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.

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Collage version 1:

Collage version 2:

And some extras, just for fun!

Therapee for Photographers

As you know if you've been following my blog, I'm a girl on a budget, which means that my general philosophy when it comes to photo editing software is cheaper=better, free=best.  Of course, it's not a hard and fast rule; obviously a free program that doesn't do what you need it to do is pretty much worthless.  That being said, there are lovely, smart people out on the interwebs who have designed freeware that, admittedly, isn't quite as flashy and straightforward as the Adobe equivalent software, but still does an excellent job of performing the same functions as the very expensive Adobe software.  GIMP is the obvious example, here--the freeware answer to Adobe Photoshop.  Turns out, though, that there's also a freeware equivalent of Lightroom (you may recall I've been using Lightroom on a free 30 day trial, and my last post outlines some of the basic functions of the program if you're interested).  The program is called Raw Therapee, and it's available for download here if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

My initial impression of the program is, overall, positive.  The developers of Raw Therapee have clearly gone out of their way to make the program similar to Lightroom in layout and appearance, and a lot of the controls work in a pretty intuitive way: much like Lightroom, there are sliding bars for most of the functions, and you can enter a numerical value or simply click and drag to make adjustments to your photos.  The program also appears to have all of my favorite Lightroom functions--highlight recovery, luminance recovery, the ability to alter the black point separate from adjusting contrast, etc.  On the downside, the program seems to be struggling to open some of my photos--not many, but a few appear to be compacted, with the gap between the compacted photo and the original size of the photo filled by vertical lines.  Disproportionately this is happening with photos that have been scanned, but it has happened with a few I shot digitally as well, and, in some cases, it can display the original scanned photo fine, but struggles with versions I have edited in GIMP.  I've provided an example so you can see what I'm talking about below.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but it is a definite strike against Raw Therapee; I haven't had any problems like this with Lightroom. 

As you can see, though, the interface is fairly similar to the interface in Lightroom, so the program is fairly user friendly.  I haven't tested this out yet, but it is also supposed to tie in well with GIMP, and, like Lightroom, it allows you to develop images shot in RAW format (if you don't know what RAW format is, just ignore that; if you do, I'm guessing you already know what I mean by develop RAW images).  The other big drawback that I've found so far is that instead of exporting your edited image to the folder of your choosing without ever altering the original, Raw Therapee requires that you save the file using a "save as" function, which increases the likelihood that you could inadvertently save over your original image.  Another thing to note (this isn't necessarily a con for me, but could be for some people) is that there aren't a lot of preset edits in Raw Therapee (i.e. there is a massive list of adjustments--black and white 1, black and white 2, old fashioned, etc. that you can make in Lightroom), so if you rely on preset edits, you may need to do some digging online to find plugins for presets in Raw Therapee.  On the whole, though, it has a wide range of handy tools--as far as I can tell, you can do everything in Raw Therapee that you can do in Lightroom, and some that Lightroom doesn't have as well (and as soon as I can figure out what these tools do, I'll be more specific about that...).  I haven't found it as easy to figure out as Lightroom, but I'm sure with some concentrated time with the manual, things will become more apparent.  That said, I decided to run a quick test to see if the programs can produce the same results: I edited the image below twice--once in Lightroom, and once in Raw Therapee.  I leave you to judge for yourself (keep in mind I've spent about 15 more days with Lightroom than with Raw Therapee, so at least some of the differences you see are, I'm sure, due to my lack of expertise in Raw Therapee).

Lightroom:

Raw Therapee:

Getting Plugged-In

My original plan was to have another installment of Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates devoted to batch (i.e. applying the same edit to multiple photos at once) watermarking and resizing in GIMP and Picassa.  However, while that's a simple task in Picassa, I've had quite a bit of difficulty with the process in GIMP (and this is where the cheating comes back to bite me--incidentally, if you haven't figured this out yet and you were wondering, you can adjust the opacity of your text for your watermark using the layers dock; if you have no idea what I'm talking about, more on this later).  It turns out that you need a plug-in to do batch watermarking in GIMP.  There are a lot of special functions like this you can perform in GIMP if you simply install the appropriate plug-in.

If you're not sure what on earth installing a plug-in in GIMP means, think of it like this: there are certain editing and creative tasks users want that GIMP cannot accommodate.  So, users who are far more computer savvy than myself go and write little mini-programs that tell GIMP how to do whatever it is they feel GIMP is missing.  Then, these kind individuals are generous enough to post all of their hard work on the GIMP registry, where novices like me can download the files to make GIMP accomplish the task.

The problem is 1) installing a plug-in for GIMP is not as simple as clicking one or two buttons and 2) you need a program called Python installed prior to installing GIMP in order to get some of these plug-ins to run.  I learned this the hard way, which involved uninstalling GIMP, hunting for a solid half an hour for the appropriate files, sifting through a bunch of UNIX gibberish I won't even pretend to understand and, finally, with the substantial assistance of my fabulous computer guru (yes, he pretty much did everything for me while I stood over his shoulder going "oooohhhhh!"), locating and installing the appropriate files.  Let's see if I can make the process a little less frustrating for you than it was for me.  Here are the steps we took for Windows 7.  Mac and UNIX users, you're on your own (though this is probably a breeze for UNIX users anyway):

1) Go here and click on the third item down in the list under "Downloads":

• Windows x86 MSI Installer (2.7) (sig) 

2)  Go here and click on

pygtk-all-in-one-2.24.1.win32-py2.7.msi  

3) Go here and download GIMP, and don't forget to install the user's manual if you want it--it doesn't come with the program automatically.  The files to pick here should be pretty obvious.

4) Run each file you downloaded in the order of the download.  So, first python, then the pyGTK package, then GIMP and the user's manual. 

 Given what a pain this is, I'm going to consider this post my good deed for the day.  Hopefully you'll find it helpful.