B&W image and select all, then copy (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C). Then go to the color image window and paste (Ctrl+V). The B&W image should be pasted into that layer, obscuring the color image.
Click the anchor button in the Layers dialog to anchor the pasted image.
You can close the B&W image window you just copied from now, if you want.

Step 4

In the Layers dialog, right-click on the B&W layer and select "Add Layer Mask". In the Add Mask Options dialog, select White (Full Opacity).

Step 5

Make sure that Black is selected as the foreground color in the toolbox. We're going to paint transparency into the layer mask to reveal the color image below.
Bring up the Brushes dialog ( Dialogs -> Brushes) and select a big brush. In the toolbox, select the paint tool (). Begin painting the interior of the parts you want to be in color.

Step 6

When you get to the edges of the colored part, zoom in to make life easier.

Step 7

At the very boundaries of the colored image I typically zoom in to 300% or so. Switch to a small, feathered brush and very carefully paint the edges.

If you only paint a little at a time it makes it much easier to use GIMP's excellent undo feature if you accidentally stray outside the boundary. If for some reason you can't undo, don't worry: just switch to white paint and paint opacity back over your mistake to repair the mask.

Final Step

When your all done, go over the colored part carefully to see if there are any gray (opaque) specks that you missed. Then zoom out and have a look. Voila!

Tips

For this kind of fine paint work, a pen tablet like this Wacom one is very useful. For photo retouching you don't need any bigger than a 4x5 model.
In this example I restored the original color from the color image, but there is no reason that you couldn't paint other colors onto the second layer. Just make sure that the image is selected and not the layer mask in the upper layer of the Layers dialog (click on either the image icon or the mask icon to select the one you want to work on).
Try blurring the lower color layer, or running one of the interesting "artistic" filters on it (pastels, oil painting, etc). You probably want to do this before you create the B&W copy.

Other Examples

Converting Color Images to Black and White

2008-12-09T01:19:00.002-08:00

The Procedure

Here is an example image, loaded into GIMP. I thought it might look nice as a black and white image.

Via Grayscale

Here is what I get if I use the standard mode change to grayscale from RGB.

Duplicate the original image (Ctrl+D) and right-click on the copy. Select Image -> Mode -> Grayscale. I don't know how this conversion works in GIMP, but I have read that Photoshop uses a standard mix of the RGB channels for their grayscale conversion: RED=30%, GREEN=59% and BLUE=11%. Supposedly this mix accounts for the eye's sensitivity to different colors. This formula does a pretty nice job in the general case, but some images do not work as well with it, particularly if the green channel component is not strong.

I suspect GIMP uses a similar formula. My experiments with the Channel Mixer (more on this below) support this.

Via Desaturate

Here is what I get if I use desaturate instead. Duplicate the original image (Ctrl+D) and right-click on the copy. Select Image -> Colors -> Desaturate. Unlike the grayscale mode change above, the channels are not remixed in different percentages, so we should expect different results.

The result is visually different; note the increased contrast in the scales. Also, compare the 100% zoom views at right and in the previous grayscale example. You can see a lot more noise in the desaturated zoomed view (examine the blurred area below the spikes). The reason is that we are getting more blue and red channel noise, whereas in the grayscale mode change operation the algorithm is giving us a remix of 60% of the clean, detailed green channel.

Via Decompose RGB

A third method is to consider the red/green/blue channels of the image. Each one can be represented as an independent grayscale image. Right-click on the original image and select Image -> Mode -> Decompose. Select the RGB option and click OK.

Here you can see the three channels: red (top), green (middle) and blue (bottom). You can see that the red channel contains most of the luminance information as well as a lot of noise, the green channel has the least noise, and the blue channel has shadows and noise. Often the blue channel has the most noise, but not in this case.

Very often the green channel contains an excellent B&W version of the image. If nothing else, taking a look at the RGB decomposition is important to give you an idea of where the important information is in your image, and where the noise is.

Via Decompose HSV

Another possibility is to decompose to Hue/Saturation/Value components and consider the Value image (the other two are not usually useful for this purpose). Right-click on the original image and select Image -> Mode -> Decompose. Select the HSV option and click OK.

Via Decompose LAB

Yet another decompose option: LAB mode. Right-click on the original image and select Image/Mode/Decompose. Select the LAB option and click OK.

The Lightness component is a very interesting one because it contains all of the luninance information (whereas in RGB and HSV some of that information is spread into other components). You can very often see an expanded tonal range and discover hidden detail in the shadows by examining this component.

Not often useful by itself, but it can be combined with other layers for interesting results (see Tips at end of article).

Note: the LAB decompose option was not distributed with the version of GIMP I got (ver 1.2.3). I don't know whether it comes bundled with newer versions. I downloaded it from the GIMP Plug-in Registry and compiled it myself.

Via Decompose CMYK

Just for fun I tried decomposing into CMYK. The Black channel is interesting: it resembles a negative.

Via Channel Mixer

The final technique is the Channel Mixer filter. Right-click on the original image and select Filters -> Color -> Channel Mixer.

You'll get a dialog box like the one at right. Click the checkbox that says Monochrome. Make sure the preview checkbox is also checked.

Now play around with the levels of the three channels, seeing the results in the preview window. If you don't want to change the overall brightness of the image then the three values should add up to 100%, but feel free to experiment (checking the "Preserve Luminosity" box will also preserve the overall brightness of the image--see the Tips section below for more explanation of this option). Dialing in Red=30%, Green=59%, Blue=11% ought to give you something that looks nearly identical to what you would get with a mode change to grayscale.

When you have something that looks decent in the preview, click OK. If you don't like the look of the result, Undo (Ctrl+Z) and reapply the filter with different settings (Shift+Alt+F).

The advantage of the channel mixer is (obviously) flexibility. I like to decompose and examine the individual RGB channels, as we did earlier. That way I can see what is good and bad about each, and then use the channel mixer to combine them accordingly. In this example, I could see that the green channel did not really have much to offer, and had the least contrast in the iguana's scales; still, I mixed in 30% to help with the noise. I liked the blue channel for the great contrast it adds to the scales. Red's got a lot of noise, but I mixed in just enough to use some of the contrast and luminance information. You can see from the close up that it isn't quite as good the grayscale version in terms of noise, but the noise isn't too bad, and the trade-off is a lot more contrast and interest in the overall tonalities of the image.

Note: the channel mixer plug-in was not distributed with the version of GIMP I got (ver 1.2.3). I don't know whether it comes bundled with newer versions. I downloaded it from the GIMP Plug-in Registry and compiled it myself.

Tips

Once you have a good B&W version of your image you may be interested in adding some simulated film grain.
If you are wondering what the "Preserve Luminosity" option does in the Channel Mixer, I have the answer. I was curious myself, and asked the author of the Channel Mixer, Martin Guldahl, about it. This was his reply:

Hi Eric:

The 'Preserve Luminosity' option just maintains the luminosity at the same level regardless of the slider values.

For example, suppose the sliders were are Red:75%, Green:75%, Blue:0%. With 'Monochrome' on and the 'Preserve Luminosity' option off, the resulting picture would be at 75%+75%+0% =150%, very bright indeed. A pixel with a value of, say, R,G,B=127,100,80 would map to 127*0.75+100*0.75+80*8=170 for each channel. With the 'Preserve Luminosity' option on, the sliders will be scaled so they always add up to 100%. In this example, that scale value is 1/(75%+75%+0%) or 0.667. So the pixel values would be about 113. The 'Preserve Luminosity' option just assures that the scale values from the sliders always adds up to 100%. Of course, strange things happen when any of the sliders have large negative values.

Other Examples

Left image: The original image.
Right image: Converted using channel mixer (80% green, 20% red).

Left image: The original image.
Right image: Converted using channel mixer.

Advanced Animations Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:19:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the advanced GIMP animation tutorial. Here you'll learn how to use the GAP, GIMP animation package. It is very advanced, but the user interface might be confusing for some at first. That's why we'll start with a little theory before we move over to the practical part.

To make things easier, we'll start with a ready-to-go static image. To load it into GIMP, just drag the image above to the GIMP toolbox. In case this doesn't work for you, copy the link by selecting Copy Target or Copy Link Location from the image context menu accessible by right-clicking on the image. In GIMP, choose Open Location from the toolbox File menu and paste the URL there. Gimp will download the compressed image and open it for you.

Step 2

Now drag the background layer from the static image to the GIMP toolbar. This will create a new white image we'll use as a base for our animation. To be able to work with GAP you need to save it in GIMP's native format, .xcf. Create a separate directory for the file, it will fill with many frame files soon. The file needs to be named like this:

name-0001.xcf

You can only change the name part. The rest needs to be exactly the way shown. GAP works on series of .xcf images, so that you can work with layers the same way as you do in static images. You don't have to copy the file yourself to add a frame. GAP has series of functions to help you manage frames. We'll create a 20 frame animation, so the first thing will be to copy the first frame 19 times using the video/duplicate frames function.

Step 3

Now it's time to use the move path function. Make sure you have the static image open but use the function on the white background image. In the dialog, select the logo image as source and make sure you set the stepmode to none! Keep the mode as normal and choose some handle mode. I have used center, so use that if you're going to stick with the parameters provided here.

For the logo we'll animate two parameters. First, we'll zoom out the logo so it appears to fly away from the observer and combine that with opacity increase. For the first animation point use the following parameters: x:157, y:74, width:800, height:800, opacity:20. Keep the rest default. Now add a new animation point by clicking on the add point button. Notice how the status above the button changed to current key: [ 2 of 2 ]. Now change the width, height and opacity back to 100%. You can check the result on any animation point by navigating to it (using next and previous or other buttons) and clicking on the update preview button. You can also preview the whole animation using the Anim preview button. This will create a new layered image, so don't be impatient, it takes a while.

Adding points to your animation creates linear time segments between those. If you want to create non-linear animation, just set a specific frame to the active point using the keyframe slider. We won't need it for the logo animation, so let's just press ok for now.

Step 4

Now we have a rendered sequence of images. You can navigate them easily using the video/VCR navigator. Pressing play on the navigator will call two functions, frames to image and animation playback, so it's fast and convenient to use it to check the looks of your animation.

You can also specify the default delay between frames by setting the framerate in FPS (frames per second). The higher the value, the smoother the animation will be, but more frames will be needed. You can also render only segments of the whole animation by selecting particular frame thumbnails in the navigator before pressing the play button. Use shift, ctrl or drag your mouse to select multiple frames. If you press Shift while pressing the play button, the resulting animation-image will be optimised (as discussed in the simple animation tutorial).

As you can see on the image above, I have added some more movement effects for every source layer of the static image using only the move path dialog. You can now try to recreate the animation yourself, you know tool to be able to.

Step 5

All we need to do now is to save the animation. You can choose to go for the GIF format as I did with the image above, but the filesize is too huge to be widely accepted on the web anyway, so you can consider using a regular animation format like avi (needs special version of the xanim player from Loki) or mpeg1 / 2.

To save the animation as gif, first apply the video/frames to image function. This will create a single multi-layered image with the specified delay. Now apply the animation optimize filter (not that useful in this case) and finaly index the image to 16 color without using any color dithering. The file will still be about 170kB, so it's huge. You can consider trying some specialised optimisation software like GIFsicle. Maybe MNG with its sprite based animation will make it more suitable for the web. Rendering will happen on the browser side and I'm very excited about the idea.

Last thing I can't help myslef not to mention is to thank Wolfgang Hofer for making such a great plugin that takes GIMP functionality to a new level. With GIMP 2 rendering engine we'll probably see more "applications" like that using GIMP's features to provide us with another area of application. I'd also like to thank the GIMP developer community to work hard every day to give us the best web gfx tool there is. If you just started to experience GIMP

Using GAP in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:18:00.002-08:00

Main Interface

Source Image/Layer specifies, which layer you want to animate on top of the current image. If you select a layer from a multilayer image, make sure you don't forget to specify the stepmode as well.

The stepmode is there to define how you want to animate the multilayered image you specified in the source image drop down.

Mode defines what mode should be GIMP using for the layer in the final layer stack.

In the modifier section you specify placement, dimension and opacity values for the current key. You can navigate in time by adding time points as shows the timeline section.

At the bootom of the dialog you'll find some inportant sliders. The duration of the animation is specified using the start frame and end frame sliders or input boxes. Preview frame renders frame # specified when the update preview button is pressed. Layerstack defines where the inserted objects will go in the layer stack of the final image. 0 means top of the layer stack, while lower values move the layer towards bottom of the image.

Stepmode

Stepmode defines how you want the source multi-layer image to be animated withing the final animation render.

Loop will suprisingly loop all the layers/frames of the source animation endlessly, while loop reverse will do the same, but for the opposite direction. Once is a simple one-time loop of the source animation, once reverse does it in the opposite direction. Pingpong will create a looping animation, but once it reaches the bottom of the source image stack, it moves the opposite direction. Use the last mode (none) if you only want to use a single layer out of a multi-layered source image.

The animation will start from the specified layer, so make sure you don't miss out some frames. If a source image is a one-layered one, stepmode will not have any effect on the result whatsoever.

If you want the final rendered layer to be different mode than the default normal specify it in the mode popup.

The handle option is used for exact placement of the source object into the final image. Select whatever option you wish to use to place the object in respect to the crosshair on the image preview (and it's x and y coordinates).

In the middle section of the dialog, you can define placement and dimensions of the rendered object. You can also set opacity and rotation of the object. You do this for every animation point (see later on). Gimp will compute the values between those points.

Every animation should at least have two animation points. For every animation point you define values for position, rotation, scale and opacity. In the animation point section you can add points and move within those to set the mentioned attributes for a particular point.

Every animation point is shown on the image preview acording to his x,y position.

At the bottom of the dialog, you can specify the segment on the animation to render the current source image animation to.

The preview frame slider is used in conjuction with the update preview button. You can use it to get the backroung image from a particular frame of the animation to be able to position the source object precisely. It will not have any effect on the final rendering.

Layerstack is used to place the source image into a particular position in the final rendering layer stack. 0 means top of the stack (covering everything below it, also depending on the mode).

Force visibility vill toggle all layers in the source image to visible, so that the final rendering does not have "holes" in it. Clip to frame will crop anything thats outside of the image dimensions. It will reduce file size, but you'll be unable to move the object on the final rendering to alter the animation.

Creating Icons in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:18:00.001-08:00

Almost every desktop enviroment I've seen has a special application for creating icons, usually a very limited drawing application. In this short tutorial, we'll show you how GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) can help you create icons for your desktop.

Before You Begin

As with any new task, it will help to have a little background information:

Filenames and Structure

GIMP enables you to save compressed files and work with them transparently, using the .xcf format. However, since we're working with very small files, compression simply doesn't save enough space to justify the effort. Especially since filemanagers like Nautilus have problems with creating thumbnails for compressed images, it's best to accompany any .xcf files you produce with a .png version. (See Image above)

Nautilus (gnome-vfs) can't yet handle compressed GIMP native files

Choosing a Color Palette

You may think palettes are only necessary in special cases like indexing colors of web images. However, if you're going to create more than one icon, having a pre-selected palette can give your icons a more consistent look and feel.

You may want to consider using a palette that already exists. Many operating systems like MS Windows or MacOS have a system-wide color palette that is used on low color depth screens. You could also use one of the palettes that Tuomas Kuosmanen has included in his public palettes list.

If you prefer to create your own palette, it's best to just define the most basic colors. That is, focus mostly on defining a set of hues you'll be using. Later on, you can tweak the value or saturation to create highlights or shadows of that particular color. Having a complex palette with many variations will make it complex and hard to navigate.

Getting Started

When you're ready to start, run GIMP by selecting Applications -> Graphics -> GIMP Image Editor from your menu panel, or typing gimp at the command line. If you haven't used GIMP before, the default window layout may be a little confusing. It's a lot like Photoshop and other similar applications, in that it uses a large number of dialogs. Select items from the File -> Dialogs menu to choose which dialog windows you'd like to have open and which ones you'd like to have closed. For icon work, you may find it most convenient to use the main window, plus the palette and layers dialogs, and of course the actual image you're working on.

To create a new image file, press Ctrl+N. Select a 48x48 pixel image, the standard Gnome icon size. Because working on such a tiny pixmap requires a lot of detail, zoom in to work on a pixel-by-pixel level. Try 8:1 magnification ( View -> Zoom -> 8:1).

At that magnification, however, you will begin to lose perspective. It's best to keep an additional window open with an unmagnified view, so you can see what your icon will look like. To do that, choose View -> New view from the image context menu (the little arrow in the upper left side of the window). Use a 1:1 zoom on this view, so that you can paint at an 8:1 zoom and see the results immediately.

Make sure to turn off the selection decorations on the 1:1 window. To do that, focus the window and press Ctrl+T or choose View -> Toggle selection.

A Few Tricks

It seems at first that creating an icon is incredibly restrictive. After all, you have just a tiny grid where you will soon run out of pixels. However, there are a few tricks you can use to fool the human eye and make your icons look better. Basically, you'll be simulating or implying shape with color value and opacity.

Antialiasing

One of the basic aspects of bitmap images is the negative effect of Aliasing.
Although many tools like the brush tool work well in large images, they aren't effective at the icon size. In particular, drawing with a 1x1 pixel brush doesn't behave as well as could be hoped.

The solution is to anti-alias manually. Some people prefer to work at a higher resolution, with full anti-aliasing, and then scale down, but the icon loses smoothness and most of the benefit of the larger size. In the end, it's necessary to touch up the image manually. In most cases, you're better off starting with just your 48x48 square and not scaling.

As much as it sounds hard, manual anti-aliasing is easy, and even fun. All you need for this is the opacity setting of the pencil tool. Say we have an outline that's aliased (Like the image to the left). Select a 1x1 brush and set the opacity to something like 40%. When you start drawing with this black brush by clicking on the white surface, it will become light gray. One more click and it gets darker. That way you can easily create fluent transitions between the two border colors. You can also change the active color using Ctrl-leftMB or just by swapping forground and background colors (X).

If you're using layers to have more freedom experimenting, you will find the erase tool as useful for anti-aliasing as the pencil (Right image). Make sure you turn on the hard edges option, for maximum precision.

Shading with Gradients

You can use gradients to enhance the shape of an object. For round objects, choose a radial gradient, and for curves, use a linear gradient. For filling surfaces, you'll want to use linear gradients almost every time. Even when the surface is supposed to be flat, a slight gradient adds realism. Make sure to keep the gradient subtle, though: too much of a difference between the two extremes and you'll ruin the effect.

Highlights and Shadows

For any given object, make sure you experiment a little with highlights and shadows, and not just the regular drop shadow used on most Gnome icons. Try giving your icon real material properties with some light reflections. Whether it's just a little gleam or shine from a corner or a suggestion of depth by lowering the saturation or value of a corner in the back, you can improve the look of an icon with just a little work.

For smooth shading, select the area you want to work with and then apply the airbrush tool. You'll only affect the selection, so you don't have to worry about overspray. To do hard highlights, use the one pixel pencil tool and, as before, a lowered opacity for the color.

Work Example

In this small tutorial, Ximian artist Jakub Steiner will demonstrate most of the techniques described in the section called "A Few Tricks" as he draws a TV icon.

Basic Shape

Normally, you'd use the bezier tool for shape editing, but a TV silhouette is simple enough that we'll just start with the rectangle selection tool.

Create a separate foreground layer for the shape, and choose a light, but not completely white, color for the background layer. After you're done with the icon, you can drag colors from the palette to the background layer to make sure that the icon looks right on any background.

Drag the black preview rectangle from the toolbox, or press Ctrl-+ to fill the silhouette. You should have a black square on a light background. Then, use the eraser tool to smooth the edges of the square so that the shape is better. This will also add a slight white shine to the corners of the image.

Making it Plastic

Next, we're going to use alpha blending of a selection to give a more three dimensional appearance to the silhouette.

Select the TV silhouette by right-clicking on the layer in the layer window and choosing Alpha to Selection. Shrink the selection by 1 pixel and fill it with a linear gradient similar to the image above. Now you have a dark grey shape with a black outline, and slightly shiny corners.

Now it's time to add a bit more depth, using the highlight trick from the section called "Highlights And Shadows". Use a white 1x1 pencil to create highlights, and a black one to create shadows. By setting opacity of the brush to something like 20% you can get results similar to the image above.

Modelling the Screen

Of course, a television isn't just a single square with an outline. You can create the screen exactly the same way you did the TV silhouette. Create a new layer, and add a smaller rectangular selection, positioned inside the television one. Fill it with black, shrink the selection by 1 pixel and finally fill it with linear gradient to form a screen like the one shown in image above.

An important aspect of glass surfaces is the reflection. To make the television screen look shiny and reflective, shrink the selection by another pixel and create a new layer. Now, pick the airbrush tool and a mid-sized fuzzy brush. Paint a white reflection like the one in image above.

If you want to create horizontal monitor lines on the screen, you can use the interlace effect. To do so, create a new layer above the current one. Render white horizontal lines with Filters -> Render -> Pattern -> Grid. Make sure you set the layer mode to Overlay.

After that, you'll want to create buttons. This is relatively simple: just create a circular selection with the elipse tool and fill it with radial gradient (image above). Choosing a gradient instead of a solid fill provides a bit of shine to the button, so even if it's just a few pixels across, it looks distinct and three dimensional.

Modelling the Remote Control

This time we'll use the bezier selection tool to create the outline of an object. With a small shape, it can sometimes be difficult to use the bezier tool, it's hard to create a small shape, because the nodes snap to the pixel grid, but it's worth the effort because it makes the shape look sharp, like the one above. You can look in the GIMP manual for more information about editing bezier paths and working with the bezier tool.

To create a shadow for the remote, copy the path window and moving just one node. The shadow in this image is done exactly this way.

You can make almost any image, especially a small one, easier to understand by adding black object outlines to enhance contrast. To do this, you'll use the opposite of technique you used to create the television silhouette with its outline. First, right-click on the remote control layer and select Layers -> Alpha to selection. Create a new empty layer below the remote control layer. Increase the size of the selection by 1 pixel, and fill the selection with black.

GIMP may not grow that selection perfectly, and you will probably have to alter the result manually. In this case, we'll use the erase tool with a 1x1 pixel brush, and opacity between 60 and 70 percent. Choose the "draw straight lines" option, and smooth the outline by drawing close to the border of the object.

Now, to make the object a little more realistic, we'll use our highlight trick. Use the pencil tool with a 1x1 pixel brush and opacity set quite low, near 20%. The result makes the object very real.

To create buttons on the remote control, use the same technique as you did to create the button on the TV: Make a selection with the bezeier tool, then fill it with a gradient, and apply highlights and shadows with the pencil tool as needed.

Adding Glow

For extra realism you can add a TV glow. Create a layer above the screen, but below the remote. Create a rectangular selection of the screen, then increase its size by 6 pixels and fill it with blue. Now, shrink that selection by 3 pixels and fill with white. Deselect the are with Ctrl-Shift-A and apply Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur RLE by about 5 pixels. Now set the layer mode to overlay, creating the transparency effect.

The Final Product

Now, you've got a final product: a television, with remote.

Draw A Paint Brush in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:17:00.004-08:00

So, we want to create a nice paintbrush image with GIMP. This tutorial can be a bit complex and I think it is better for a bit more advanced GIMPer. If you want to learn the basics, a good way to do so is to get one of the many GIMP books written. If I must pick one to recommend, I think it would be Grokking The Gimp, it is pretty good. But I am sure many of the others are great too, check a few out at your bookstore!

Step 1

Anyway, we start off with a plain gray image.

Step 2

We first create a new transparent layer, and name it "tip" since we start drawing the brush from the brush tip.

Step 3

Use the Bezier (Paths) tool to make a brush-shaped selection, like on the above image. This could be tricky if you are not used to the tool, so it might be helpful to check out my Bezier tool tutorials if you have trouble.

Step 4

Just fill the selection with black color.

Step 5

Make another bezier selection, now inside the black brush tip. Since a wet brush tip is rather shiny, we want to add a hilight too make it look realistic. Try to think where the light comes from, and make the selection accordingly.

Step 6

We are going to use the Blend tool (gradient fill) to make the hilight. You might want to make a new layer for the hilight so you can edit it later if you are not happy with the result.

The important thing here is to set the blend mode to "FG to Transparent", we only want to add white, not the black.

Step 7

Make a blend from top to bottom, so that the white fades out towards the brush tip.

Step 8

Then make another bezier selection that will form the brush metal handle, this is a bit more tricky, try to think where the brush handle will point, and add small "roundings" to the ends. Then fill the selection with a rather mid gray gradient. It does not look very real yet, but we want to bring this to life next...

Step 9

Keep the selection active still, and start adding black shadows with the airbrush tool so the shape gets some depth and looks more three-dimensional.

This takes a bit of work, start first with large fuzzy brush, and work towards finer detail by using a smaller fuzzy brush. As far as I know, real airbrush artists use the same method to paint, they just use masking film and tape in place of the bezier selection.

Again, think how the light would reflect and how the shadows would be on a real object. And dont worry if it does not look right at first, it needs some practice and patience.

Step 10

Also add some hilights by using white color on the airbrush. You can make the object appear more metal-like by adding a second hilight to the "shadow" edge as if it was reflected from the background plane. If your background was having some color, you could add slight tint of that color to the "second" reflection.

Again, since the metal has a pretty shiny surface, you can use the Dodge/Burn tool to make the shadows and hilights stronger. Using brighness and contrast might help too.

Step 11

We add the "engraving" by painting blackwith a very small brush, airbrush again works well. Try to make it look like some letter ornament or whatever you like.

Step 12

Add hilights with white color to the areas that would get reflection. Since the light comes from top left, the hilights go to bottom right of the black "engraved" shapes.

Step 13

Next we want to do the rest of the handle. We again create a new layer for it. Since it comes from "inside" the metal part, it is better to put it behind the metal part layers.

Step 14

Again, the bezier selection tool. Yes, I love it. You should too. Make a nice tapered shape that represents the brush handle.

Step 15

Doubleclick the "Bucket fill" tool and select "Pattern source" from the tool options window. Select one of the wooden patterns. This will make the texture of the handle. Fill the selection with the wooden pattern.

Step 16

Add another layer, this time for the hilight of the wood. Position it just above the handle layer.

Step 17

First, like you did on the "metal" part, shade the wooden handle a bit with the airbrush tool so it looks round. Then do a hilight like you did for the brush tip on steps 5-7. You might want to reduce the fill opacity a bit since the wood is quite not as shiny as the wet brush tip.

Step 18

Okay, it looks very much like a brush already... Lets just add a shadow and it looks better.

Step 19

Duplicate the image, delete the background and select "Merge visible layers" to make the brush just one layer. We are going to make this copy into a drop shadow for the original brush.

Step 20

Turn on "Keep Trans" checkbox on the layers dialog, and select the whole image and fill it black with the bucket fill tool.

Step 21

Unselect the "keep trans" and blur the layer a fair bit, I think I used something like 20 for the radius.

Step 22

Now scale the shadow image so that it is 60% of the original height, but keep the original width. You need to click the "chain" button on the scale dialog to change the image's aspect ratio.

Step 23

Copy the shadow image on the original brush image, and move it just above the background layer. The easiest way to copy a layer is to drag it from the layers dialog to an image.

Step 24

I wanted to erase some of the shadow of the handle so it looks more realistic. I just used the eraser tool with a big fuzzy brush.

Step 25

There! The finished paintbrush image. And you learned a lot about GIMP as well.

Photo to sketch

2008-12-09T01:17:00.003-08:00

Tutorial on how to make a nice baby & daddy photo into a nice baby & daddy painting.

1. Original image

Nice picture of a baby & dad. Ah.

2. After a Sobel edge detect

Straightforward Sobel edge detect ( Filters -> Edge-Detect -> Sobel) of original (don't forget to save a copy of the original) The Sobel edge detect should be done on the background image (without an alpha channel) rather than a copy of the background (which has an alpha channel).

3. Equalised & desaturated Sobel

Bring out detail with an auto-equalise ( Layer -> Colors -> Auto -> Auto-Equalize) of the sobel edge detect, and convert it to greys using desaturate ( Layer -> Colors -> Desaturate).

4. Curves window for how to do a highpass filter

We only want the strong edges, otherwise it'll look crap. To get them, we eliminate the edges with small magnitude. The easiest way to do this is with the curves tool ( Image -> Colors -> Curves) like this.

We set the curve type to free (which allows discontinuities), and then for the bottom 3/4 of the curve (or thereabouts) to 0. Just drag the mouse/pen along the bottom of the curves tool.

5. Image after the highpass

The result is much cleaner. The only problem is it's white-on-black, when we want black-on-transparent ideally.

6. L&C dialog for creating an edges mask

Small trick to get to black-on-transparent. Invert the Sobel edge detect (you did keep a copy, right?) with Layer -> Colors -> Invert and apply our highpass-filtered copy as a mask. To do this, open the Layers & Channels dialog (if it's not open already), and add a layer mask to the layer with the inverted edge detect layer ( Edit -> Copy with the highpass layer selected, Add Layer Mask with the inverted edge layer selected, then select the mask and Edit -> Paste) Since we kept the strong edges in the highpass filtered layer, this means that we end up with a rather nice black-on-transparent layer.

7. Save of the image above to show effect

This is the result of the trick above. It's shown here with a white layer behind it. We could stop here, and this is a decent sketch effect. For the colouring, we need some more work (mostly slogging, though).

8. L&C dialog with set-up for the colouring trick

images,original image & colouring layer in overlay mode

We put our original image back in the background, and set the white layer to overlay (as we see here) - this means we can see the coloured areas behind the white layer - this is extremely helpful when we're painting the white layer, as sometimes the edges are rather fine, or are in the middle of an area that's more or less the same colour.

9. Colouring looks after doing one area of the image

Using the colour-picker tool (looks like an eye-dropper), we select the colour we want to paint from the original image (just activate the "original image" layer and try to pick a colour representative of an area), and then we re-activate our colouring layer, which is still in overlay mode. Using a big brush (with the brush tool for more natural edges) we fill in the area of that colour roughly (doesn't have to be perfect). You should see the colour darkening as we draw with a colour similar to the background colour.

10. Colouring layer in normal mode

This is what we see if we set the colour drawing layer to normal mode. And we're on our way.

11. Finished with a completed colour layer

After some effort, all the regions get filled in. Final touches to make faces and the like look better for shadows and highlights were accomplished by selecting a representative shadow/highlight colour, and adding the extra bits with the airbrush tool (looks like an airbrush). After all our work, we end up with this very nice looking painting effect.

Sketch effect in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:17:00.001-08:00

Before:

After:

1. High pass filtering

High pass filtering means that we filter away the low frequencies of something, and let the high frequency bands pass. In image terms, this means that the detail of an image is kept, while the larger scale gradients are removed. Luckily, it's not as complicated as it sounds.

First, duplicate the layer.

Then Gaussian Blur the top layer with an appropriate radius.

You need to experiment to find good values, but roughly speaking one can say that the larger the radius, the wider the high pass filter's frequency response, and the "fatter" the lines in the final sketch. In this example I used 7 pixels, giving this result;

Now we have a low pass filtered version of our image; all gradients and no detail. Exactly the opposite of what we wanted. So, how do we obtain a high pass filtered version? Why, we subtract it from our original, of course. A good way to do that is to simply Invert the image, and blend it 50-50 with the original. First, Image->Colors->Invert;

Then, to blend the two, we adjust the Layer's Opacity slider to 50%, and our high pass filtered image appears;

Now it's time to Merge the two layers, so that we can continue to process them as one. Right-click on the top layer and pick Merge Down.

Now, back to the image. Was the effect a bit too subtle, perhaps? While not necessary, we can apply the Levels tool (Layer->Colors->Levels) to increase the contrast a bit, so that it's easier to inspect visually. In this example, I set Input Levels to 100-155;

2. The sketch part

Now it's time to make the image background white. First, Layer->Colors->Desaturate the image, and fire up that Levels tool again. Here you need to experiment a bit to find the best values for your image. But you will most likely want to set max Input Level (the right value) to 128 or thereabout. This makes the 50%-grey part of the image go white, which is a good start. (If you look at the Levels histogram, you should notice a strong peak in the middle. This is where we want the Max Input Level.)

The primary target of experimentation would be the gamma value field in the middle (the grey triangle just below the histogram). With a bit of tweaking, you could end up with something like this;

That's pretty much it. I tend to want to hand-polish my images to get rid of various imperfections, though. Below is the result of softening the contrast on the lower right region, which is where the bright skin fell against the black background; The higher the contrast, the stronger the lines. I also fine-tuned the overall contrast (with Levels) to get rid of some of the noise in the face;

Finally I wanted to remove the annoying shadow below his chin and some of the specks scattered around his face, so I manually hand-brushed away parts of it, giving the final result;

Voila. That's it. Hope you liked it. :)

Golden Text Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:16:00.002-08:00

Doesn't the title look really valuable? To reproduce this effect you need the incredible "Lighting"-Plugin, created by Tom Bech and Federico Mena Quintero. It is not in the standard gimp-1.0 distribution, you have to install it yourself. It can be found at Filters -> Light Effects -> Lighting Effects. This Plugin does a very good Bump-Mapping. Additionally it can map an enviroment-map to the image.

Part I

The trick is to use a good enviroment-map. I created it with Filters -> Render -> Solid Noise (X/Y-Size: 2.8, Detail: 1, Tileable). It is important for a good effect to get different grays in the top right corner. Then I did a Image -> Colors -> Auto-Stretch Contrast and a Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur (IIR) with a radius of 5 to get the full range of gray. Then select the "Golden"-Gradient in Dialogs -> Gradient Editor... and Filters -> Colors -> Gradient Map it to the image.

The next step is to create a bumpmap for the text. Open a new grayscale image in the desired size, fill it black and paint the white text on it. To get a smooth transition do a Gaussian Blur on it.

Then open a new RGB-Image with exactly the same size and start the Lighting-Plugin. Select the "Enviroment-map"- and "Bumpmap"-Toggles and select the images in the appropriate notebook-pages. I prefer a lower value in the "Maximum height" Bumpmap option. I think 0.02 is good in most cases.

This is the result after a click on Apply. There is room for Improvements. Since the Lighting-Plugin doesn't support antialiasing yet it is a good idea to render the image in the double size and scale it down for the final image. Some other neat tricks can be found in the next part.

Part II

At the Bumpmap-Options you can select different between four different Curves for Bumpmapping. So you can select between a linear, spherical, logarithmic and a sinusoidial Bumpmap.

There is a much more flexible way to specify the surface of the Bumpmap. The Key is the Image -> Colors -> Curves-Dialog. Create the text and blur it with a wider radius. Then select the Curves-Dialog and modify the text-profile. A little Blur (Radius 2) makes the Bumpmap a little bit smoother. See the examples above.

Another possibility is the use of a different gradient.

Part III

To get Chrome-like effects try to use different environment-maps. Look at these examples.

That's it :-)

Image Pipes 2 in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:16:00.001-08:00

What are image pipe and pixmap brushes?

A pixmap brush is an image, with both shape and color, that gets drawn with one of the paint tools. The pencil draws the pixmap with a single click. The paintbrush does the same with some extra options. The airbrush allows you to do levels of transparency for the pixmap brush. Even the eraser can be made to erase segments in the shape of the pixmap.

An image pipe is a series of pixmap brushes combined into one, so that one or more of the pixmaps from the image pipe is drawn as you click or drag the mouse.

How Do You Make a New Brush?

100 percent spacing

150 percent spacing

20 percent spacing

Both the image pipe and the pixmap brushes are made as images in GIMP. A simple pixmap brush has one layer, and an image pipe has several. Both images need to be partly transparent, with alpha channels on all layers and no background. You save an image as type .gpb for a pixmap brush, .gih for an imagemap brush. GIMP searches $HOME/.gimp-1.1/brushes/ for a user's customized brushes.

When you save an image in either format, a dialog box comes up. For pixmap brushes, this dialog is simple. It asks you for a name for the brush and a default spacing. The name is simply the description that will appear in the brushes dialog when that brush is selected. The spacing determines how close together the images are.

A pixmap brush with 100% spacing will draw a bunch of pixmaps with touching borders. More spacing will have a gap between the pixmaps, less will mean the pixmaps will overlap. See the examples above.

Image Pipe Options

The options for an image pipe are a bit more complicated. Let's take a simple image with four layers. The layers look like above.
Click on the example above to download the GIMP file.

When I try to save this image as type "GIH", I get this dialog box: (Image above)

There's a lot of options here. Here's a list of what the simple ones mean:

Spacing: Same meaning as for pixmap brushes above.
Description: Same meaning as for pixmap brushes above.
Cell Size: Gives width and height of the brush. Generally, you don't want to change these values.
Number of Cells: Should match the number of layers in the image pipe.

The last three fields are a little harder to describe. If you want to give this image a one dimensional image pipe, you put '1' under Dimension and 4 under Ranks. This gives you four images in your image pipe, one of which will be chosen each time the brush touches. The last field, Selection, is about how that brush is chosen.

Let's say we save the image above as an image pipe with one dimension, four ranks and random selection. One of the images will be chosen for the brush at random. If we paint a short line with it (spacing 150), we get something like image above.

If instead, we chose incremental selection, the layers will be chosen in order from the top layer to the bottom, which would look like this.

An angular pipe choses its layer based on the angle the brush moves. The top layer covers 0 degrees (straight up) and the angles to either side. The layers going down are assigned counter clockwise, evenly dividing the number of degrees with the layer. So with four layers, "A" will go up, "B" right, "C" down and "D" left, like this.

Angular pipes can have more or less than four layers. If it was eight layers, they would cover, roughly, the eight compass points. Three layers would cover 120 degrees each, and so on.

There's a few more types of selection. One is 'velocity', and frankly I don't understand it. There's a few others that require a graphics tablet. If anyone gets me a graphics tablet, I promise I'll describe these selection options, too.

So, what can you do with a two, three or four dimensional image pipe? You can combine the selections. Take the gnome foot for example. You can cut one out and make eight layers. Four layers are for the left foot going in each direction, four layers are for the right foot going in each direction. You end up with a layer dialog that looks like image above.
Click on image above to download the GIMP image

Now, let's save this image with two dimensions. The first has angular selection and four ranks for that selection. That means these eight layers get divided up into four ranks of two layers. Then we select incremental selection with two ranks, which will divide each of those sets of two into sets of one.

So, what we have is feet which alternate left-right-left and follow the direction of the mouse. It looks a little like above.

Image Pipes in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:15:00.002-08:00

GIMP 1.2 introduced a lot of new features that have been further improved in version 2.0, including the ability to use full color "pixmap brushes". In addition, you can also combine single frame pixmap brushes into a "image pipe". A GIMP Image Pipe allows you to spray out series of full color pixmaps. To make it more flexible, the order the images are painted onto the canvas can depend on direction, angle, speed, or other factors.

This effect can be used in many ways, from a simple way to paint repeated images, or as sophisticated texture generation. The flexibilty in the way images are sequenced and composited to the canvas on the image can make creating a image pipe to do what you want seem difficult. However, for almost all common image pipes it is easy to set them up.

Example 1

Taking a set of images and making a image pipe out of them is a common configuration. The easiest way to do this is to create each indivual image as a separate layer in an image, much like you would if you were going to save an animated image. And in fact this is often a convient way to think of image pipe creation. As designing an animation of which snapshots are going to be composited to the canvas. Let's start with a simple example image, an 8 layer image. In this case, with the numbers 1-8 on each layer. This will help to make it more obvious what the various "ranks" do.

GIMP versions older than 2.0 could not reload gih files (GIMP image pipes), so I include the source xcf images here. The example image.

To start creating a image pipe, you will need to save the file in the ".gih" extension. To use the brush immediately, you probabaly want to save it in the brushes/ subdir of your GIMP directory (probabaly ~/.gimp-2.4). To save the image you will be presented with a save dialog for the GIH plugin. (Image above)

For a simple image like this, the only values you usually need to change are "Spacing", The "Number of Cells", the number of "Ranks", and the "selection" for each rank. Spacing is pretty much the same as for regular brushes. It indicates what percentage of a brush width or height that the cursor moves between each time the shape is pasted.

Ranks indicates how many levels of variation to use by the Selection values. For this image, the value of ranks should be equal to the number of images in the stack. Since it is possible to have multi-dimensional pipes, there needs to be a way to set more than one rank.

For this example, we are going to choose to select from the rank using method "incremental". This essentially means that the images will be selected in the order they are in the layer stack.

Other options include:

Random: selects the images in a random order.
Angular: selects the images based on the angle the brush is moving at.
Velocity: selects the images based on the velocity the brush is moving at.
Pressure: selects the images based on the pressure of the brush (requires a pressure sensitive tablet)
xtilt: selects the images based on the xtilt (also requires a tablet)
ytilt: selects the images based on the ytilt (also requires a tablet)

After saving the image, you can "refresh" the brush list and then select the new image. For an example of what this can do, tale a look at the example image above (also making use of the fun gradient brushes).

Example 2

Tater Tots!

This pipe is a good example of making a image pipe out of a series of images. Each layer has a a bit of an image cut out and placed on a transparent background. Any areas that are transparent in the image will be transparent in the brush as well.

To add a bit more of a "3D" effect, a slight drop shadow was added to each layer in the image. Save this image as gih with the parameters as indicated in the following screenshot.

An example of the use of this image:

Example 3

An example of a two dimensional pipe

A interesting use for image pipes would be to simulate a natural media saturation. For example, maybe a brush that has ten different versions that correlate to tablet pressure.

For this example, I'll use a somewhat contrived example for simplicity sake. It will use the "angular" parameter in for per layer dimension, and a "random" parameter to select which of the multiple images to use. I use this in a couple of brushes to "humanize" the output. Instead of having the same image stamped out over and over, it varies a little randomly.

The example source image is a 8 layer image, with each layer split in two with a guide. The guide isnt require but it makes it easier to create.
A screenshot of the layers dialog showing creation of an image of this type.(Image above)

You will want to save the image with the values show here:

Example 4

Using a image pipe as a way to generate textures.

Making tileable textures with gradient brushes is a tutorial on how to generate textures with just graident brushes.

A lot of the same techniques that are used there can be used Image Pipes as well. The main advantage to using image pipes is that the brush as well as the color can change as you paint, which adds an extra dimension to the textures.

For this example, it is just another one brush per layer situation. The example source image is available. The image is saved with the paramaters as in image above.

Example output:

Example 5

Converting a PSP image tube to a GIMP Image Pipe

There are lots of "Image Tubes" created with and for Paint Shop Pro available on the internet. GIMP can load these files and save them as GIMP image pipes.

Unfortunately, unless you really like pictures of teddy bears, puppy dogs, and unicorns, finding good PSP Tubes isnt so easy. There is a .tub loader plugin in GIMP that you can use to load .tub files you find on the net. Then you can turn around and save these files as a .gih file.

We are going to start with a .tub file available from Hood's PSP Tubes, in this case the Fireball example. Hood's site is not available anymore but you may be able to find "HFireball.zip" or "H Fireball.tub" on several sites distributing PSP Tubes.

The file needs to be loaded as a regular image, then saved as a gih image. Sometimes you may need to make some best guesses as to the save parameters. An example of what the image window will look like after initially loading the .tub file is shown above.

Saving this file as a .gih file, and using the paramaters as shown in:

Custom Brushes Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:15:00.001-08:00

Along with the brushes already included, you can create custom brushes using three methods. Simple shapes are created using th button labelled New at the bottom of the brush selection dialog. Complex black and white brushes can be created by saving a grayscale image as using the .gbr file extension. The content of such a brush is treated line an alpha-channel. This means that any pixel that is pure white is treated as transparent. However, in this tutoria we will be creating brushes that use pictures with colour and this brush will also have multiple images.

Step 1

Create a new image the size of the brush you will be creating. For our example, we will be creating a 64x64 image. Create it with a transparent background.

Step 2

Go to the Layers dialog and create additional layers with the fill type Transparent (if necessary, delete or clear the background layer if you forgot to make it transparent when creating the image).
Give them any name you want. We will be just naming them Layer1, Layer2, and Layer3. The layer name really don't matter in this case.

Step 3

Draw the images you want in the layers that were already created. In our case we will be drawing a picture of a happy face in 3 colours (red, green and yellow). At the end your layers should look something like this (see image above). You can save a copy of your image in .xcf format now, in case you want to edit it later.

Step 4

The last step is to save your brush as a GIMP picture brush. The extension of this kind of brush is .GIH. So right click on the image, then choose File -> Save As.... IF you want the GIMP to be able to use your new brush, you have to save it in the "brushes" folder inside your personal GIMP folder (for Linux and other UNIX systems, this is usually in "~/.gimp-2.2/brushes/"). So select that folder and type in a name for the brush. For our example, the brush was named happy.gih
The Save As Pixmap Brush Pipe dialog will ask you how you want to save the image. Since we have 3 layers make sure to put 3 in the Ranks edit box. You can also choose how you want the images to appear as you move the mouse aruond. In most cases Random will do fine.
NOTE: The Spacing (Percent) means how much space is left before the next image is drawn. If the value is lower, then the image will be drawn more frequently. You can also adjust this value in the Brush dialog.

Final

To see our brush, go to the Brushes dialog and hit the Refresh button. Our happy image should appear in the dialog. If it doesn't, make sure you have saved the brush in the GIMP "brushes" folder and that it has an extension of .GIH.
You will note that our little picture on the right has a little red triangle in the bottom right corner. This tells us that the brush contains multiple pictures. You can click on the brush image and hold the mouse button to see a preview of the brush. The brush animation will show you that it contains the three images.
Let's test our brush. Select our brush from the brush dialog, create a simple image and start drawing.

Tilable Textures in Gimp The GIMP 1.2 series have a nice new feature I refer to as gradient brushes. Essentially, this is just the regular paint tool,

2008-12-09T01:14:00.002-08:00

The GIMP 1.2 series have a nice new feature I refer to as gradient brushes. Essentially, this is just the regular paint tool, but instead of painting with a constant color, it gets its color from a gradient and rotates through the gradient as you paint.

Using Gradient Brushes

Gradient brushes can be accessed from the standard paintbrush dialog. Just check the option "Use Color from Gradient" and start painting. You can also press the Gradient button to change the current gradient. Try "German flag smooth", for instance.

Just filling in an image with a gradient brush is a good start for interesting textures, and you can make some nice ones that way.

But that gets a little boring after a while. To really spice thigns up a bit, you need some more interesting brushes. So called "grunge brushes" work quite well for this use. A very nice set can be found in the June 1999 edition of thegimp.com, in the brushes section. Get these for real fun with gradient brushes.

Basically, just select one of those brushes, and se the spacing to something reasonable (most default to 10 or so). I would suggest setting the spacing to about 80-120 or so. Of course, please experiment.

For example, lets choose the "Grunge 15" brush. Set its spacing to about 70 or so. Now choose a gradient from the the gradient selector ( Dialogs -> Gradients). Just about any of them will do fine. Pick one at random, you can get nice results from any of them. For this particular example, I used "Caribbean_Blues".

Now for the easy part. Draw random stuff on the image. Or not random. It doesnt really matter. If you want to stick to a very set pattern, your texture might look a bit more orderly. Fill the image completely if you dont want alpha poking though. Nice eh?

The hard part is making the image tilable. The easiest way to do this is to offset your image by half its height, and half its width. Select Layer -> Transform -> Offset. Then choose the convient "x/2, y/2" option, and hit OK. Your image will now show what used to be at its edges at the center of the image. The secret to making tileable images is to make this transition smooth.

For gradient painting with grunge brushes, this typicaly just means painting along those lines. You probabaly want to give it a bit of character so it looks more natural. You will probabaly want to avoid painting at the edges of the image when you do this. But if you do, just repeat the above steps again and you should be fine.

Offset that image one more time (or not,actually...), and your ready to go.

Things to tweak

Of course changing the gradient type, and the brush will have a big effect on the look of the texture, but so will more subtle things like the opacity of the brush, and the paint mode can make for some interesting effects. These type of textures also seem to work well for layering two or three textures together with different layer modes.

All in all, this is nice and simple, and fast way to create some colorful textures.

Examples

Just some examples whipped up in a few minutes.

3D Floating Logo in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:14:00.001-08:00

This tutorial is aimed squarely at the novice GIMP user. The more experienced user may find some techniques here useful. This is the same procedure I used to create the logo on my homepage, albeit with slightly different settings. I'll point out the differences as I go along. I've taken a lot of screen shots to support this tutorial, so enjoy :)

Step 1

Fire up GIMP and create a new image. I used a white background at 500px by 200px. I feel this size it adequate as my website at the time of writing uses 500px tables.

Step 2

Start by laying down some text that is wider than 400px and not too thin. I've used a font called Pricedown. The text should be created as a new layer. If you use GIMP FreeType then it is done for you, otherwise click the New Layer button in the Layers, Channels, & Paths dialog (looks like a blank piece of paper). It will help to change the layer size to that of the image. Do so by accessing the Layers menu (right click or Control+Click on the layer you wish to operate on) and select Layer to Imagesize.

Step 3

Duplicate the text layer (text) twice. One for the highlight effect (highlight) and one for the shaded part of the effect (lowlight). The highlight layer needs to be white, so select that layer, check the Keep Trans. box on the Layers, Channels, & Paths dialog, and fill it with white. You can do this easily by dragging the white color swatch from the toolbox over to the image (assuming that the highlight layer is currently selected). Keep Trans. means "Keep Transparency"; this will ensure that any transformations or fills made to that layer will only affect the non-transparent part of the image.

Step 4

Duplicate the text layer again and move it to the top of the Layers stack (use the little up facing arrow head on the Layers, Channels, & Paths dialog). Make sure that Keep Trans. is un-checked and then blur it. I used Gaussian Blur (RLE) at 10 pixels. When I did the original logo, it was set lower than this to make the effect less rounded.

You will need to make sure that the layer boundary is larger than the layer so that the blur can spread nicely. Step 2 mentions this.

Step 5

Duplicate the blurred layer once (tmp1 and tmp2). These layers are used to create the edge lighting for the text.

Step 6

Nudge one of the blurred layers (tmp1) down and to the right about 5 pixels. The precise number of pixels depends on how blurred and thus how round the text will appear to be, so use your best judgement. You can nudge layers my using the Move tool and the cursor keys on your keyboard. It doesn't matter which of the blurred layers you use in this step, as long as you know which one you didn't move \x{2013} you'll be needing to do a very similar thing to that one soon.

Step 7

Now create a selection using the blurred layer (the one you moved in step 6) using Alpha to Selection. This selection is a precise selection based on the layer and includes alpha (transparency) information. Handy stuff. You'll notice that I've turned off the layer below (the other blurred layer). This was done to make sure I could see how far I moved this layer during step 6.

Step 8

Now that the layer is selected...

Step 9

Select the highlight layer and...

Step 10

Cut (edit/cut or CTRL+X on PC or Command+X on Mac). This will remove the blurred layers selection from the highlight layer. You could do this with channel masks, but I'm a man of simple needs and wants. There's another step after this that I haven't documented, but that's because it's the same thing again (steps 6-10) but with the other layer (tmp2: see steps 5 and 6). Move (nudge) that layer in the opposite direction (up and to the left about 5 pixels), then make the cut from the lowlight layer. Once you're done, delete the two blurred layers (tmp1 and tmp2).

Step 11

I like to take quasi-breaks while doing some images, and this is one of those times. A good time to roll a cigarette or grab a cup coffee. I also tend to clean up temporary layers occasionally.

Step 12

Now we'll add the first elements of 3D-ness to the logo. The original text layer is the base layer for any color you want to add. I'll use grey70, but you could just as easily use any old color you like. It's a good idea to play with this as you can get some funky plastic logos too. Make sure Keep Trans. is checked when you fill the layer.

Step 13

As you can see, it's starting to look like something now.

Step 14

Click the blank piece of paper on the Layers, Channels, & Paths dialog and make a new transparent layer called outline. Move this new layer down the layers stack until it's underneath the original text layer.

Step 15

Select the original text layer (the one you added some color to) and do the Alpha to Selection trick again. Right click on the image and use Select -> Grow. This will make the new selection larger by a number of pixels - I used a value of 2 pixels. Once you have a selection, be sure to reselect the new layer (outline) so that you can fill it (step 17). And below is what it looks like.

Step 16

And this is what it looks like.

Step 17

Fill the layer with black and deselect (CTRL+SHIFT+A on PC or Command+SHIFT+A on Mac). As you can see, the image now has more background contrast. Now, duplicate that layer and lower the copy below the original outline layer. Make sure that Keep Trans. is not checked, and blur it. I like soft shadows, so I used a Gaussian Blur (RLE) of about 30 pixels. Drop the Opacity of the layer down to about 50 and nudge it to the right and down until it looks okay.

A nice way to fill selection areas or layers that have Keep Trans. selected, is to simply drag the color from the toolbox color swatch to the layer.

Step 18

This is what the Layers, Channels, & Paths dialog should look like.

Step 19

I've duplicated the highlight and lowlight layers and made them all blend with the lower layers using the Overlay mode. This helps to make the edges more 3D.

Step 20

Create a new transparent layer called rust and select the bezier tool (shown here as the depressed button).

Step 21

Rust isn't uniform and I've decided to only worry about the lower half of the letters. Use the bezier tool on the new rust layer to start a selection that looks like...

Step 22

This. Click inside the bezier path once you close it (close it by clicking one the first node). This will create a selection. Use Select -> Feather to feather (blur) the selection. I used a value of about 10 pixels.

Step 23

Pick a nice bright orange or brown color for the rust. My site logo used a reddy-borwn color, but here I've chosen a bright orange. Fill the selection with it. Using the famed Alpha to Selection move, get the selection for the original text layer. Once you have that selection area, click the rust layer to make it active. Invert the selection (CTRL+I or Command+I) and Cut. This will leave only the part of the rust layer that actually covers the letters and not the extra.

Step 24

Change the Layer Mode of the rust layer to Muliply (Burn).

Step 25

The image should now look a little like this. Don't worry, it'll look better soon.

Step 26

With the rust layer selected, add a Layer Mask.

Step 27

Making sure that you reset the color swatches on the toolbox, use the gradient tool to make a gradient in the Layer Mask so it looks like this.

Step 28

The image should now look like this.

Final

With a little playing around you can get to this. I duplicated the rust layer and moved them (the original rust and the copy) down the stack until the highlight and lowlight layers were above them. I also duplicated the original text layer, switched on Keep Trans., and used Render -> Clouds -> Solid Noise to add a bit of interest to the layer. Try using the Curves tool to help with this. You may also notice that the outline layer is blurred. Sometimes this can help. The idea is, try stuff and find out.

Well, thats it. Hope that taught you the power of selections and layer modes to some degree. There are many people who tout the use of channel masks, but don't under estimate the power of selections to do your dirty work.

Coloring A BW Sketch in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:13:00.003-08:00

First of all you have to acquire through a scanner or something similar your sketch. It doesn't necessitate to be truly a black and white image (2 colors), often a well contrasted grayscale image is better (use contrast autosketch or/and the brightness-contrast tools).

Step 1

Create a new image of the wanted size and place below the sketch layer a pure white background layer. Now turn the mode for the sketch layer into multiply. From now the sketch layer will stay forever over the others.

Step 2

Now let's start playing with colours!
Create a new layer and call it "Details". In this example I've used it for painting the blue doughnut. As you can see, thanks to the multiply mode, the black lines of the sketch are kept while the white zones are "transparent". Don't be too afraid of going outside the shapes, in the next steps we will see that some stuff will "disappear", covered by other layers.

Step 3

Create a "Skin" layer over the "Details" one. Here I've coloured the skin and the shoes with the paint tool and the airbrush. For first you should fill with the base colour the shapes (use a paint tool), then apply (with the airbrush) darker shades on the edges and brighter ones over the cheeks.

Step 4

The "Details#2" layer is used for some extra details like the white text over the blue doughnut. I've used it because I want be able to change and retouch the doughnut shading without the white text (that should stay as brighter as possible).

Step 5

The "Hairs" layer contains ... well, what do you think will contain a layer called "Hairs"? Yeah, right answer! ;P Please notice only that this layer is below the sketch one but over the others, so the extra painted zones of the "Skin" layer are covered by this one. I.e. you can add some shadows over the forehead by painting over these zones.

Final

Finally I've added a "Shadows" layer for making the doughnut and the other elements less flat. This is the end. Still reading here? Now it's your turn! Quickly open GIMP and start playing! ;)

Changing Background Color 2 in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:13:00.001-08:00

Many times you have an image with a colored background, like the one above and you want to take out the background to use the image's subject in a composition. With gimp there are many ways to achieve this, one of which is using a plug-in specifically designed for this: Changing Background Color 1.

Step 1

In this tutorial I explore the select by color option to remove a particular color from the image. The first step, after you have loaded the image of course, is to click on the Select By Color tool.

Step 2

Like other selection tools, this one provides several options that can be modified. The top row of buttons sets the Selection Mode. We will use the add option, which means any color we click on will be added to the selection. You can also use the Shift key to acheive the same result.

The other interesting setting is the Threshold. When you click on a color, the higher this setting is, the more similar colors to the one you clicked on will be selected. You can start by using the default setting and increasing it if you need to add more colors faster, or decrease it if you're selecting more then you want.

Step 3

Now it's time to start selecting the color you want to remove. Just start clicking on the color you don't want and watch the selection update. If that didn't select all the color you want, continue clicking on the unselected parts until you get the desired result.

Step 4

Finally, there is one last step before you can remove the background. You have to add an alpha channel (a common term for transparency in images) to your image. To do that you have to use the right button on the mouse to get the image menu and go to layers and add alpha channel.

Step 5

With the selection complete and with an alpha channel just choose from the image menu Edit -> Clear, and the image background will be gone.

Step 6

After the last step you should get something like this in Gimp.
You can now use this image in a composition or in a web page with a different background like below:

Final

Of course you still have to take care of the details if you want to merge an image perfectly into another.

The sunflower image was taken by the photographer Raymond Lofthouuse.

Changing Background Color 1in Gimp

2008-12-09T01:12:00.000-08:00

This tutorial shows you how you can effeciently replace the background of an image with another in GIMP, through the use of the color to alpha plug-in. The aim is to show the advantages of using the color to alpha plug-in over selection-based techniques. To illustrate this, this tutorial will use the above images as source and destination. This tutorial doesn't address the complexities of handling real-world photos in this manner, but does briefly discuss it at the end.

Why Not a Selection

The common approach to doing many things in GIMP is to first get a good selection. However, when removing an anti-aliased object from its background is not a good idea, as shown above.

You'll note that each of the three zoomed in selections above have varying amounts of the green-blue mix selected. When these are filled, we are left with flat black and slightly blueish-green pixels between them, or no transition to black at all.

Compare each with the target image below. The left one has a blue border around it. This looks somewhat neat, but not what we're going for. The middle one is close, but there are some ugly visble pixels still. You can try getting rid of all the ugly pixels, but then you'll end up with something jagged like on the right.

You can spend hours trying to find something that will work perfectly, but you won't. Anything short of the rightmost image has some blue in the pixel, which will stick out. You can go too far, and blend it back to something close, but this is time consuming. Instead, may I suggest the rest of the tutorial?

Step 1

The first step is to activate the color to alpha plug-in. Its menu location is Filters -> Colors -> Color To Alpha, where means to right click on the image. If its grayed-out, it means that you have an indexed image. If its not there, upgrade your gimp to 1.2.x.

Step 2

Next use the Color Picker Tool to select the background color.

Step 3

When you used the color picker to select the background, a window with the color popped up. Click, hold, and drag from the color portion of this window to the color portion of the Color To Alpha plug-in. If using Gimp for Windows, you'll have to right-click on the destination button and select the Foreground - drag n' drop doesn't work. Click OK after the color indicator on the Color To Alpha plug-in is changed to blue.

Step 4

There should now be a nice green and alpha image with no trace of the blue left. Next add the new background.

Step 5

Now create a New Layer (have Forground set to Red when you do this). Lower the newly created layer.

Final

The image should now be green on red, with no trace of blue!

This may not work as well for you for 2 reasons:

Photo's don't tend to have one color you can choose like that
The foreground may contain portions of that color that are removed by the plug-in

The work arounds, respectively, are:

Apply multiple times, or just once and touch-up by hand
Paint underneath the new image with the original color to bring it back to those portions that need it

Film Grain Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:24:00.001-08:00

Real-world images have lots of noise: film grain, scanner lines, CCD noise, paper texture, and just about anything else you can imagine. Computer-generated images, on the other hand, tend to be too real. If you need to make computer-generated images look like real-world ones, then this tutorial is for you.

Why Would Anyone Want to Ruin Perfectly Good Images?

Perhaps you've rendered a gorgeous 3D scene, but want to make it look more like a photograph. Perhaps you're compositing two different photos, and need make the grain match. Or maybe you're just perverse.

Extracting the Film Grain

This is a subject for another, longer tutorial. But here are the basic steps:

Take a noisy image.
Duplicate it into a new layer.
Blur it to remove the noise.
Set the blurred layer to Grain Extract mode to extract the noise.
Flatten the image.
Choose an interesting area of the noise, and make it into a tileable pattern.

(GIMP pattern file)

Some good ways of making tileable patterns include Make Seamless, the Resynthesizer and Homogenizer, mirroring, and hand-editing. You'll have to experiment a bit. In the following example, we'll use a weird, vertically-striped noise pattern. It looks like some kind of scanner noise, or perhaps an artifact of old newsprint.

Ruining a Perfectly Good Image

First, desaturate the image. You can do this using Image -> Colors -> Desaturate or the Desaturate filter provided with the MathMap plugin.(The latter actually returns the luminosity of an image, not a desaturated version. Technically, it's better, but it's unnecessary for most images.)

Step 2

Next add a new layer to the image, and use the bucket to fill it with your tileable noise.

Step 3

Position the noise layer above the image layer, and set the mode to Grain Merge.

Step 4

So far, so good. But the noise is too strong in the shadows and highlights of the image. To demphasize it, we can use a layer mask.
First, add a layer mask to the noise layer. Then, make a copy of the image, gaussian blur it with a radius of 15 pixels, and paste the blurred image into the layer mask. Use Image -> Colors -> Invert to swap bright for dark. This will cause the grain to show through strongly in the shadows and midtones, but not in the highlights.

Step 5

Next, use Image -> Colors -> Curves to adjust the value of the layer mask. We want to make the midtones bright, and the shadows and hightlights dark. You can adjust the curves to taste. Curves Dialog This increases the grain in the midtones, and reduces it elsewhere.
Here's the Layers, Channels & Paths dialog for the finished image.

Related Techniques

You can use various brushes in the mask layer to selectively edit the grain. You can also use the bucket tool in Pattern Fill, Grain Merge mode to fill a selection with grain directly.
Many kinds of noise can be created using Filters -> Noise -> Scatter HSV. You can apply this directly to an image, or to a film grain pattern.
To denoise an image, try Filters -> Blur -> Selective Guassian Blur. It's slow, but very nifty.

Anti-Aliased Threshold Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:23:00.004-08:00

The threshold plug-in works by dividing the image into two parts, dark and light, producing a 2 color image. This is often not the desired result, for some images anti-aliasing is needed, but the threshold plug-in cannot provide that. With a little utilization of the curves plug-in, we get nice results.

Problems with the threshold

On the left you we see the original image that is about to be thresholded, and on the right side we see the result. The default settings for the Threshold plug-in were used ( Layers -> Colors -> Threshold). The resulting image is very blocky and aliased.

The Curves Trick

First duplicate the image layer by going to the layers dialog, making sure the image layer is selected, and clicking the duplicate button (fourth from the left). We can use the original layer for some color tricks later. Now the next thing is to desaturate the image ( Layers -> Colors -> Desaturate). This way the colors will not interfere with the fake thresholding. When the layer is grayscale, select the curves editor ( Layers -> Colors -> Curves). Now we can play with the Value "channel". The image on the left displays the settings used for the example image. The space between the two dots determines how much aa the resulting image will have. The wider the gap, the more grayscale values it will have, and vice versa. The resulting image can be seen on the right.

A neat addition

If you now take the original image layer, move it over the new one (make sure it has an alpha channel), and change its mode to "Color" in the layers dialog, you get nice results displayed above.

Drawing Shapes with the Path Tool in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:23:00.003-08:00

The Path Tool (replacing the old Bezier Selection tool) can be used in many creative ways. Maybe the best thing in it is the smooth, beautiful curves it produces. But you can also use paths to create different polygonal shapes if you don't 'pull out the handles'. Polygonal shapes are especially useful when painting some geometric objects, as you can draw one side at a time (into different layers if you want).

Shapes with Paths!?

This tutorial is about making simple geometrical shapes with GIMP. I will concentrate on the Path tool since I find it so useful for this purpose. I hope you get some help and new stuff to put in your GIMP Tricks Sack :) I personally use this technique for nearly all my work.

Notice! This is not a 'back to basics' -tutorial. You should be familiar with GIMP's dialogs and menus. I was thinking about this, and I did not want to make this an 'entry level' thing, basically to avoid bloating this too big and duplicating other people's work. Paths are covered in my other tutorial, and I recommend you to read it before going further if you find the material here confusing. If you are new to GIMP I suggest you to go to the GIMP homepage in www.gimp.org and first read through the Documentation section there.

Let's get started!

First we must create a new image for our creation. Make the size 256x256 pixels and choose RGB for the type. The image background should be white. During this tutorial, you will have to use the Layers tab and optionally the Paths tab from the dock "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo". This dock is present in the default GIMP installation. You can also get these tabs using Dialogs -> Layers and Dialogs -> Paths.

1. Left side

Now create a new transparent layer, and name it Left_side so you know what layer I'll talk about later on. Make sure you have the new layer active by checking the layers-dialog. If it is not selected, click the layer's name in the dialog.

Imagine the blue cube on the right side into your canvas, we'll be doing side #1 now.

Choose the Path tool and make something like the side #1 on the blue cube, think about the perspective. (If this causes you trouble, don't worry. You will learn by experience).

You can adjust the points' places if you can't get them right at the first try, see the Path tutorial for more information on that. Your path should look something like the one on the right.

Once you are satisfied with your "box", convert it to a selection using the button "Create Selection from Path" (in the Path Options dialog) or using "Selection to Path" (in the Paths tab).

Next we must choose some nice colors for our gradient, choose white for the foreground color and some dark-blue for the background (we are making a blue box, remember?) Something like that on the image nearby.

Select the gradient-fill tool and, starting from the top-left of the selection, 'drag' the gradient quite far down-right (see the arrow in the image. This way you get a quite light-colored face for the cube, and it is just what we want here. We also want the lighter end of the gradient to be near our imaginative light source. (The light was coming from the left)

2. Right side

Now on to the right side, side #2. Create a new transparent layer and name it Right_side. Use the Path Tool and try to make the right side of the cube and turn it into a selection.

Take the Gradient Tool again and, still with the same colors, make a gradient from farther up-left to near the selection's lower-right corner (see image on right). This way we get a darker gradient suitable for the shadow-side.

Hint! Be careful with the edges. You don't want to leave any holes so the background can be seen through... It's better to overlap the lower layer a bit than leave a space between them.

3. Top side

Our final ultimate task is to create the top, side #3. Again, create a new transparent layer and name it (who quessed? :) Top_side.

Now you probably know we want to make yet another path and this time the gradient has to be even lighter than in the first side. So I suggest you lighten the dark blue color a fair amount, it's easier to get a light gradient that way. This time you pull the gradient from left to right, according the arrow in the picture. Once you find the shading look good, you can flatten the image and our little tutorial-cube is finished. Now apply for your 'Cube GIMP Licence' from the nearest GIMP Station ;)

4. Finished Work

Now you have a cool image of a Light-Source-Shaded Cube. You can choose Image -> Flatten Image to merge the layers togerher so you can save as jpeg or any other format than xcf. Or, better still, from the layers dialog, make the background invisible and choose Image -> Merge Visible Layers so you will have the background on a separate layer and you can work further on it if you like.

The next thing is to start using the geometrical shapes as building blocks to make things. And you can twist the beziers to make a bit more fancy stuff...

Straight Line Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:23:00.001-08:00

This tutorial shows you how you can do straight lines with GIMP, using a feature called the Shift Key. Straight lines are a convenient way to make things that aren't so terribly affected by the imprecision of a mouse or tablet, and to take advantage of the power of a computer to make things look neat and orderly. This tutorial doesn't use Straight Lines for complex tasks; its intended to show how you can use it to create quick and easy line effects.

Step 1

The invention called the typewriter introduced the Shift Key. You generally have 2 of them on your keyboard. They look something like the picture on the left. They are located on the left and right sides of your keyboard.
The other invention, called the Mouse, was invented by Douglas C. Engelbart in 1970. These come in different varieties, but always have at least one button located on them. They are located on your desk, or sometimes on a mouse pad.

Step 2

First, create a new image. Any size will do.

Step 3

Then click on the paintbrush. Any of the red-highlighted tools on the above toolbox can do lines.

Step 4

After you click the paintbrush tool, you can click the image. A single dot will appear on the screen. The size of this dot represents the current brush size, which you can change in the Brush Dialog.
Now, lets start drawing a line. Hold down the Shift button, and keep it down.

Step 5

After you have a starting point, and have held down the Shift Key, you'll see a line like above if you're running GIMP version 1.2.x or later. This feature was not present in GIMP version 1.0.4. However, the next step works the same way.
Press the first button on the Mouse (the leftmost one usually) and then let it go. During that whole "click" of the Mouse button, you need to keep the Shift Key held down.

Final

See how the line is drawn on top of the preview? This is a powerful feature of the Paint Brush. You can use it with any of the tools shown in step 4, or even draw more lines at the end of this one.
Our last step is to let go of the Shift key. And there you have it. Some more examples are shown below. Questions? Comments? Let me know.
Happy GIMPing!
Seth

Examples

This one I turned on gradient in the Paint Brush Tool.

This one I rendered a grid, and then used the Smudge Tool with a low spacing and a slightly larger brush.

This one I used the Clone tool, and set the source to "Maple Leaves" pattern.

This one I rendered a plasma cloud, and used the Erase Tool with a square brush.

This one I used the Dodge tool on the top and left of a blue box, then used the burn tool on the right and bottom.

Red Eye Removal in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:22:00.004-08:00

It used to be that the photos with red eye weren't really worth fixing as only cheesy cameras had the flash built in and underneath the red eyes was a crappy photo. Well, welcome to the future when you can get a pretty good image from a camera with the flash built in. They do not have a button that works to prevent this yet, so don't even try it. The best way to fix red eye on photos is to have those intense people look at the photographers shoulder. The cause of red eye is the flash reflecting from the back of the eye and into the lens. So, until this lovely child is able to understand "look at my shoulder" it is good to know that red eye can be fixed, somewhat. I learned the following method from tigert while lurking on the irc late late one night.

Step 1

I zoomed in on the image, 4:1 ratio, as this is almost pixel by pixel work. I ended up using the 5 x 5 fuzzy brush that came with the GIMP tarball. As usual, your choice depends on the resolution of your image. A fuzzy brush is highly recommended. On this web sized image, the 3 x 3 fuzzy brush didn't work fast enough. As always, you can Edit -> Undo until you make the right selections.

Step 2

A long time ago, someone suggested on the gimp-user list that the Layers, Channels and Paths Dialog always remain open while you use GIMP. Some three years later, I still follow and give this advice. So, if your Layers,Channels and Paths Dialog is not open, open it and leave it open. Select the Channels Tab. Deactivate the Green and Blue Channels by clicking to the right of the thumbnails in the dialog window.
The image should still look like the screenshot of the close up in step 1. If it looks all red, you have just turned the view of the color off. (burning the red eye area will not work if the Layers,Channels and Paths dialog is set up that way, I happen to know).

Step 3

Make certain you have a good brush selected (for this image I used the 5 x 5 fuzzy) Then select the Dodge and Burn Tool. Double click on the button to get the Tool Options dialog. My dialog defaults to dodge and midtones, for this project, choose burn and hightlights (as illustrated). Touch all of the red in the eyes with the burn tool. I think that I used the burn tool on the midtones just a little bit also. GIMP doesn't have a magic button to fix red eyes with, but it has the tools. It has been my experience that each image is slightly different and I sort of like the control that GIMP gives you ...
tigert warned that this method can leave the white spots in the eyes slightly green. I have found this to be true, however so far it hasn't been enough green to worry about. Given a photo where the green will make a difference, you can use the same tool combination on the green channel, just move the opacity slider to a smaller percentage. Edit -> Undo until you get it right.

Final

... looking so much better!
The very best fix, of course would be to prevent it from happening. Due to the nature of the problem, my guess is that it will be the same people over and over again with this problem. Some personalities have no problem looking deeply into the camera lens (like this beautiful baby for instance) and maintaining the gaze through the flash. My guess is that as soon as these people know what is going on, they can fix it themselves.
Other personalities have other portrait problems. There is a small handful of people who have no problem looking into the camera lens, but anticipate the flash and blink at the wrong moment. This causes the portrait to look like the object is starting to sneeze. (this is what happens to me) If you know of a method to prevent this, please email me.

What a cute baby. This is Maurits and his baby. He is one of a growing list of developers that are changing their babies while working on GIMP. I watched work on WinGIMP occuring between diaper changings and feedings also. *chuckle*

Quickmask Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:22:00.003-08:00

This tutorial shows how you can do vignette effects using a feature of GIMP called QuickMask. QuickMask is a convenient way to modify selections using pixel-changing tools such as the paintbrush, eraser, or any plug-in filter. It lets you make very precise adjustments to your selections. This tutorial doesn't use QuickMask for complex masking; it's intended to show how you can use it to create quick and easy vignette effects.

Step 1

For your first step, load up an image. Any image will do. GIMP 1.1.7, a development version of GIMP, introduced QuickMask. The QuickMask control button is located at the lower-left side of the image.

Step 2

First, make a rectangular selection around the edge of the image. Then click on the red-bordered QuickMask icon in the lower-left corner of your image.

Step 3

After you click the red QuickMask button, a translucent red mask appears around your selection. This red mask represents the outside of your selection. When you click the dashed QuickMask button to go back into normal selection mode, anything red will not be selected, and anything clear will be. So, let's start playing with this mask. First, right click on the image and select Filters -> Distorts -> Waves from the menu. Apply the filter, and watch what happens to the mask.

Step 4

The mask gets all wavy. Let's add one more effect: Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur (RLE).

Step 5

Now that there is a soft edge on the mask, click the dashed QuickMask button to convert the mask back into a selection.

Step 6

See how the selection follows the mask? This is a powerful feature of QuickMask. You can use it to modify any existing selection, and you can even use it to create new selections. Our last step is to use Select -> Invert and Edit -> Fill with BG Color. The result, a soft white fade into the background, is shown in the final step.

Final

And there you have it. Some more examples are listed below. Happy GIMPing!

Examples

The above image used Filters -> Noise -> Spread, with horizontal and vertical settings at 11, to get the effect.

I used some blurring and the Filters -> Distorts -> Newsprint plugin to get this effect.

As in the tutorial, this one used Waves, but instead of blurring, I used Filters -> Blur -> Pixelize instead.

Simple Paths (Bezier Selections) in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:22:00.001-08:00

The Path tool (previously known as Bezier Selection) is a powerful tool in GIMP. The rectangle- and ellipse-selections are not very flexible if you happen to need something more special. And since many of us GIMPers don't have a graphics tablet, it's not so easy to make the mouse pointer move the way you want. The paths can solve the problem by using smooth mathematical curves instead your own shaky mouse trail. Paths are also very useful when used with gradient fills, see Drawing Shapes with Bezier for more information on this great tool.

What is it?

The Path tool can make complex selections by specifying certain points that are connected together with a curve. So to make a box you would specify four points, one for each corner of the box. Example in image above. The great thing is the corners don't have to be 90 degrees.
In older GIMP versions (1.2.x), you had to close all paths by joining the last point of the path to the first one. This is not necessary anymore in 2.0 and later versions, but this is still useful to create closed shapes such as a box. So after creating the fourth point, press and hold the Ctrl key and click on the first point to close the path. Of course you can have as many points as you need.
Finally, click the "Stroke Path" button (in the Path Options dialog) or use the menu Edit->Stroke Path... to draw the new shape. You can also use the button "Create Selection from Path" if you want to have a selection that you can fill or stroke.

Modifying the curves

Straight lines alone are a useful thing, but it's not all. Actually they are not lines but curves. Cool anti-aliased smooth curves.
The curves can be modified quite flexibly by adjusting the 'handles' of the nearest points. 'What handles?' you say... See the image above? The small circles are those familiar points we used with the box in the previous section. The little boxes are those handles. The handles are not visible by default, you must drag them 'out' from a point. To make the handles visible 1. click to a point to make it active, 2. while pressing the Ctrl key, click again on the same point and 3. drag the handles out with the mousebutton still pressed down. You notice the curves between the points are not straight anymore. You can control the shapes by dragging the handles around.

A Few Tips

Always before modifying any points or handles, click the handle or a point to make it active.
To have a smooth curve, both handles should be aligned at each point. Press Shift while dragging a handle to ensure that the other one remains aligned.
A path can have multiple components. If you have closed a path, you can create a new component by clicking where you want to place the first point of the new component.
If you want to create several components without closing them, press Shift and click where you want to start a new one.
When you are satisfied with the shape, you can use Stroke Path or Create Selection from Path.
The default GIMP installation creates a dock containing the tabs "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo". Click on the Paths tab to manage your paths.

Borders On Selections in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:21:00.003-08:00

Since GIMP is an image manipulation program and not a painting program it doesn't include tools to draw shapes like squares and circles. However this doesn't mean you can't paint them, in fact there are some interesting options regarding this subject when it comes to GIMP. The solution is to use the selection stroking capabilities of GIMP.

This option can be accesed on the image menu (right button click on the image), by going to Edit -> Stroke Selection.

Step 1

Before doing that however we need to make a selection with the shape we want. There are several ways to make a selection, including all the tools in red shown above and select by color as explained on Selecting and removing one color . When using the tools, holding shift at the beggining of the selection process will add the selection to what is already selected, while holding the control key will substract from it.

Step 2

Use the selection tools to create a selection with the desired shape.

Step 3

After you have the selection, choose a brush from the brush selection dialog. Choose also a color and you can play with the spacing option for the brush. Brush selection dialog

Step 4

When all the options are selected you can click on Edit -> Stroke. You will get a dialog allowing you to set many options for stroking your selection, including dashed lines and other fancy features. If you select Stroke Using a Paint Tool, you will be able to use the brush that you have selected.

Step 5

When all the options are selected you can finally click on OK. Using a fuzzy brush and selecting a blue color here is the result for the selection made above.

Examples

Playing around with the spacing options in the brush selection dialog, the color or using one of the animated brushes you can get very interesting results.. here are some examples.

Basic tutorial for Gimp

2008-12-04T11:21:00.001-08:00

On this page, the first section of our ever growing (?) collection of tutorials, I will demonstrate the basic operation you will need to perform over and over again in your life as a computer artist: Generate isolated parts of a picture and combine them with a random background. What we want to achieve in this example is to generate a 3-dimensional text logo flying (and movable) over the background (a simple uni-color layer in our case, but you will easily see that you could use any other (stack of) layers/images instead. Start with a plain white picture, black as the foreground color and open the layer dialog!

Adding text

Use the text tool to add some text. You will get a new text layer which you can also see if you look at the layers dialog. You can use the move tool to move the text where you like to have it. Then merge it with the white layer below by choosing Merge Down from the Layer menu. You should now have one layer with black text on white background. Using Layer -> Colors -> Invert you will achieve something like the picture above.

Adding colors

First of all: Blur the image a bit (Gaussian blur at 5 may be a good start). Now add a new layer to the image with the help of the New Layer button in the layers dialog. Choose it to be white. It will be created above the just made text layer effectively hiding it. It will be active which can be seen from the fact that it has a blue background in the layers dialog. Click some times on the eye symbol to see how you can make a layer invisible and make the other layer active by clicking on its small preview in the layer dialog. At the end, leave the new white layer visible and active. Use the plasma plugin to make this layer a little colorful (Yes, you are invited to experiment with the parameters...). The layer dialog should look something like this now:

Bumpmapping

It's getting funny now: Use the bumpmap plugin with the blurred text layer as a bumpmap on the plasma layer. You can play with the other parameters, but they have sensible defaults. You'll get an image like the one above. Now (still on the plasma layer) choose Add layer mask from the layer dialog menu. Choose the mask to be white. Nothing will change on the image for now, but the layer dialog will look like this:

You can toggle whether a layers mask or the actual picture is active by clicking on their previews in the layers dialog.

Using the layer mask

Now activate the text layer again. (you don't have to make the layers on top invisible to work on this layer. It's enough that you activate it in the layers dialog.) Now do Edit -> Copy. Make sure you have the mask of the top layer selected and the layer is activated. Choose Edit -> Paste. You will again get a floating selection, shown in the layer dialog like this:

Use the layer dialog menu to Anchor Layer, which will anchor the floating selection into the previous activated layer (which is the mask of the plasma layer in our case). This will leave you with the following scenario:

Adjusting the levels

Now add a new layer and fill it with some color (e.g. with the help of the bucket fill tool) and use Raise Layer or Lower Layer from the layer dialog menu to achieve something like this:

Now you'll see that the image of the logo isn't very sharp. We'll change this now. Make sure you have selected the plasma layer's mask and open Layers -> Colors -> Levels. This tool is one of the most important tools you have! Play with the little triangles you'll see in the two grey gradients and watch their effect on the image. For now, try to achieve something like the following:

What we do here is making the border of the mask sharper, and by that means, sharpening the whole picture (the area which is neither 100% opaque nor transparent will become smaller). But we can easily avoid the picture getting pixel-steps by leaving still a smooth transition between opaque and transparent parts of the layer. (If you didn't realize it by now - I bet you did - the layer mask works in such a way that all black parts of the mask will become transparent parts of the layer and all white parts will stay opaque (with smooth transitions realized by values of grey).

Creating a drop-shadow

Using the layer menu you will have noticed the entry Duplicate Layer. Use this now. Then use Apply Layer Mask and Lower Layer which should leave you with something like this:

Make sure you check the Keep Transparency option (the little box next to the layer mode) and then fill that duplicated layer with black. You can paint over the text with a paint tool or simply drag a black color from the color selector and drop it over the image. You do not have to be careful: the Keep Transparency button will let you paint only on opaque parts of the image. This will give you:

Now make sure you uncheck the button again and move the layer some pixels to the right and downwards. You can move it with the Move tool while pressing Shift so that it moves the current layer instead of picking a new one. (Alternatively, can use Layer -> Transform -> Offset and enter a small offset for both X and Y: this will offset the contents of the layer without moving the layer itself.) Then blur your layer and adjust the transparency with the slider so the background will shine through: You've just generated a so-called drop shadow, which greatly enhances the 3D effect and is used in very many places.

That's it! Now have a lot of fun making flying logos!

How to Create Cartoon Clouds in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:20:00.002-08:00

Step 1: Create a New File

Leave the defaults, 480x680 is fine.

Step 2: Set the background color

I set it to a nice, sky blue gradient: #66aebd to #8fe1f3:

Step 3: Create the Cloud

Select the elliptical select tool and set the following settings. Everything is at its default value, except the mode, which is set to Add:

Create a new layer. Now create a couple of circles (hold Shift to create circles) connected to each other using the elliptical tool until you have a selection that looks like this:

Now use to the fill tool to fill your selection with white:

Step 4: Depth and Shadows

Time to add some depth to our clouds. Set your foreground color to a slightly darker and muted blue that you used for the background. I used #618d96. Then select a circular brush with the following settings (make a new one if you can't find one that matches):

Create a new layer above your cloud's layer, use this brush, to add some depth to your cloud. You might want to decrease the opacity of this layer. I set it to 40%:

Finally, just add a very weak drop shadow to your cloud (Script-Fu > Shadow > Drop Shadow). Make sure the cloud's layer it selected, not the depth layer!:

Finished!

Fiery Space Explosion in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:20:00.001-08:00

Here's a new tutorial in Gimp for ya guys. Today I'm going to teach you how to create a fiery space explosion in Gimp based on a tutorial by Collis at PSDTuts. Here is what we are going to create:

Step 1
In the original tutorial, Collis focuses on the Rule of Thirds, a method that simply states that if you divide your canvas in three lengthwise and vertically,

your main focal points should be at the intersections, or along the lines themselves. The reason being for having your main focal point off center is that it creates a more visual interest. Take a look at this image from Collis:

Keeping that in mind, I'm going to keep my focal point in the bottom right corner.

Step 2
Alright, let's start our composition. Create a new canvas. Mine will be rather large, at 1280x800. Use a radial gradient, with a rather subtle light color where the explosion will be. Make it somewhat like mine:

Now let's give it some texture. Create a new transparent layer. Go to Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Use these settings:

Click ok. Set the cloudy layer's blending mode to Screen and lower the opacity to about 12%.

Step 3

I chose to next use this stock due to it's texture (Right Click>Save As):

In your canvas window, go to File > Open As Layers. Open your aurora image. Rotate the image so the aurora runs lengthwise. You can also use the scale tool and adjust the aurora to better fit your image. Go to Colors > Desaturate and click Desaturate. Now get out a large, soft eraser and erase pretty much anything that isn't part of the aurora. You can leave the sky in it, though. Set the layer to Dodge and lower the opacity to 50%.

Step 4
Now we are going to add the stars. Download this image of stars below:

Go to File > Open as Layers and select the star image. Lower the opacity to about 19-20%.

Step 5
Now we'll add our planet. I am going to be using this planet found via Google:

http://dragonsoulgallery.com/miscpics/Planet_by_Randell.png

Open up the planet as a new layer in our piece. Resize, rotate, and place it in the desired spot abiding by the Rule of Thirds I mentioned earlier.

Step 6
Now let's give our planet a little more depth. Duplicate the planet layer. Run the dodge/burn tools over it. Make the top of the planet lighter, and the bottom of it darker. Set the layer mode to Screen.

Step 7
Now let's add our planet into the image again. Do this by going to File > Open as Layers, and select your planet. Shrink the planet so it is even smaller, like in mine below. Desaturate it so it looks, well, different from our larger planet. Rotate it a bit, and use the dodge tool on the part where it will collide with the larger planet.

Step 8

Get out the gradient tool, and select FG to Transparent. Make white your foreground color. Right click > Alpha to Selection on the planet layer. Create a new layer and apply the gradient to the selection, going from where the comet is, to the bottom of the planet. Select > Deselect. Set the layer mode to Overlay and lower the opacity a bit.

Step 9
Go ahead and move the comet layer behind the planet layer. Create a new layer. Grab a large, soft brush and click only once or twice to get a nice, white, soft glow as shown.

Step 10
Now use the scale tool and the rotate tool to elongate the light like I have done. Also be sure it is tangential to the main planet.

Step 11

Now we'll add a blue glow to the outside of the light. Go to Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow. Make the X & Y Offsets 0, the radius 15, and do not allow resizing. Change the color to a darkish blue, or whatever matches your planet. Click ok.

Step 12
Duplicate the glow layer and rotate it so it's opposite the last glow layer. Go to Filter > Repeat Drop Shadow. Your second glow should have the same glow as the first. Let's add some color to it now. Get out another large, soft brush. Now I want to stick with a sort of blue explosion. I'll make my brush blue. Paint the explosion a bit and set the layer mode to Overlay. Duplicate the layer. Set the new layer to Screen.

Step 13
Duplicate one of the light layers. Go to Filters > Blur > Motion Blur. Use these settings:

Set the layer mode to Screen, and lower the opacity.

Step 14
Now we want to create a tail behind our comet. Duplicate your layer we just made. Lower the opacity. Smush it a little and blur it a bit. Place it behind our comet. Give it some color if ya want. Remember to change opacities and such and to also play around a bit with what you're making. Makes it more, creative, I guess you could say.

Step 15
Now we are going to grab this image found via Google:

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~korista/stargal-images/pleiades_gendler_big.jpg

We will use this image to form some of the tail lights on the comet. Open this image as a layer and place it behind our two planets. Use a soft eraser and erase everything except for what you see in the image below. It makes it look somewhat like particles are being thrown out by the collision. You can even duplicate the layers a couple times and make it different.

Step 16
Right click on the planet layer and select Alpha to Selection. Create a new layer behind the planet layer named "backglow." Fill the selection with white. Select > Deselect. Press the Up & Left arrow keys a few times to move the white ellipse in the direction shown. Afterward, go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Blur by 40. Click ok. Set the backglow layer to Overlay and duplicate it. Blur it again, and move it up and to the left even more.

Step 17
Now we need the all-important lens flare. Create a new layer above all the others and fill it with black. Go to Filters > Light and Shadow > Lense Flare. Render your lense flare. Set the layer mode to Screen.

Step 18
Now we'll apply a subtle blur to soften the whole image. Go to Edit > Copy Visible and Paste as Layer. You should now have a new layer with our WIP on it. Duplicate it. Hide one of them. Desaturate the visible one. Go to Filters > Blur > Motion Blur. Select Zoom as the type of blur. Play around with it until you get something like this:

Step 19
Now set the blurred layer to Overlay at 20% opacity. Alright now grab the other layer we hid earlier. Repeat the blurring process to it (but don't desaturate it!). Set it to 10% opacity.

Step 20
Let's add some texture to it, shall we? Alright, so grab one of these paper textures from BittBox. Open the texture as a layer like we have done previously. Move the layer to in between the light layers. Erase all but the parts where I haven't.

Set the layer to Overlay. Lower the opacity if needed.

Step 21
Alright we are almost there! Yay! Now let's add in this image of the moon via Google:

http://www.tutorialquest.com/templates/tutorials/moon/moon.png

Open it as a layer in our composition. Shrink the size of it down to about the size of our comet. Get out the burn tool and burn the side of the moon facing away from the explosion.

Step 22
Now let's make our moon interact with the explosion a bit more. Use the eyedropper tool and select one of the main colors from the explosion. That turns out to be a blue for me. Right click on the moon layer, and select Alpha to Selection. Create a new layer. Use a soft brush to paint a cresent shape with our selected color. Be sure it is facing the explosion. Duplicate the cresent layer. Blur it with Gaussian Blur by 8 or so.

Now you are done! Enjoy.

Design an Apple iPhone Advertisement in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:19:00.002-08:00

Let's be honest. I like Apple, I really do, but what keeps me from buying Apple products is the fact that it's just too expensive, and nothing is upgradeable. I do like the looks of Apple products, though, except the iPod. I prefer my Zune. But doesn't that iPhone look slick? (It's expensive, too.) But anyway, let's design us one of those fancy iPhones in Gimp. Remember, you can click the images to make them bigger. Also remember to save often, since Gimp has a tendency to crash.

Step 1

Let's create a new document in Gimp, preferably no less than 1024x768 big. Make the background black. Create a new layer and name it "inner black." Get out the Rectangle Select Tool, and make a selection about like mine. Afterward, go to Select > Rounded Rectangle, and enter about 30 for the radius. Click ok. Change the foreground color to black, and the background color to #323333. Apply the gradient from bottom to top.

Step 2
Now we want to create the outer silver part that outlines the iPhone. Create a new layer and name it "outer lining." With your previous selection still active, go to Select > Grow. Grow by 15. Click ok. Select the gradient tool. Make the foreground color a light gray and the background color white. Apply the gradient tool from bottom to top. Create a new layer and name it "outer-inner lining." Select > Shrink. Shrink by 7. Apply the gradient tool from top to bottom.

Select the paintbrush tool. Select the Circle (01) brush. Make white the foreground color. Go to Edit > Stoke Selection. Select the paintbrush radio button. Click ok. Select > Deselect. I also took the blur tool around the white stroke a bit to smooth out the line. Merge the two outline layers.

Step 3
Get out the rectangle select tool to make the screen. Create a new layer and name it "screen." Fill the selection with #447AB0.

Now personally, I don't feel like making the screen completely from scratch. I guess I'm just too lazy to do it. I'm going to use this picture of an iPhone and steal it's screen. You can copy if you wish, or make your own.

Step 4
Now for the speaker. Create a new layer and name it "speaker." get out the Rectangle Select Tool and select an area about what I have selected. Select > Rounded Rectangle. Use 80 as the radius. Use black as the foreground color and white as the background color. Fill it from top to bottom like I have. Select > Shrink. Shrink by 3 pixels. Fill the selection with black.

Step 5

Now for the camera. Create a new layer and name it "camera." Get out the Ellipse Select Tool and select an area about what I have. Fill it with white. Select > Shrink. Shrink by 1 pixel. Fill the selection with a black and white gradient from top to bottom.

With your selection still active, click the paths tab above the layers dialog. Click on the Selection to Path button. You should have a new path pop up in the paths dialog. Select > Deselect. Grab the paths tool. Click and drag the new path into the work area. You should now have a path where your selection was. Use the path tool to adjust the path to about what I have done:

After you have your path ready, click the Selection from Path button in the toolbox. Fill the new selection with black. Select > Deselect. Get out the Rectangle Select Tool and make a selection like I have. Select > Rounded Rectangle. Use 30 for the radius. Fill the selection with a very light gray. Select > Shrink. Shrink by 1 pixel. Fill with black. Select > Deselect. Now we're done with the iPhone part of the tutorial. Happy? Good. :D

Step 6

Now let's create the rest of the advertisement. (This half of the tutorial is based on a tutorial by Fabio at PSDTuts.) Create a new layer above the background layer. Fill it with a radial, white to black gradient. Get out the Rectangle Selection Tool and select a rectangle that covers about the bottom half of the screen. Fill it with a very dark red on a new layer.

Step 7

Create a new layer. Select a blue color (#113e4b) for the foreground color and black for the background color. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. You should now have clouds in your previous selection. Go to Colors > Colorize. Slide the Hue bar until you get a dark blue like I have. Lower the Lightness a little bit.

Step 8
Select the Perspective tool and distort the floor as I have below. Click Transform when done.

Add some blur to it by going to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blue. Put 8 in box boxes and click ok. Lower the opacity to make it a bit darker.

Step 9
Repeat the steps 7-8 to create another set of clouds, but this time, use a dark pink hue instead of blue. Note: If you duplicate the blue layer, it won't work because we need to use different clouds.

Step 10

Create a new layer just like you did in step 6. Select black and white for your foreground and background colors. Get out the radial gradient tool and apply it, with white in the center. Change the blend mode to Dodge. Note: I've hidden my iPhone layer so you can see what mine looks like.

Step 11

Create a new layer. Get out the Lasso Tool. Create a selection like I have below. Then go to Select > Feather. Feather by 100px.

Go to Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Let's add more blur to the clouds. Filter > Blue > Gaussian Blur. Put 35 in both boxes and click ok. Set the blend mode to Dodge. Delete the part of the cloud that is not on the floor.

Step 12

Now we'll create the background's light. Create a new layer. Use the Rectangle Select Tool and select the top part of the background (from the top of the floor, up). Go to Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Click ok. Go to Colors > Brightness/Contrast. Lower the brightness and raise the contrast some.

Create a new layer and fill the existing selection with #84a7b8. Set the blending mode to Overlay.

Create another layer and get out the gradient tool. Create a new gradient with the colors #fba46f, #cb8cd4, and #346777. Fill the existing selection with that gradient. Set the blending mode to Overlay. I also took the eraser tool to the cloud layer we just made and erased some of the parts.

Step 13

Create a new layer. Get out the lasso tool. Make a selection like I have. Feather by 100 like before.

Filter > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Select > Deselect. Get out the blur tool and blur parts of the image. Set the blending mode to Dodge.

Step 14

Reveal your iPhone that we hid earlier. Let's add some lights in front of our iPhone. To do that, create a new layer.Choose a soft brush and and use about a 50% opacity. First choose an orange color, and brush a little bit up in the top left corner. Then, choose a pink color and paint around the left side of the phone. Change the blend mode of the layer to Overlay. You can also add another layer of clouds, but erase most of them, leaving behind a few gray parts.

Step 15
For the most part, we are completely done with it. Yeah, it does look a bit plain, with just the iPhone on top. I decided to use the Outer Glow filter from FX-Foundry Scripts (which you can download here) and added a few other glows.

Create a Worn Vintage Pop Art Design in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:19:00.001-08:00

Pop art, vintage, and grunge are some of my favorite types of styles. They're back and you see them everywhere. Well, today I'm going to teach you how to create a worn vintage pop art design in Gimp based on a tutorial by Alvaro Guzman at PSDTuts. BTW, this is also my 100th post! Yay!

Remember you can click the images to view them full size. Oh, and here's a tip, be sure to save every so often, preferably after every step. Gimp has a tendency to crash a lot...

1) Alright, first we are going to start with the background. Create a new document that is 960x1280 in size. Why so big? Well, it's good to be able to work with a lot of space. If you need to later on, you can scale it down a bit, but keep it in proportion.

We need to use this image for the background. Open the image in Gimp and copy/paste into your document. Rotate, resize, and adjust it like I have done.

2) Now we are going to add a dirty style to the paper. Create a layer named "clouds" above the "paper" layer. Reset the foreground and background colors by pressing (D) and go to Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Use these settings:
Random Seed: 0
Detail: 6
X Size: 3
Y Size: 4
Leave everything unchecked an click ok.

Now get out a huge, soft, eraser tool and erase big parts of the clouds. When done, set the layer mode to Burn and the opacity to 75%.

3) Now we are going to add different design elements to our design. We need in image of a person. I am going to use this image of a businessman here. Render him and copy/paste him onto a new layer named "man." For a guide on rendering in Gimp, you can visit this site.

4) Pop art can be bizarre sometimes. Don't know what I'm talking about? You can check out some bizarre pop art here. Because I like originality and, well, bizarre things, we are going to use a dog's head. Yeah, I know the original tutorial used a dog head, but, oh well. Dogs are man's best friend, right? You can go ahead and use something else if ya like. Same goes for the rest of the tutorial, as in, if you want to use something else, go ahead. It only shows how creative you can be.

Open up the image of the dog's head in Gimp and render it. Copy/paste onto a new layer in Gimp named "dog." Use a soft eraser tool and erase the man's head, leaving a nice, soft, rounded area around the neck, like in my example below. Place your dog head over it. Do your best with the eraser tool, paths tool, etc. to make the head blend in.

5) Merge your "man" layer with your "dog" layer. Name the layer "dog man" or something like that. Duplicate the "dog man" layer. On the "dog man layer copy" layer, set the mode to Burn. Lower the opacity to about 25%. Set the "dog man" layer mode to Hard Light.

Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Keep the same settings and click ok. Erase parts of the cloud like we did before. Move the new clouds layer to the top of the layers palette. Set the mode to Burn and lower the opacity to about 45%.

6) For this next part, I would normally use custom shapes, but because we are in Gimp and not Photoshop, and because I'm to lazy to teach you how to make a sunburst in Gimp, we will download this sunburst shape I made in Photoshop. After you have downloaded it, in Gimp, click File > Open as Layers. Select the sunburst shape. Get out the magic wand tool and select the light blue area. Select > Grow. Grow by 1px and click ok. Delete. Select > Deselect. Colors > Hue/Saturation. Slide all 3 bars to the left and click ok.

Rotate the layer and scale to where the center of the sunburst is focused around the dogman's head, somewhat like mine. Change the layer mode to Overlay. Raise the sunburst layer to the top of the layers palette.

7) Now, we want the sunburst to be under the dogman layer, but we can't simply move the layer order because the dogman is set to a certain blending mode affected by the paper. To solve this issue, right click the dogman layer, and click Alpha to Selection. Select the sunburst layer and press delete. The sunburst over the dog should be deleted.

Now we want to add a little bit of grungyness to the sunburst. Right click on the sunburst layer and select Add Layer Mask. In the dialog that pops up, select "White (Full Opacity)." Get out some splatter brushes, and select black as the color. Lower the opacity of the brushes to about 80%. Now add a few splatters to the layer mask.

8) Alright let's add the drop shadow. Select the "dogman" layer. Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow. Use these settings:
Offset X: -8
Offset Y: -10
Color: #444444
Opacity: 80%
Do not allow resizing. Click ok.

Now right click on your "dogman" layer and select alpha to selection. Click on the drop shadow layer and press delete. This should get rid of the shadow not visible under the dogman. Lower the drop shadow layer to about 30%.

9) Now we'll add some patterns to the design. Download the pattern of your choice from here. Open up the image in Gimp. File > Save As. Save it in your Gimp patterns folder. Restart the Gimp to load the pattern. Be sure to save your work.

Open up your piece we have been working on. Create a new layer above the rest and name it "Texture 1." Get out the rectangular select tool and select an area that covers about 1/3 of the image from the bottom. Select the Bucket Fill tool. Select pattern as the fill type. Select your pattern shape in the patterns dialog that we saved earlier. Fill the selection.

Add a layer mask to the "texture 1" layer. Select the "White (Full Opacity)" option in the dialog that pops up. Use a black, hard round brush and erase parts of the mask where you don't want it to show. It's ok if some of it covers the dogman, because we'll fix that next.

Right click on the Dogman layer and select the Alpha to Selection option. Click the "texture 1" layer and press delete. Do the same with the drop shadow layer. Set the texture 1's layer mode to Multiply. Lower the opacity to what suits you.

10) Now let's make another pattern. Go to this website and pick a pattern of your choice. Open the pattern in Gimp and save it as a pattern like we did before. Go to the patterns dialog and click the refresh button at the bottom to refresh your patterns. Create a new layer above the rest and name it "texture 2." Fill it with your pattern. Right click, add layer mask. Select "Black (Full Transparency)." Get out the eraser tool and start erasing parts of the mask to what suits you.

Right click your dogman and click Alpha to Selection. Select the texture 2 layer and press delete. Do the same with the drop shadow layer. Set the texture 2 blending mode to Multiply and lower the opacity a bit.

11) Now if you notice, there is an awful effect where our two patterns overlay. To fix it, Right click on texture 2, and select Mask to Selection. Click the texture 1 layer and press delete.

12) The hard work is almost done! Now we are going to add some magazing clippings. Download this image and open it in Gimp. Cut out whichever words you like and paste them onto their own layers in our piece. Use different tools on them (ie. perspective, distort, scale, rotate, etc) to arrange them however you like. Give them drop shadows.

13) We'll be adding text shortly. For now, download these three sheets of paper: Paper 1, Paper 2, and Paper 3.

Open up Paper 2 in Gimp. Delete the white part around the paper and add the paper onto a new layer named "Paper 1" in our piece. You can use the burn tool to make the paper look a little more stressed. Go ahead and put the other 2 sheets in as well. Add drop shadows to them, too.

14) Now we'll add some text to on the pieces of paper. Get out the text tool and add a letter or whatever you like to each piece. Be sure to set the layer mode of each letter to Multiply and lower the opacity. Use different fonts for each.

15) Now we'll add some text over the background. Use any text you like. Set the layer mode to Overlay, and you're done!

Click to view full size!

Car Vector Tutorial in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:18:00.002-08:00

We are going to need quite a few things for this piece. First, let's use this car stock from Stock.xchng, or you can use your own. We are also going to need a couple of skyscrapers as well. Click the images to view them full size.

Car- a schweet 1956 Chevy Bel Air Convertible. (Courtesy Google)

Skyscraper 1. (Courtesty Stock.xchng)

Skyscraper 2.(Courtesty Stock.xchng)

Skyscraper 3.(Courtesty Stock.xchng)

Seattle Space Needle. (Because it's just awesome and has to be in the piece; courtesy Google)

We will also need some brushes.

Here's a nice set of 378 abstract vector brushes courtesy PAULW at DeviantART. Yes they are Photoshop brushes, but remember Gimp can read Photoshop brushes. Just place them in your brushes folder. Refer to my guide to installing anything if you need help.

Here are some vector foliage brushes by ObsidianDawn that we will be using as well.

Here are some splatter brushes by ka05 that we will also be using.

Here are some galaxies brushes by Sunira that we will be using.

Here are some abstract brushes by r0man-de that we will be using.

1) Create a new image on a white background in Gimp. I'm going to make mine 1000x800, which is within the 4:3 ratio. Fill the background with #5f420b, or a dark brown.

2) For the background, we have to create a sun ray effect. In Photoshop, this is fairly easy seeing as one of the preset custom shape tools includes a sun ray shape. Gimp does not have this, so we'll do it manually. Get out the path tool. To make sure we will get the lines even, we will want to use the grid. Go to View > Show Grid. We will also want the snap to grid feature, so be sure to click "Snap to Grid" as well.

3) Now, in the tool box, make sure you have the same settings as I do, and then draw your first path, like in my example below.

4) In the paths tool box, click the Selection from Path" button. Create a new layer and name it "Ray 1." Get out the gradient tool and use these settings. Use #b7c14d for the foreground color.

5) Fill your selection like below. Start inward and make your way outward.

6) Select > Deselect. Now select the layer the ray is on and duplicate it. Layer > Transform> Rotate 90 Clockwise. Now get the Move tool and position the point of the ray along with the other one so that they meet at a 90 degree angle.

7) Now do the same with the layer we just created. Keep going until yours looks like mine. You may have to manually rotate the layers yourself. Here's a handy little guide as to what degree you should make each ray. The red lines are what you start out with, and the blue are what you should get. When you are done, now would be a great time to save.

8) Now we can turn off our grid and the snap to grid function, so do that. Let's get our car out. Open up your car as a layer and render with the path tool using the same settings as last time.

9) After you've fully outlined your car with the path tool, press enter and you should get a selection. CTRL-I. Delete. Select > Deselect. Now you should have a nice pretty car all rendered out. Don't crop out what may be in the windshield or other windows. Just leave that there. Resize your car and place it like mine.

10) Duplicate the car layer 3 times. Arrange the layers like so:

11) On each layer, perform the following:

Threshold Car Layer: Colors > Threshold (The settings don't have to be exact- just whatever helps define the car)

Purple Layer: Colors > Hue/Saturation

Again, the settings don't have to be the same. Just use a purple hue, lower the lightness, and raise the saturation.
Green Layer: Colors > Hue/Saturation

Again, the settings don't have to be the same. Just use a purple hue, lower the lightness, and raise the saturation.

Blue Layer: Colors > Hue/Saturation

Again, the settings don't have to be the same. Just use a purple hue, lower the lightness, and raise the saturation.

11) Now make all the layers visible. Lower the opacity for each one except for the original car layer. Make it somewhat like mine. The numbers in red are the opacities for each layer. Merge the car layers when done.

12) Next we will add in the buildings, coloring them like we did with the car. Rendering, duplicating, applying a threshold, using three different color layers like before, and changing the opacities of each layer. Place each building behind the car rotated in a different position.

13) Now it's time to take out the brush tool. Pick your splatter brushes and lay a couple of them on there using the settings I have. Don't go overboard with them though.

*Note: You can use any size for the scale. Just don't make it too big.*

14) Create a new layer named "foliage" above the splatter layer. Select the foliage swirls brushes. Use a purple color and full opacity.

15) Create a new layer named "arrows" underneath the foliage layer, but above the splatter layer. Use the arrow brushes from the vector brush pack we downloaded with a golden yellow color. Be creative with the opacities.

16) Find the brushes in the vector brush pack that have a bit of writing on them. Use a light blue writing brush and add a few of those in there. You can also add some larger ones in there that have an orange color.

17) Create a new layer under the worded brushes layer and above the foliage layer and name it "vector splatter." Use your splatter brushes once more underneath the car, using a tan color. Afterward, use the circular vector brushes and an off-yellow/brown color and put in some other designs, kinda like mine.

18) I also added a few more purple arrows in on the existing arrows layer.

19) Now we will add some finishing touches. Create a new layer below everything but the rays. Use your galaxy brushes on it as a light indigo type color. Set the layer mode to Screen.

20) Last but not least, we will now add some abstract brushes. Create a new layer above the galaxies layer. Use your abstract brushes we downloaded, in a golden color. Set the layer mode to Screen and lower the opacity a bit.

And you're done!!

(You just gotta see this one full size- go ahead, click it! You know you want to!)

Make Gunge-Vector Style Art in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:18:00.001-08:00

I love making vector-grunge based styles that can be used for design in Photoshop. So today, I'm going to show you how to make them in Gimp. We are going to attempt something I made in Photoshop:

First, you going to need a few things.
Urban Designs Brushes.
Snowboarder stock.
Mountain Stock.
Vector Foliage Brushes.
Splatter Brushes.
Grunge Brushes.
Hair PSD.
Scribble PSD.
Sun Rays.

1) Open your mountains in Gimp. Duplicate the layer. Delete the original layer. We do this so the mountains are not on the background.

2) Get out the paths tool and render the mountains.

3) File > Open as Layers. Select the Sun Rays image you downloaded. I actually had to create this in Photoshop seeing as it is difficult to make in Gimp. Drag the Sun Rays layer to the background.

4) File > Open as Layers. Select the snowboarder. Render the snowboarder. Resize and place as desired.

6) Go to the layers dialog and lock every layer by clicking the chain symbol. Image > Scale Image. Type 800 in the width and 533 in the length. Click ok. Everything should be resized.

5) Open up the hair PSD as a separate document in Gimp. Pick the magic wand tool and select one of the designs. Get the gradient tool. Pick a bright color, such as bright red, for the foreground color. Make white the background color. Use the gradient tool on the selection. Select > Deselect. Get the lasso tool and make a selection around the design. Copy it and paste it into a new layer in your snowboarder image. Rotate and reposition it behind your snowboarder as desired. Continue doing this with other hair image. Experiment with layer order, size, rotation, colors, etc.

6) Open up the scribbles PSD and do the same.

7) Merge the scribbles and hair designs to one layer. Create a new layer and name it "under splatter." Drag this layer under neath the hair & scribbles layer. Get out the paint brush tool. Select white as your foreground color. Pick one of the splatter brushes and try to achieve something similar to mine.

8) Still using the paint brush, pick one of the fuzzy brushes. Add little white fuzzy dots within the colorful tail. Don't go overboard.

9) Create a new layer, name it "Grunge." Drag it down between the background and the mountain layer. Get out your grunge brushes. Make your foreground color black. Achieve something like mine. Experiment with opacities and sizes.

10) Create a new layer between the grunge layer and the mountains layer. Get out the urban designs brushes. Play around with them behind the mountain.

11) Create a new layer named "black splatter top." Leave the layer on top. Using a mixture of your urban designs brushes and your splatter brushes, achieve something like mine below. Experiment with sizes, placement, etc.

12) Create a new layer on top of the others. Name it "black splatter front." Again, use your urban designs brushes, splatter brushes, and vector foliage brushes to achieve something like mine.

Save it and you're done!!

Create a Cool Music Logo on a Grunge Background in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:16:00.002-08:00

1) Create a new 1000x500 pixel image on a white background. Get out the text tool and type in something that you would like for your text. The font I used was size 70 black Kremlin font.

2) Create a new transparent layer and name it "outline" Drag it underneath your text layer. Right click on the text layer > Alpha to Selection. Go to Select > Grow. Grow by 3 pixels. Click Ok. Click on the Outline layer. Click the fill tool. Use color #a0a0a0 and fill the selection.

3) Merge the text layer and the outline layer. Name the layer "Text." Now, duplicate the layer. Using the move tool, move the duplicated layer 1 pixel down and 1 pixel to the left. Move the duplicated layer behind the original. Repeat this until you get something like mine:

4) Create a new transparent layer named "circle." Drag the circle layer underneath the text layer. Get out the ellipse tool. Create a selection that is 185x185 pixels in size near the right above your text. Fill it with the same gray we used on the words. Select > Shrink. Shrink by 20 pixels. Click ok. Now press delete.

5) Create a new transparent layer and name it "x." Move it between the circle layer and the text layer. Get out the rectangular selection and make a selection that is 282x41 pixels. Fill it with #e06900. Rotate it and position it like in mine below. Duplicate the layer and go to Layer > Transform > Flip Horizontally. Position it again like in mine below. Merge the two x layers.

6) Click on the circle layer. Fill the inside of it with white. Now select the magic wand tool and select the inside of the circle. Select > Shrink. Shrink it by 3 pixels. Go to Select > Invert. Click on the X layer and press delete.

7) Click on the background layer. Filters > Render > Clouds > Difference Clouds.
Detail: 2
X Size: 2
Y Size: 2
Click ok.

The clouds are kinda dark, so go to Colors > Brightness/Contrast. Raise the brightness and contrast a bit, but not too much.

8) Get out the gradient tool. Make white your foreground color. From the bottom right corner, click and drag to somewhere in the middle of your text. Get to something like mine:

9) For this step you will need some super-amazing grunge and splatter brushes. Go to DeviantArt.com and search for some there. It doesn't matter if they are for Gimp or Photoshop because Gimp can read both.

Create a new layer and name it "grunge." Use your grunge brushes and splatter brushes like I did below. Remember to play around with the sizes and opacities. When you are done, merge the grunge layer and the background layer. Name it "Background."

10) Click on the background layer. Go to Colors > Colorize. Give the layer a blue hue and brighten the saturation and lightness. Get to something somewhat like mine.

11) Duplicate the layer with your text enlarge it with the scale tool. Drag the layer to just above the background layer. Right click > Alpha to Selection. Fill it with white. Lower the opacity to 29.5. Do the same with the X layer. Position the two layers like mine and you are done. Now go play with it.

It isn't perfect, seeing as Gimp has some anti aliasing issues (believe me I tried everything to make it smoother), but hey, it was pretty damn close.

Photo Montage Tricks

2008-12-04T11:16:00.001-08:00

Alright today I am going to teach you how to create one of those colorful photo montages usually used in advertising. The original tutorial was written by Ian Keltie, a Newcastle-based commercial artist, for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. We are going to try to achieve something similar to this:

You will need a couple of stocks. You will need something for the main aspect, whereas the boy in the above example. I have decided to theme mine as music instead of money like in the original. I used one of Daron Malakian, guitarist for System of a Down. I will tell you about other stocks we will need as we get to them in the tutorial. You are going to need some textures as well. Here is the link to the ones used in the original tutorial. I will be using them as well.

1) Open up your main image in Gimp. Render it.

2) Duplicate it. Colors > Threshold. Play around with the slider until you get something you like. Get out the magic wand tool. Select the white parts of the face and the neck and delete them. Create a new layer. Make a selection with the ellipse tool that is covering the face and fill it with a bright color. I used orange. Select > None. Now move the layer with the circle below the black and white layer.

3) If the shirt of your person is white, it would be a good idea to add a design. In the original tutorial, it has some info about that. Download the original tutorial here (PDF; free) and read about that on step 7. Mine has a darker shirt, so there is no need for a design.

4) Open up the circle_texture image as a layer in Gimp that was in the pack you downloaded at the beginning. Move the texture's layer down just above the circle's layer. Right click on the circle layer > Alpha to Selection. Click on the texture's layer. Select > Invert. Delete. Select > None. Lower the opacity of the texture's layer to about 20%. Merge the texture and the circle layers.

5) Now get something to use as a pattern in the background. I actually did something a bit different and used two kinds of web dings music themed fonts to get a music themed pattern. I don't remember where I got them, though. Also be sure to mess around with the shapes, using the perspective tool, the rotation tool, etc. Make sure that whatever you used is black and white like your main person. Use the threshold tool to do that. Make sure the pattern is all in one layer. I also decided to make the canvas bigger so I can add more to it.

6) Now add some circular patterns in different bright colors to the background. I used some grunge brushes found on DeviantArt, however, I can't remember the name. After you've applied your brush on it's own separate layer, go to Filters > Artistic > Cubism.
Tile Size: 0.9
Tile Saturation: 2.5
Use this filter on each brush you apply. This filter gives it that "vintage" look. When you are done, put all the circles on one layer. Give the background a color. Black is good because it helps the other colors to pop out.

7) Now we will add some text. Get creative with it. You can also apply the cubism filter to it if you like. Also add other little ammentities to go along with it, like images that you have used the threshold effect on. Make it colorful so everything in black shows up. If you want, take a look at the original tutorial and it can give you a few pointers. I can't really help you with this part very much because it really comes down to your creative imagination for this part. When you are done, save it. There you have it, a neat little photo montage. (Click on mine below for the full image.)

Creating an Urban-Style Piece of Artwork in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:15:00.004-08:00

Now, as the original tutorial says, this tutorial is very stock heavy. I wanted my image to be based around music like the original, so I have gathered stock images based around that genre. You can get stock images at GettyImages, Corbis, etc. Here are what I used:

1) Create a 600x450 image with a white background. Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise.
X Size: 11
Y Size: 7
Leave everything else default and click Ok.

2) Filters > Noise > Spread
Horizontal: 20
Vertical: 20
Click Ok.

3) Filters > Artistic > Oilify
Mask Size: 24
Exponent: 16
Click Ok

4) Filters > Artistic > Apply Canvas; Click Ok

(This is about as close as I could get to the original.)

5) Filters > Noise > Slur; Leave the settings like last time and apply. Save it. Keep that texture for later.

6) Open up your image of your person. Crop the background of the picture out to where it is just your person.

Colors > Desaturate and click Ok. Duplicate the layer. Colors > Threshold. Play around with the slider until you get something you like. Click Ok. Now lower the opacity of the layer you changed the threshold on.

7) Add in your other stock images, desaturate them, and arrange them to form a nice image.

8) Now we need a crinkled paper texture. You can download the one I used here. Merge all the layers of your image. Open the paper texture in with your image, behind all the other layers. Create a selection with the paths tool around your person and objects like mine below:

9) Copy the selection (provided everything is in one layer) and paste it onto the texture we made earlier. Lower the opacity of the texture and give the background a color of your choosing. Position the image of the person and the speakers toward the bottom left, and give it a drop shadow by going to Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow. Play around with the settings until you find something you like. I also added some notes by drawing them with a brush and adding the paper and drop shadow to it like before.

10) Now add some halftone effects, brushes, etc. Just kinda play around with it. For the halftone effect, I used the brushes found here and here. For the other brushes, go to DeviantArt and search "vector brushes." For the amazing urban vector brushes, go here. Remember to change sizes, opacities, etc. to get a neat effect. In the end, you should have a totally amazing urban style piece of artwork. Enjoy.

Quick Grungy Poster in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:15:00.003-08:00

1) Create a new image. Give it a background color of #6d5608. Now set the foreground color to white and the background color to black.

2) Go to Filters > Artistic > Clothify.
Blur X: 8
Blur Y:8
Azimuth: 176.1
Elevation: 53.7
Depth: 1
Click Ok.

3) Click the Text tool. Instead of typing PSD like in the original tutorial, type GIMP.
Font: Arial Bold
Size: 140
Position it in the center.

4) Create a new transparent layer. Click the Rectangular Selection tool. Create a selection as shown and fill it with white.

Do the same for the other letters on the same layer. It should look like mine:

5) Duplicate the text layer, then merge the lined layer with the other text layer. Now rotate the lined layer keep note of the angle value. Do the same with the separate text layer, using the same angle value. Drag the text layer on top of the lined layer. Scale the lined layer and the text layer by 135%. Align both. If they appear blurry from scaling, run the Sharpen tool over them. It should look like mine:

6) Create a new layer and name it "Yellow." Using the lasso tool, create a selection as shown:

Fill the selection with yellow. Drag the yellow layer underneath the striped layer. It should look like mine:

Do the same for the next colors. Make sure to use a light blue, a darker red, and a darker orange. It should look like mine:

7) Now select the yellow layer. Apply the cloth filter to it like you did the background. Leave the settings the same. Do the same with the rest of the color layers.

8) Select the lined layer. Click the paths tool. Trace the lines on the lined layer, but just the lines only (look at the picture below to get an idea of what I'm talking about..I know it's confusing...) Press enter to get a selection. Filters > Light and Shadow.
X & Y Offsets: 0
Blur Radius: 8
Opacity: 90
Do not allow resizing.
Click Ok.

9) Apply a drop shadow to the alone text layer. Erase part of the drop shadow as shown in the image below. Also be sure your layers look like mine:

10) Create a new transparent layer. Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Click Ok. Lower the opacity of the new cloud layer to about 20%

11) Merge the striped layer and the text layer. Alpha to selection on that layer. Create a new layer. Filters > Artistic > Cloth. Apply that filter. Now go to Filters > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. Apply that filter. Now go to Colors > Brightness/Contrast.
Brightness: 98
Contrast: 43
Click Ok.

12) Select > None. On the new layer, go to Colors > Colorize. Adjust the hue till you get a light brown hue. Brighten the layer and desaturate it a bit. Click Ok. Lower the opacity of the layer to about 35.5.

13) Merge all the layers. Go to Colors > Brightness/Contrast.
Brightness: -39
Contrast: 72
Click Ok.

14) Go to Image > Canvas Size. Resize the canvas to 520x520 pixels. Move the only layer to the center. Create a new layer with a white background. Move it to the bottom on the layers stack.

15) Click the grunge tool. Now go crazy with your brushes. Be sure to change them by scaling them, changing opacity, etc. You can even use the Dodge/Burn tool to create a neat effect. In the end, you should have something similar to mine. There you go. A neat little grunge-style poster. (Click on the image to make it full size. Makes for better viewing, too.)

Smiley Tutorial ( Emoticon ) in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:15:00.001-08:00

Today I'm going to teach you how to make smilies in Gimp. This is a very easy tutorial.

1) Create a new 19x19 transparent image.
2) Zoom in to about 800%. Click the ellipse select tool. Create a circle that fills up the entire space. Fill it with a dark yellow.

3) Now select the gradient tool with the selection still activated. Select a lighter yellow as your foreground color. Now, in the gradients dialog, select FG to Transparent. Drag the gradient from the top to the bottom. You should have something like this (note I am zoomed to 800%):

4) Create a new layer. Select the ellipse tool again. Select an area about the size of an eye. Fill it with a semi-dark shade of gray. Again with the gradient tool, and white as your foreground color, drag the gradient tool from top to bottom. Shrink the selection by one pixel and fill it with black for the pupil. Do this again for the second eye. You should have something like this:

5) Now for the mouth. Create a new layer. Select the paths tool. Create an area about the shape of an open, smiling mouth. Move the points and the lines to get the shape you want. Once you have it, click the "Path to Selection" button. Your path should have changed to a selection. Fill it with a dark red. Then shrink the selection one pixel. Fill it with a darker red or black. Deselect. Zoom out to 100%. You should have something like this:

Sigs in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:14:00.003-08:00

1) First, we need to make a background. I am going to make a grunge style background based on the tutorial from GimpTalk. First, you need to get some grunge brushes in order to do this. Go to DeviantArt.com and search for grunge gimp brushes or just Google some. Now, create a new image, 400x150, with a white background. Create a new layer, name it grunge. Brush your grunge brushes on it with a black color. Completely cover the layer.

2) Now, go to Colors -> Color Balance. Change the color balance of the grunge layer to something that suits your needs. You can also go to Colors -> Colorize and change the colors from there.

3) Do a motion blur. Go to Filters -> Blur -> Motion Blur. Blur Type: Linear, Length:121, Angle:115.

4) Create a new layer. Now use your grunge brushes in white on the layer. Do a motion blur on the layer again. Linear, 160, 0. Lower the opacity to about 60.

5) Create a new layer, name it clouds. Go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds -> Solid Noise. Leave the settings as they are. Now go to Colors -> Color Balance. Play around with the settings until you come up with something you like.

6) Create a new layer. Paint your grunge brushes on this layer in black. Fill up the layer but don't get too dark. When you're done, change the layer mode to Overlay. Create another layer and paint your grunge brushes in white. Set the mode to Overlay. Repeat steps one and two as many times as you want but don't use too dark of colors. Then, use the color balance again.

7) Alright, now that you have a background, you need a render. Go to PlanetRenders.net or Google one. Add your new render to your sig. Position it toward the left or somewhere you like it. What I did with mine was after I positioned it, I made it about 80% opaque, duplicated the layer, then set that layer to overlay.

8) Now, we need to add some text. Position it towards the right. I lowered the opacity on the text, then duplicated the layer, setting the second layer to overlay. There you go. A simple way to make sigs.

Software Boxes in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:14:00.001-08:00

Here's that tutorial I promised on how to make a software box. (You can click on the images to enlarge them.)

1) Open Gimp. Create a new image with a white background, that is 400px by 550px.
2) First, we need to make the boxes face that will be in the front for all to see. Create a new transparent layer. Name it front base. Select the Rectangle Selection tool and create a box that is about 260 by 340 pixels. Using the Paintbucket tool, fill your selection with whatever the base color of your box will be. I am making a Firefox software box so my base color will be blue. You should have something like this:

3) Now, using the perspective tool, we will change the perspective of the front of the box so it appears as if we are viewing it from an angle. Just mess around with the box until you find something similar to mine:

4) Now we need to make the side of the box. Create a new layer, name it side base. Pick the Rectangle Selection tool again. Make another rectangle whose length is equal the side of the box we have already made. Fill it with your base color, then get your perspective tool again, and shape it to where it looks like the two pieces form a box. It will take a bit of work to get it just right. Leave a tiny bit of white space between the two pieces to make it look more like a box. It should look somewhat like mine:

5) Now we will add the graphics that you see on boxes. Graphics differ from box to box so yours may not turn out like mine. For the Gimp one I made, I simply took a screenshot of Gimp, put that on the front, and took the Gimp logo and the splattered Wilber images from the Gimp website. Theres no limit to what your box can look like. Use your imagination. But here's the catch: everything you put on your box has to be in perspective. So, when you add your logo or screenshot or whatever, make it in perspective using the perspective tool. Here's what mine looks like:

6) Merge all the layers together except for the background layer. We will now add a drop shadow. Go to Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Drop Shadow. Set the X offset to -5, the Y offset to 5, the blur radius to 15, opacity to 80, and do not allow resizing. You should have something like this:

There you go. Now what I gave you are extremely basic instructions on how to make a software box. Play around with it and figure out what you like best. You can add neat little designs to it such as stripes and curvatures and such like the orange bars on my Gimp box, which you can see in my last post.

Well, there you go.

iPod Dancer in GIMP

2008-12-04T11:13:00.004-08:00

You know those iPod commercials where the people are black and the earbuds are white and they are dancing and such? Well, I had this crazy idea, literally two seconds ago.

I decided, hey, why not make a tut for all to see about how to make the little dancers with white earbuds in Gimp? So I did.

1) Get a picture of someone dancing. It doesn't matter who. Anyone. I got mine from GettyImages:

2) Open your image in Gimp. If you want, you can clear out that logo if you got it from a stock website. Also do some housekeeping, such as making the background one color, cleaning up anything fuzzy, etc.
3) Create a new transparent layer. Name it "Black." Click the paths tool. Make sure in the toolbox, the paths tool is in Design Mode and polygonal is unchecked. Now, start outlining your dancer with the paths tool. When you get to the end, hold down CTRL and click on the beginning dot. It should look somewhat like mine:

3) Now click on the "Selection from Path" button. You should now have a selection around your dancer. Click on the Paintbucket Tool, and, with black as your foreground color, fill the selection. It should fill your dancer completely black. Now you can go around a clean up the edges a little if they're not smooth or some of the original picture is showing. It should look like mine:

So now it looks like we're getting somewhere. Now we'll make the background, so the earbuds will show up. You can delete the original image now.
4) Create a new white background layer. Drag it under your black layer. Pick a color for your background. I'm using a green one that I've seen in the commercials. Apply it to the white background layer.

Now we will add the earbuds...yay!
5) Select the paths tool. Zoom in on the ear and draw the shape of an earbud. Fill it with white.

6) Now, using the paths tool, draw an iPod in his hand. Here's mine (yes, I know my iPod is smaller than it should be):

If you want, you can draw fingers and thumbs to the hand to make it look like he is holding the iPod.

7) Use the paths tool again to draw the cord. Instead of clicking selection from path, this time you will click stroke path. Experiment with the boldness of the line.

And now for some final touches:

Now you have an iPod dancer. Have fun.

Convert Photoshop Layer Styles to Gimp Gradients

2008-12-04T11:13:00.003-08:00

Alright, so I was browsing the forums at Gimper.net and Gimper asked in a post to convert the rest of these Photoshop Layer styles to Gimp gradients...all 130 of them. So I said I would and I did. These are the original layer styles by dezinerfolio:

These are the 30 Gimper converted:

So now, here's a tutorial on how to convert gradients.

Here are the layer styles I downloaded, scroll down a bit to find the download link: http://www.dezinerfolio.com/2007/05/06/ultimate-web-20-layer-styles/

You will also need Photoshop (I used CS3 but it doesn't really matter what version you use..) and you will also need Gimp.

First, I will show you how to make the regular, two colored gradients, like this:

Open Photoshop. Make a new image. Any size will do. I used 300x300 pixels, but it doesn't really matter. Select the Custom Shape Tool. Now select the black rectangle shape and click and drag it to a reasonable size on your canvas. Now select one of your layer styles by going here: and pick one similar to the one we are working with. Your shape should take on the layer style you selected:

Now you can easily view your layer style. Now open Gimp. Don't start a new image. Instead, go to File -> Dialogs -> Gradients. Click on the new gradient button. You are represented with this screen:

Name the gradient whatever you like. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will name mine Gradient 1. Now go back to Photoshop. Select the eyedropper tool. With the eyedropper tool, select a color furthermost to the top of the image, circled in red, for the foreground. Then select a color furthermost to the bottom of the image, circled in blue, for the background. Try not to select part of the stroke on your gradient. It'll mess you up.

Click on the foreground color box. A Foreground Color Picker should pop up. Copy the 6 numbers (HTML notation) in the # box . Go back to Gimp. Right click on the bottom bar (section) and select Left Endpoints Color. Paste the HTML notation in the HTML notation box. Press Ok. The left color on your gradient should be your foreground color from Photoshop.

You should now have something like this (although your left color may not be the same):

Now for the right color. Go back to Photoshop and open up the Background Color Picker by clicking on the background color box. Copy the HTML notation once again. Go back into Gimp and right click on the bottom bar again. Then click on Right Endpoints Color. Paste the HTML notation into the HTML Notation box. Press Ok. You should now have something like this:

Now we're done with this type of gradient. Save it. The other two types that come with the layer style pack are glossy and flat. The flats consist of one color so we don't really need to go over those. I will now show you the glossy kind, like this:

Go back to Photoshop. Click on the Custom Shape Tool , and then select a new layer style here: and pick one similar to the one we are working with.

Now, these gradients are a bit different. Selecting the colors are different here. First, select a color near the top for our foreground color. Then, select one near the middle, which would be just above the black in my gradient.

Go back to the Gradients dialog in Gimp. Click the new gradient button. First thing we have to do is right click on the bottom bar then click on Replicate Segment..

In the Replicate Segment dialog, slide the slider to 2, and press Ok. Your gradient should now look like this:

Go back to Photoshop and click on the foreground color box. It should be the color of the top of your layer style. Copy the HTML Notation.
Now, back in Gimp in the Gradient Editor, left click on the left bar, between the two black triangles. The left bar should now be grey, with the right bar as white.

Now right click on the left bar. Then click on Left Endpoint's Color button. Paste the HTML notation in the HTML notation box. Press Ok. The very left color should now be like mine or similar:

Go back to Photoshop, and click on the background color box. Copy the HTML notation. Go back to Gimp, right click on the left bar again, and select the Right Endpoint's Color option. Paste the HTML notation. Click Ok. It should be similar to mine:

Now, left click on the right bar. The left bar should be white now and the right bar should now be grey. Go back to Photoshop. For your foreground color, select a color near the top of the middle, which would be in the black, not in the grey of my image, circled in red, and for the background, select a color near the bottom, circled in blue.

Now click on the foreground color box. Copy the HTML notation. Go back to Gimp. Right click on the right bar, and select the Left Endpoint's Color option. Paste the HTML. Click Ok. Go back to Photoshop, click on the background color box. Copy the HTML. Go back to Gimp. Right click on the right bar, and select the Right Endpoint's Color option. Paste the HTML. Click Ok. It should now be similar to mine:

Now we're done. Save it and there you go. I haven't figured out how to get that stroke of color on there that seems to border the gradient. It's probably something that'll have to be manually added to your image if you want it. That's the tutorial.

How To Userbar in Gimp

2008-12-04T11:13:00.001-08:00

Getting Ready
1) Before we make a userbar, we have to get together a few things first. What you need to make the userbar font is the Visitor TT1 BRK font from here. Install the font on your computer.

2) We also need to make the scanlines pattern. To do that open GIMP and make a new image with these settings:

3) Now zoom in 1600% so you can see it. If you can see it without zooming in, then you must have super mega ultra sight. Select the pencil tool and pick the Circle 01 brush, 100% opaque. Now draw an image exactly like mine. If it isn't, then you screwed up. It has to be like this or your userbar will turn out weird.

4) Save the image as scanlines.pat in Program Files -> Gimp-2.0 -> share -> gimp -> 2.0-> patterns

5) Exit GIMP. You have to do this so your pattern and Visitor TT1 BRK font are loaded into GIMP.

Making the Userbar

1) Create a new image with these settings.

2) Select a gradient that matches the colors of what you want your userbar to be about. Mine is about my blog so I chose a light blue (0090ff)and white (FFFFFF). Hold down the CTRL key and drag the gradient from left to right or right to left. It should be somewhat like this:

3) Create a new layer, and make it transparent. Name it "scanlines." Now we need to add the scanlines. Select the paintbucket tool and in the tool options pick pattern source as the fill type. These are the settings:

4) In the scanlines layer, apply the paintbucket tool. Decrease the layer's opacity to about 50%. It should look like this:

5)Now create another layer. Name it "logo." Add your picture to this layer and position it on the right. Mine came out like this: (My logo came out horrible...I'll fix it later..)

6) Now we'll add some text. Select the text tool and pick the Visitor TT1 BRK font. Font size needs to be 10 and the color needs to be white:

Click on the right side of your userbar and type in something. I put "SGlider12's Blog Reader." Position the text to the right side on the center. Make sure your layers look like mine.

9) Now we'll add the text outline. Select the text layer, right click it, select "Alpha to Selection." Now create a new transparent layer. Name it "outline". Go to Select -> Grow. Grow selection by 1px. Press Ok. Now select the paintbucket tool. Choose foreground color as fill type. Set the foreground color to black. Fill in the outline layer with it still selected. If you fill the whole layer with black, then you once again screwed up. Move the outline layer underneath the text layer. It should look like this:

10) Now we'll add the shiny part. Create a new transparent layer and name it "eclipse." Select the circle select tool and select the upper part of the userbar like this:

Fill the selection with white using the paintbucket tool. Now change the layer's opacity to about 50% and deselect it.

11) Last, we'll add the border. Create a new transparent layer and name it "border." Put the border layer on top of the other layers. Put black as your foreground color. Select -> All. Go to Edit -> Stroke Selection. Put a value of 1. Press Ok.

Final Result:

Now go show it off to the world.