Fun with Filters

As you probably already know if you've been following my blog, I've been invited to contribute a photo collage to a calendar for charity (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out my previous post). The theme of the calendar is what peace means to each artist, and everyone else is contributing either a painting or a drawing. In order to make my collage fit with the rest of the calendar stylistically, I decided to teach myself all about filters for this project. For those who are reading my blog to pick up a few tips, you may find the next few paragraphs to be handy. For those who just want to see some pictures, this entry is particularly full of them! Below, I've posted the original photo (some with tweaks such as slight overexposure to make to make the filters work better), followed by the version I edited using filters. I've also posted two versions of the collage--same photos, arranged in different ways. I would really love some feedback if you have a strong initial reaction in favor of one versus the other. Finally, there are a few photos that aren't related to the collage--I just edited them for fun!

So, now to the technical tips. GIMP didn't come with some of the filters I was interested in applying, so I had to search around on the GIMP registry for a bit before I found the scripts I was looking for. I found these to be particularly useful. You'll need to have Python properly installed for these extra scripts to work, though (if you're confused by that statement, check out this entry). Download the second file (_246c.zip) and follow the instructions in the enclosed read me file. I will say, the scripts folder was not exactly where he said it would be, so I had to dig around a bit. I promise, though, it's there! Just snoop around in the GIMP files until you find it. If you're already running GIMP, you'll need to restart it before the scripts show up.

Ok, so you have your script installed. Now what? If you have a photo you're interested in editing open, take a look in the Script-fu menu option--you should see a bunch of new options under Photo Effects. There are also a few hidden in the regular filters menu for some reason--for example, the Stamp option, which gives you the ability to make a photo in the style of the iconic Che Guevara image, is hidden in Filters-->Decor-->Photo Effects-->Artist. No idea why. At any rate, just start playing around with all of these filters--me describing them in painful detail will never be as good as you fiddling around until you figure out what each little slider button on each filter does. A few pointers before you begin, though:

1. Don't save over your original! Give your experiment a new file name. Hopefully this is an obvious tip, but it's worth repeating...

2. One filter is probably not enough. On some of the photos below, I applied 10+ filters before I arrived at a photo I was happy with. For example, pastel, unsharp mask, oil painting, unsharp mask.

3. Don't be afraid to fiddle with the colors and really crank up the saturation--obviously it depends on the look you are going for, but I found that some of the images still looked way too much like photos until I started applying more vibrant colors. I actually did some color adjustments in Lightroom and then moved back to GIMP between filters for a few of the photos. The photo of the street below is a good example of this.

4. As you may have guessed from tip #2, I like to apply unsharp mask a lot. Turn the threshold down and the radius up quite a bit and it can really help to define the subject of the photo if applying an artistic filter made it look like a big ugly blob. Doesn't always work, but give it a shot.

5. I occasionally needed to edit a photo for color/contrast/exposure before editing to get the effect to work in the desired manner. The filters will be particularly uninspiring on low contrast or dark images. Don't be afraid to slightly overexpose or underexpose an image so that it will pop when you apply a filter.

6. I often use the smudge tool to remove some detail. Likewise, you may want to clone out some of the details. The photo of the children on the grey background and the buildings on the pastel street below are two good examples of this. Sometimes too much detail gives it away as a photo--try ditching some detail.

Alright, enough talk! Time for some photos.

Before:

 

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Collage version 1:

Collage version 2:

And some extras, just for fun!

Delightfully Desaturated

In an effort to get the most out of my remaining days of my free trial with Adobe's Lightroom, I've started randomly experimenting with settings just to see what kinds of whacky things I can create.  Of course, most of what I accomplish involves making some previously fine photos really, really ugly.  Every once in awhile, though, I stumble across something that really works.  I present Exhibit A:


Original:

Experiment:

And now to share my secret: desaturation.  Ok, I may have given that one away a little with the title of this post.  There are other, much more complicated ways to accomplish this look once you've mastered the art of using selection tools, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover this handy little short cut.  So, the key is to pick a photo where the colors in the subject share no common elements with the items in the background--otherwise, you end up with a fully saturated subject, and a few random streaks of color in the background.  In the "Develop Room", scroll down the toolbar on the right until you hit the "HSL/Color/ B&W" section.  You can click on individual colors (displayed in boxes below the heading, above the sliding bars), then desaturate individual colors one-by-one by sliding the saturation bar all the way to the left.  Just don't desaturate the colors featured in your subject.  Voila!  Quick and painless, huh? 

I liked this particular technique so much that I went a little crazy with it.  As I said, it doesn't really work if the colors in your subject appear in the background, too--but it was fun playing with the saturation on a variety of photos and seeing some of the surprising successes.  I've shared two of my favorites below. 

Original:

Experiment:

Original:

Experiment:

Let There Be Light...for 30 Days

I know I've been going on non-stop about GIMP, due largely to the fact that it is 1) powerful and 2) free.  However, I've been persuaded to try Lightroom by Adobe on a free 30 day trial, and, I have to confess, I'm impressed.  Obviously there are a lot of things that can be done in GIMP--in fact, it may be that GIMP can do everything Lightroom can.  If so, I just haven't found a way of doing some specific things in GIMP yet.  That being said, I'm really enjoying Lightroom.  Granted, I haven't completed any tutorials, and I've only been playing around with the program for about two days.  Even so, here's my run-down, followed by some before and after examples so you can see what I'm talking about:

Pros:
1) The program is pretty intuitive and user-friendly.  As I said, I haven't done any tutorials yet, and I've been happily editing for two days.

2) The recovery feature is AWESOME if you have photos with high dynamic range.  In other words, there's a tool that allows you to tone down some of the highlights in your photo--so if your insanely blonde friend looks like her head is glowing while everyone else looks normal, you can recover some of the color and contrast in her hair so that she looks a bit less like an alien.

3) You can independently tune your blacks, so you're not stuck fiddling with contrast and washing out your highlights when all you really want is to make your blacks a bit blacker.

4) The heal tool certainly isn't perfect--GIMP is a better choice for cloning.  However, it's easy and quick, and does a great job on small spots and imperfections.  For touch-up jobs, you can spend seconds instead of hours correcting minor blemishes in your photos.

5) The luminescence tool allows you to ditch some of the graininess in photos shot in low lighting.  Crank it up too much and people begin to look like they've had too much plastic surgery.  On a low setting, though, you can make your photos look a little softer/smoother without losing clarity. 

6) There are lots of fun creative modes to play with to give your photo a unique look.

7) Lightroom won't overwrite your photos, so you don't have to worry about accidentally losing your originals.

8) Dodging and burning is a little different from the way it's handled in other programs, but it's quick and easy to learn, and you can do more than adjust exposure--you have options for brightness, clarity, sharpness, saturation, and contrast.  Nice, huh?


Cons:
1) Adobe programs aren't cheap.  In fact, I was ready to do a happy dance when I found Lightroom for $150 because on the Adobe site it's $300.  However, you can do a 30 day trial for free on the Adobe site (which I'm doing before I part with $150).

2) I'm not impressed with the Autotone function.  Lightroom is great for easily adjusting things by hand, but Autotone seems to like things to be really washed out and grainy.  I imported a few photos with Autotone on by mistake and I struggled to get them looking normal; I couldn't believe I had taken such bad portraits at a paid gig.  It was only when I reset the photo that I realized what had happened.  Among other adjustments, the Autotone feature cranked the brightness and fill light way too high, and turned the contrast way down, and the photos looked overexposed and unfortunate.

3) Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place, but it seems that all zooming is limited to preset values, so I spend a lot of time and effort fidgeting with 1:2 vs. 1:4 vs. 2:1 vs...you get the idea.  Zooming into a specific area by a specific percentage seems to be an impossibility.  If you know something I don't on this front, I'd love to hear that I'm wrong because the zooming is rather frustrating.

4) The program can watermark on export--this is a pro, except that it doesn't look like you can adjust the position or opacity of your watermark.  Again, I'm new to the program, so maybe I'm missing something, but having the watermark in the lower left corner of the photo means that it will be pretty easy to crop out.  Defeats the point of a watermark...



Alright, enough talk.  Time to show you what I'm talking about.  Below are a few before and afters.  The first set of photos was from a film shoot, and when I scanned the photo,  it was covered in dust, it looked grainy, and it just generally wasn't a very good representation of the original photo.  Enter Lightroom.  Obviously, it's still not perfect--there was some dust I will have to remove in GIMP, and I'd like to clean up the background a bit.  However, for the speed and ease of editing, I was pretty pleased with the difference Lightroom made.  Note: luminescence was particularly helpful for reducing the grain, and the heal tool was used to get rid of some of the dust and the big scratch on her arm from the original photograph. 

Before:

After:

Before:

After: