A Little Fun Before the Work Begins...

Alright, so one of my professed reasons for starting a blog was to push myself to learn more about digital editing.  A lot of the image editing I've done to date has been simple touch-ups in Picassa--I've picked my best photos and fiddled around a bit, but didn't really have the skills to take it any further.  I've picked up a few books on the subject, and I'm ready to take my digital editing to the next level, but I decided to fiddle around in Gimp a bit and just familiarize myself with some of the menus before picking up my books and getting serious.  I've had a bit of fun messing around with some of the functions in Gimp, and I've shared the before and after images below.  Just above the after images, I've provided the menu commands I used to produce the effect you see.  I'm not sure how many of these I would actually use regularly, but it's fun to see what the program is capable of.    

Before:

Filters-->Edge-Detect-->Neon

Before:

Filters-->Artistic-->Cubism

Before:

Filters-->Distorts-->Mosaic