f/4.0; 1/125sec; 105mm; ISO 800

In late 2009, I wrote a post about adding a vignette to a photo. I was never really happy with that post, and it has bothered me now for a year and half that I never wrote about a better option. Then, almost exactly a year later, I posted about the FIL Script (side note: I totally forgot about that script! I really liked it, too. I should use it more often), and I made a quick reference to the fact that if you wanted to use some of the grain options, you would have to download the G’MIC plug-in.

What I did not mention in that entry was that, after downloading that plug-in, I finally came full circle and was able to provide a way of creating vignettes that I’m much happier with. The concepts are the same as from my first post – either create a new layer with a black area set to overlay, or create a duplicate layer with a layer mask and make that layer darker somehow (don’t worry, if you’re confused, I’ll detail the concepts below).

The key that G’MIC provides is the ability to produce a radial gradient starting at the center of your photo without you having to eyeball. Now this seems to me that this is something that gimp really should provide for you out of the box, and I looked all over for it, and maybe I’m missing something obviously but I could never find it! Even if they do, and I am blind for missing it, there’s still a reason I’d use G’MIC, but I’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s see this in action…

First, if you don’t already have it, you’ll need to install the G’MIC plugin. You can download it from here. I’m not sure how it works for Linux/Mac, but for Windows, you’re downloading an exe and you can just double-click to install it.

Next, of course, you need to open a photo in Gimp to edit it. Here’s the photo I’m using (for the record, this isn’t straight out of the camera, I did adjust levels):

Taken on a hike in a Metro Park near my house.

Option One: Vignette set to overlay

Remember, I said there were two ways to create a vignette effect. This is the one I do more often, but if I’m being completely honest, it’s just because I find it easier – not only to do, but to adjust the settings if I’m not completely happy with it.

So, to start, we bring up G’MIC, which is under the Filters menu. I’m going to pause here for a second and ask – how do you think that is pronounced? I’ve been pronoucing it as “Gee Mick”, but it sudddenly occured to me that, with the apostophe, they might intend for it to be pronounced more like “g’day, mate” is. Hmmm.

Anyway, sorry for that tangent. We bring up G’MIC and it looks like this:

Click to see full-size

G’MIC, like FX-Foundry is a suite of scripts, but instead of listing them all as individual scripts in the menus, you open G’MIC and select which script(s) you want to run from there. We want the Radial Gradient script, which is found under Colors:

Notice that you can select a starting color, ending color, fade start and end, and how centered you want the gradient. This is much nicer – in my opinion – than trying to center that gradient yourself!

In our first method for vignettes, we want a transparent-to-black gradient, so we change our starting color to transparent by click on the black box and then dropping the opacity to 0:

Then switch the Ending color to black (the “color name” for black is #000000, or you can just make sure the Hue, Saturation and Value boxes are all zeros).

Next, I prefer to have my fade Start at around 25 or 26 (this means more of the center of the gradient will be purely transparent), and my Fade end to be right at 100. So, my final settings look like this:

Now, while it’s not necessary, I suggest you save these settings as a favorite. That way, the next time you open up G’MIC you don’t have to select the colors and Fade start point again. To do this, all you have to do is click the blue Plus sign below the list of filters:

It will now show up as a Filter under Faves at the top of the list of Filters. If you want to, you can double click on it to rename it (you don’t have to do this, but I have mine named “Vignette (overlay)”):

Ok, before you hit OK there is one very important step – you need to set your Output Mode to “New Layer(s)”. You do this in the lower left of the dialog box:

Note: your favorite that you created won’t remember this, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll forget this step the first time you use G’MIC in a day of editing. Then you’ll grumble and have to undo the script and come back in here and run it again. As soon as you set this, though, it WILL remember the setting until you close the Gimp.

Ok, NOW you can hit ok! And now my image looks like this:

Not quite there yet...

And I have these layers:

Now, I select my G’MIC layer and set the Mode to Overlay. And now my image looks like this:

Now that looks good!

I happen to like this vignette just as it is, but that’s pretty rare for me. Usually I want to either decrease or increase the effect. To decrease the effect, just adjust the Opacity of the G’MIC layer down. To increase the effect, create a duplicate layer of the G’MIC layer and then adjust that one’s opacity until you’re happy with it. For instance, this is my photo with two G’MIC layers, with the second set to about 50% opacity:

Perhaps a bit too much for my taste, but still looking good.

Like I said, I prefer this particular image with just the one layer, but no two images are alike, of course!

Option two: Layer with a Mask

The idea with this method is that we’re going to create a duplicate layer of our photo with a layer mask on it, and then make that photo darker. I covered Layer Masks, and what exactly they do in the smoothing skin tutorial, but a quick recap: if you had a layer mask to a layer, you can then “paint” on that mask – if a layer mask is completely white, then you will see all of that layer. If a layer mask has some black on it, the layer becomes transparent there, so you see the layer below.

What we want to do is make the center of our layer mask black, so we see the (original photo) layer below in the middle, and for the outside of the photo we want our layer mask to be white so we can to see our duplicate layer, which we will make darker. So the outside is darker than the center!

…sometimes I feel I’m really not good at explaining things… seeing in it action should help!

First step is to create a duplicate layer of our photo (Layer –> Duplicate Layer), then right click on your new layer and select “Add Layer Mask”. It doesn’t matter what settings you use to initialize the layer mask, I usually stick with the default white.

Now open up G’MIC and go to the Radial Gradiant again (under Colors). This time keep black for the starting color and white for the ending color, and adjust the Fade start again. If you want, you can save this to your Faves as well (I have mine called “Vignette (Mask)”). Make sure your Output Mode is still New Layer(s) and then hit OK.

Now my photo looks like this. Which just isn’t right!

what I need to do is get this gradient into that layer mask I created. So I select the entire image and copy it. Then I paste it. This will make it show up as a floating layer:

Click on the layer mask in your layer dialog:

Then right click on your floating layer and select “Achor Layer”. Now you’ll have that gradient in your layer mask:

Now you can either delete or remove the visibility of the G’MIC layer. I deleted mine. You’ll notice after doing this that your image still looks exactly the same. Our layer mask is make the original photo show through in the center and our duplicate layer show on the outside, but the two layers are still exactly the same, so it doesn’t look any different.

The magic happens when we adjust the levels on our duplicate layer. So, make sure the duplicate layer (and now the mask) is selected and then go to Colors –> Levels. Now more the left-most slider under Input Levels over to the right some. I have mine set to this:

Then hit OK. Now my photo looks like this:

The final result!

As a reminder, here is the original:

Taken on a hike in a Metro Park near my house.

And here is the photo with the first method:

Using the first method.

Honestly, I the two methods result in a image that looks pretty much the same, and I still think the first one requires less work. That whole pasting into a layer mask thing on the second method can be annoying.

But both work, and the Radial Gradient script in G’MIC make both methods easier. Especially because you can save your settings as a favorite (which, btw, was the one reason I was mentioning above that I would still use G’MIC even if the Gimp could create those gradients out of the box without manually selecting your start and end point).

Honestly, I haven’t explored G’MIC much outside the radial gradient and – as you might have seen from one of my screenshots – the Old Movie Strips. My first impression that I mentioned back in December still holds true – I think it’s probably a much more useful tool for editing graphics instead of photos. My methods of editing usually result in my photo still looking like a photo, which is what I prefer. But if you want to play with reflections and making your photo look like a cube, and other crazy effects, G’MIC definitely offers a lot of different scripts with very customizable options to do these things, so check it out.

What do you think about the vignettes though? Do you think this was easier? I hope so, because that original vignette entry is one that has bothered me for quite some time!

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FIL Script ran with Lomo: Golden autumn, no grain, with vignette

If you’re looking for a way to produce all kinds of old film photography looks in Gimp, then FIL (Film Imitation Lab) is the set of scripts for you.

There are a lot of things I love about these scripts (and one thing I don’t like, but I’ll get to that later), and the first is that you can actually download the documentation, too! So that makes my job here easily, because I feel I don’t need to walk through each setting and what they do, because it’s all described in the documentation!

You can download both the script and the documentation from here. If you can’t remember how to install Gimp scripts, you can check this out for some instructions.

left - unedited. right - color process: Dram normal, grain: dram grain normal, no vignette

Using FIL

After installing the script, it’s found under Filters –> RSS –> FIL (I haven’t yet figured out why RSS…), and when you bring it up, your options are as follows:

All of the options are clearly explained in the documentation, but I’ll go through them quickly:

• Colorcorrection stage/Color process: if you check the checkbox, it will use whatever you select in the dropdown to determine the look of your photo – options include monochrome, lomo, duotone, vintage, photochrom and more. Note that if you select one of the “user colors” options, it’s going to use the colors that you have set as your foreground and background colors.
• Grain state/grain process: if you check the checkbox, it will add whatever grain type you select from the dropdown to the photo. Most give off typical grain, however, there’s also the “Sulfide: scratches” option that gives you what appears to be scratches down the photo.
• Enable Vignette/vignette sliders: If you check the checkbox it will add a vignette to your photo with the options as selected by the sliders below
• Border blur: This blurs the image just a little bit, I believe the idea is to similate older lenses that we’re quite as sharp as the ones we have on our cameras today.
• Exposure correction: Makes your image lighter or darker. If you’re shooting in RAW, I suggest you ignore this option and do any exposure correction in your RAW editing program before importing into Gimp.
• Write options in layer’s name: does exactly what it says – it changes the layers name to whatever options you selected when running the script. It’s helpful for me, because I can run the script multiple times on one photo without having to label the layers myself and still be able to document which one I liked the best!

top - unedited. bottom - color: SOV Normal, no grain, with vignette

My Overall Opinion

I love all the color correction options, and it’s a great script for quickly converting an image into something completely different and beautiful. However, I really like having more control over the results of my photos, and the fact that it just merges all the changes into ONE layer means I don’t have control after the fact to change the intensity of any particular option. For instance, I like a little bit of grain added to my photos sometimes, but my preference is for just a little bit, and I don’t have the option to choose the opacity of the grain layer. So if I run the script with the grain option selected, it’s either all or none.

That being said, there is a work-around. If you want some grain, but want to lessen the effect of it, run the same script twice – once with grain, and once without. Put the layer with the grain on top of the layer without and then decrease the opacity.

I have to admit, though, it still just annoys me that I don’t have the option to play with the layers once it’s all done running.

That being said, overall, I think it’s a great script because there’s so much you can do with one script ANd because it’s simple and quick if you want an old-film look without having to know how to do all the steps yourself.

A few more things to note. First of all, it actually uses some of the scripts we’ve already talked about – for instance, when selecting photochrom, it’s using this photochrom script. You don’t have to have it installed, though, it just borrows the code from them. However, i fyou want to use the G’MIC grain options, you must install the G’MIC plug-in, which I’ve never talked about here before, because I find most of the options to be less photograph-related and more graphic-design related. To intsall it, download it from here then double-click to go through the installation process, it’s not just an .scm file like the scripts we download. If you don’t install it and yout ry to use one of hte G’MIC grain options, the FIL script will just pop up a warning with the link to download and install it.

Some More Examples

I’ve scattered some examples throughout this entry, but here’s another few:

left - unedited. right - color: Lomo soft yellow, grain: sulfide grunge (ran once with grain, once without, decreased opacity of top layer)

top - unedited. bottom - color: duotone soft, no grain, with vignette

left - unedited. right - color: photochrom retro, grain: sulfide scratches, with vignette

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A photo edited with the filter discussed below. f/4.0; 1/320sec; 105mm; ISO 200

I’ve talked about using solid color layers to warm or cool your photos, but there’s also a Gimp script out there if you’re not interested in going the Do-It-Yourself route. Plus it offers a few more options than just simple solid-color layers do. You can find the script here. Once again, if you need to know how to install Gimp Scripts, go on back to this entry.

Once you install this warming and cooling filter, you’ll find it under Colors –> Warming or Cooling Filter.

Let’s take a look at the options for this Script:

The Tone drop-down has 7 options:

• Cooling – Wratten 80
• Cooling – Wratten 82
• Warming – Wratten 81
• Warming – Wratten 85
• Roy’s Warm
• Brauer’s Warm
• Pasty Cadaveric Look

The Overlay Fill Method only applies to the Wratten Filters, so I’ll talk about it when I go over those. The Opacity slider, I’m sure you’re all aware of what I’ll say about that one: there’s no need to mess with it because it’s easily changed after-the-fact.

And finally, the Flatten Image checkbox will – surprisingly enough – flatten your image after running the script. Flattening an image means that it will basically remove all the layers you were working with and instead give you one layer of what was visible. So any new layers created while running this script and any layers you already had in your image will no longer be there for you to play with. I never check this box on any script I run, because as soon as you do that, the only way you can manipulate or undo any part of the filter is to do an Edit –> Undo and remove the entire filter itself.

The Wratten Filters

The basics of these filters really build off of what my previous entry was talking about – using solid colored layers to warm or cool your photos. If we don’t mess with the Overly Fill Method dropdown and just run each of the four Wratten filters, you’ll get four different solid color layers, set to Overlay and set at 25% Opacity:

Nothing special is happening, nothing changed to my Background layer, running the filter just gives you a solid color layer set to overlay. Obviously this is something that’s done easy enough without using a script, but sometimes it’s just nice to click a button and have it do it for you instead of creating your layer and picking your fill color and setting the blend mode (what? I’m lazy sometimes. I’ll admit it.). At 25% opacity, the change was pretty subtle, so to make sure you could really see the difference in the photos, I bumped it up to 50%. Here’s what those lovely colored layers do to an image of a flower (top half is the original photo, bottom half is with the Wratten Filter):

Cooling - Wratten 80

Cooling - Wratten 82

Warming - Wratten 81

Warming - Wratten 85

Now that we know what all the colors are and how much they warm or cool a photo, let’s look at the next drop down for the Fill Method. If you go back to the page in the Gimp plugin registry, you’ll see that it explains that selecting the Fill Red Channel, it will select only the red channel of your image and apply the color to that – suggesting that this is good for warming or cooling skin tone without effecting the entire image.

So, let’s start with this (unedited) photo of my niece:

Unedited

If I run Warming – Wratten 81 with the Fill Red Channel option selected, I get a new layer created that looks like this (note, the script doesn’t actually look like this when it runs, because this layer is set to Overlay and 25% opacity. But I switched it to normal and 100% opacity in order to show you what the layer itself looked like):

100% Opacity, Normal blend mode

Notice that her purple shirt and the dark parts of the green grass are almost all black, so they’re not going to get as warmed up as they would if I was running the script with Fill Entire Layer selected. I ran the script twice – once with Fill Red Channel and once with Fill Entire Layer (and kept them both at overlay – I think I might have bumped the opacity up to 50%, too, but I didn’t seem to write that down. Oops.). Here they are, side-by-side for a comparison:

Fill Entire on the left and Fill Red on the right

You can really tell the difference by looking at the trees in the background that are getting quite yellow-y in the Fill Entire Layer version of the image. It’s a very helpful tool. The only thing I don’t really like is that, because the non-colored part of the Fill Red Channel layer is so dark, and the layer is set to overlay, it makes parts of the photo – like the shadows, her hair, and her shirt – quite dark.

Roy’s Warm

If you go back to the registry page for the filter, you’ll see that it says the Roy’s Warm option uses teh color balance to adjust the magenta and yellow hues in order to warm up the image. From my limited experience, I can tell you a few things about this option:

• You don’t have to bother with the Fill Mode dropdown (since that only applies for the Wratten options anyway)
• The Opacity slider makes no difference even if you wanted to use it, because it doesn’t create a second layer…
• …which is why I suggest creating a duplicate layer before using this option, if only to make it easier to compare before and after by just making the second layer visible and invisible
• It made such a little difference on some of my photos that it wasn’t even noticable. For instance, on the flower photo I was using in the Wratten examples, you could barely tell anything changed, even when switching the visibility on the layer

It did, however, make a slight difference on this photo of a dandelion next to a river. Original, unedited photo is on the left, Roy’s Warm is on the right:

Roy's Warm

Brauer’s Warm

Once again, we can look at what it says on the registry page to know that a duplicate layer is already going to be created for us, and the hue of this layer is going to be adjusted.

The opacity slider does make a difference on this one (though I still say no reason to bother messing with it until after you run the script so you can adjust it while actually looking at the photo). What you’re going to get is a rather sepia-looking version of your photo with the blend mode set to Normal. For instance, if you run it on the original flower photo and set the opacity to 100%, this is what you get:

100% Opacity

If you drop the opacity down to the default of 25%, you get this (unedited on top, Brauer on the bottom):

Brauer's Warm

I had a lot of fun playing with this one, too, and really liked switching the blend mode to Overlay and bumping the opacity back up to 100% (once again, unedited on top):

Blend mode set to overlay at 100%

It’s not quite as much of a “warming” effect, per se, but it does look kinda cool, in my opinion.

Pasty Cadaveric Look

As the name suggests, this is supposed to “cool” the skin tones and give a person a pasty cadaver-like look. I ran this on the photo of my niece, and it definitely did what it said it would do, but I can’t say I actually like it (sorry, I didn’t split this one into unedited and edited, I apologize):

Pasty

But, then I tried it on the flower picture, just to see how it looked on a non-person, and ooooh, I liked it! (As usual, unedited on top):

Pasty flower

Conclusion

I’m really loving this script – which in a way seems surprising because it’s all things that are relatively easy to do without a script, but it’s just kinda nice to have a script do it all for you, and have a bunch of warming and cooling options all tucked away in one place, so if you KNOW you want to warm up your photo, you can just try them all and see what looks best in a matter of a few minutes. Which reminds me of something else I really liked about this script – it ran really fast. I realize that’s directly related to the fact that it’s doing relatively simple things. But still, it’s definitely nice.

As a final thought, I did want to mention that, if you’re shooting in RAW, you also have the option of changing the white balance of your photo in order to warm or cool the image. I talk about using the Temperature slider – among other things – in UFRaw in this post.

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A photo edited with this script.

I’ve been really excited to show you guys this script for a while, but writing this entry kept getting pushed back for various reasons (some of which I mentioned in my quick update last week). But, I’m finally getting around to it, and I hope you think it’s worth the wait. It’s all about the National Geographic Script for Gimp. I first noticed this script a while ago and added it to the queue of ones to post about, but when misskeito and DM|ZE both commented to let me know how much they liked it, I knew I just had to do this one next. If you don’t already use this script, I’m pretty sure you’ll soon discover why it’s such a favorite.

Before I get started, here’s my original, unedited photo that I’m going to play with:

f/1.8; 1/1600 sec; 50mm; ISO 800

It’s a self-portrait I took while on one of my photowalks last year. Some of you might recognize this photo, actually, because the black and white version of it is my DISQUS icon, so it’s what you see when I reply to your comments.

Running the Script

If you need a reminder on how to install scripts for Gimp, be sure to check out this entry.

Once you have the script installed, you’ll find it under Filters –> Generic –> National Geographic. By the way, this is another script that takes a really long time to run on large files (or maybe it’s just that my computer is kinda old… hmm…)

Here’s all the default settings:

And here’s what the photo looks like with the default settings:

Default Settings

Here’s all the layers it creates:

And here’s what all the settings for the script do:

• Shadow Recovery Opacity: I think you can guess this one. The Layer labeled Shadow Recovery? This is the opacity of it. I wouldn’t ever change this setting because it’s really easy to change after the fact. If you mess with the opacity slider after-the-fact, you won’t be surprised by what it does, either – the higher the percentage, the brighter the shadows are – so that green behind me? If I had this layer set to 0 Opacity, that green would be much darker
• Sharpness: The values here range from 0-2.0, and the higher the value the more sharpening will be done on the photo. This is one that’s harder to adjust after-the-fact, so if you don’t like the defaults, the best thing to do is run it again. The difference was most noticeable in my eye – on the left is with the default settings (of 0.5), and on the right it’s set to 1.5:
 

Default vs. More Sharp

• Screen Layer Opacity: This is another obvious one. This controls the Opacity of the layer named “Screen”. Once again, don’t bother messing with this in the dialog box, just play with it after-the-fact. Remember, screen layers tend to wash out a photo, so you see how my face looks kinda washed out? If you up this to 100% Opacity it will be really washed out, and if you lower it to zero, it won’t be washed out at all
• Overlay Layer Opacity: Another obvious one! It will set the opacity for both layers Overlay and Overlay2. These Overlay layers make the dark parkts of the photo even darker, so if you up the opacity of these layers my eyes, glasses frame, and the dark parts of my hair got even darker.
• Local Contrast: The values here, once again, range from 0-2.0 – but these have a much more drastic final effect on the photo than the sharpness value did. If you scroll back up to the layers that get created, do you see the one called “Local Contrast”? See how it’s a subtle mostly-gray-toned version of the photo? I realize it’s hard to see exactly what it looks like from the thumbnail, but you get the idea. Well, if you up the Local Contrast value, that gray-toned layer is much less subtle. And that layer is set to Grain Merge at 100% opacity. When I upped the value of that layer to 1.8, this is what my final photo looked like (which is, in my opinion, a bit scary):


extra contrast - a bit much?

• Layer Mask for the Screen Layer: I’m sure you’re really surprised to hear that this creates a layer mask on the layer named “Screen”. You might as well check this because you can always delete or disable the layer mask if you don’t like it. However, the layer mask is just another way to make the washed out look not quite so washed out, and I liked this particular photo much better with the layer mask disabled. So, if you decide to keep this box checked, just to be sure to toggle the layer mask on and off after you run the script so you can really see which you like better.

Other Examples

I know this script is intended for portraits – and I love it for that – but I thought I’d try it on some other photos, too, just to see.

Unedited on top, National Geographic script on bottom

National Geographic script on top, unedited on bottom

I actually really liked the way it worked on the kitty photo (that cat, btw, is not one of mine, but ooooh, my heart just melts looking at that photo!).

One more person-photo just for kicks:

National Geographic script on left, unedited on right

Note: in all of the above photos, I checked the box for the Screen layer mask, but I disabled it in the first two photos. For the photo of John, I kept it enabled.

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Second, I’m going to go through the March Mono photos in the Monthly Themes group on flickr sometime this week, so if you haven’t yet uploaded all your black & white photos from March yet, do it now! As a reminder, April’s theme is People.

Ok, now for the real purpose of this entry. I found a script recently for Gimp that sounded (and looked) pretty interesting called the Movie 300 script – intending to make your photos have the same tones of the movie “300″. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, and I honestly don’t remember it having any sort of specific color quality, but the example photo looked neat, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Here’s my example photo un-edited. The man who randomly makes soft pretzels from scratch and bakes me cookies when I mow the grass:

f/1.8; 1/40s; 50mm; ISO 800

First of all, if you don’t remember how to install Scripts for gimp, check out this entry.

Running the Script

Once you have the script installed, you’ll find it under Filters –> Artistic –> Movie 300. Here are the default settings:

Note: this script does a LOT behind the scenes, so depending on the size of your image, it may take a long time to run.

Here’s what my photo looks like with the default settings:

With all the default settings

And here’s all the layers it creates:

Now, here’s what all the settings are for the script do:

• Grain Merge: The color of the Sepia layer. No need to mess with this in the dialog box, as you can easily change this after the fact.
• Multiply: The color of the Yellow Multiply layer. No need to mess with this in the dialog box, as you can easily change this after the fact.
• Desaturation: Bad label, in my opinion. This is how saturated your base layer will be (the one labeled “Desturated”. If you pick a negative number (which is the default) it will be desaturated to some degree (selecting -100 will be completely desaturated). A positive number will be more saturated than your original photo. I tried this at -100 (completely desaturated), and it made the photo look more sepia than by using the default settings. You can change this after the fact by using the Hue/Saturation sliders, but if you have an idea of what you want, it’s probably best to adjust this in the dialog box.
• Overlay Opacity: – The Opacity of Overlay 1 and Overlay 2 layers (btw, these are identical layers). No need to mess with this in the dialog box, as you can easily change this after the fact.
• Overlay Gamma: – See how those overlay layers are black and white? The higher the gamma value, the brighter (or whiter) those layers are. The difference is pretty subtle on the final image – making it slightly brighter with a higher value. You can probably achieve the same effect using levels or curves on those Overlay levels. That, combined with the fact that it’s only a subtle difference makes me say that you don’t need to mess with this in the dialog box.
• Multiply Opacity: See the layer called Multiply? This controls its opacity. No need to mess with this in the dialog box, as you can easily change this after the fact.
• Red Tint Opacity: See the layer called Red? This controls its opacity. No need to mess with this in the dialog box, as you can easily change this layer after the fact.
• Grain Strength: See how grainy my photo is? If I wanted it less grainy I would use a lower number. You can also change the opacity of the grain layer after the fact, but I think it looks better if you do adjust this value in the dialog box itself.
• Edge Amplification: Creates the Edge Amp layer that you see, which just makes any edges in the photo more pronounced. For instance, can you see the darker area around the outside and neckline of John’s shirt? Without the Edge Amp layer, those aren’t there. Might as well leave it checked because you can always make that layer invisible if you don’t like it.
• Extra Darkening: This adds a second Multiply layer (with a layer mask on it) that makes the photo extra dark. Might as well leave it checked because you can always make that layer invisible if you don’t like it.

Tweaking things

Because I can never leave well enough alone, I messed around with this filter until I got a photo I really liked out of it. Here’s my final photo:

Just a couple tweaks

And here’s what I did:

• Used the default settings, except lowering the amount of grain.
• Got rid of the Edge Amp layer
• Decreased the opacity of the Red layer (to 60)
• Decreased the opacity of the Sepia layer (to 17)
• Decreased the opacity of both Overlay layers (to 38)

Other Examples

For some reason, this script just screams “portrait” to me, but for fun, I tried it on some other photos too:

On the right (and for some reason a small strip on the left) is the script run with less grain, no edge amp, and with the extra darkening

On the top you can see the effect with all the default settings but less grain and with the extra darkening

Overall Opinion

It’s something different and fun, but I’m not sure I’ll use this one very often. What do you think?

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Just one example of this script in action

I used to review Gimp scripts on this site, and it feels like it’s been a while since I did that. I’m changing the title of these entries now to Gimp Script Showcase, because I’m really not reviewing the scripts, I’m just showing off all the possibilities of them! So, I thought I’d let you know about the latest one I downloaded, a Photochrom script.

If you need a reminder about how to install gimp scripts, check out this entry.

So. What is photochrom? Basically, it was a method used back in the late 1800s/early 1900s to transform black and white negatives to color lithographs – so really, the goal is to make your photo look like a very vintage photo.

Let’s see what it does, shall we?

First off, here’s the original image I’m working with:

f/4.0; 1/2000 sec; 105mm; ISO 200

The Default Settings

After you install the script, the photochrom filter is found under Filters –> Artistic –> Photochrom. Here’s all the default settings:

I ran the script with all the defaults and it created a bunch of layers. See?

It’s easy to see from the top two layers where the Screen & Grain Merge and Multiply colors are being used. Because they’re really easy to change after-the-fact (by using the bucket tool on those layers to turn them any color you want to), I don’t see any reason to ever change those in the script options. You can also see two layers called Contrast1 and Contrast2 and one called BW Merge. Based on the default options, I give you ONE GUESS as to what the opacity of those layers are (it’s 60, in case you don’t feel like scrolling up to see what it was set to). Because the opacity of layers is also really easy to change after-the-fact, I suggest you don’t ever mess with those settings either.

The next two sliders (Gradient Begin Offset and Gradient End Offset) control how much of the Gradient in three layer masks will be black and how much will be white. The higher the Begin number – the more white. The higher the End number – more black. Remember, anything in that layer mask that’s black will turn transparent and you’ll see the layer below, and anything that’s white, you’ll see the effect of that layer, so keeping the values as they are mean that the effect of those three layers are noticed more on the bottom of the photo than the top. With most of the photos that I tried this on, I actually liked that – I’m assuming it’s because they all had a sky at the top of the photo, and the brightness of the sky really didn’t need whatever those three layers were doing. Regardless, you can change that layer mask all you want after-the-fact, and I found that easier to do than to play guess-and-check with numbers, anyway, so I suggest you don’t ever stray from the defaults in those sliders, either.

See the Layer that’s called Dodge? The B/W Dodging checkbox, when checked, turns that layer from color into black and white. First of all, that’s really easy to do yourself after-the-fact. Second, I noticed that – at least with the photos I was testing with – it only made a very subtle difference. So I recommend not messing with that checkbox, either.

So, that leaves only one checkbox in the settings left to discuss (Retro). I’ll get back to those in a minute. First, let’s see the goose photo with the default settings:

With the default settings

Aside from all the obvious tone changes, do you also notice how everything seems a bit more blown out and less detail? Look at the ice on the lake in particular. Because there’s a layer called Dodge, I assumed it was coming from there so I made that layer invisible and I ended up with this:

No more dodge

Then I decided it was just a bit too orange for me, so remember that Grain Merge layer that had an opacity of 60%, I dropped it down to 35% and ended up with this:

(subtle difference, I know, but it IS different, I promise)

So, for this photo, with the default settings, those are the changes I liked most – removing the Dodge layer and decreasing the opacity of the Grain Merge layer. Obviously, every photo is going to be different and I won’t make those changes every time – I suggest if you try this yourself, that you play around removing and adding back in each layer to really see what effect each layer has on the photo as a whole.

But for now, let’s run the script again with the Retro checkbox checked.

Retro

This is taking the original image and running the photochrom script on it where the only thing I changed on the pop-up screen was to select the “Retro” checkbox. I found the layers it created to be interesting:

It created all the same layers as before, and then made the top three invisible and created three more instead. What this tells me is that I can always keep the Retro option checked and just toggle those three layers on and off in order to see the differences between Retro and Default. Good to know!

Let’s take a look at my Retro goose:

With the Retro checkbox checked

I still thought it was a bit to Dodge-y, but this time when I removed the Dodge layer all-together, I didn’t like it as much (I can’t really explain my reasoning on this one, these things just happen), so instead I just cut the opacity of that layer from 50% down to 25% and now I have this Retro Goose:

This goose is less dodgy. Does that mean I can trust him more?

For the record, if you try this yourself, I also enjoyed playing with the opacity of the Gradient Overlay layer, so I suggest you move that slider back and forth some to really see what that does.

More Examples

Here’s a few more of my photos I tried this script on, what I changed on them (if anything), and how they turned out:

Before

After - with Retro; Gradient Overlay set to 60% opacity

Before

After - No Retro; Edited the gradient in the Grain Merge layer mask to have more white and less black

Before

After - Retro; Removed Gradient Overlay layer

If you try this yourself, leave a comment with a link to your photo so we can all see more examples!

(on a side note, I referred to the goose in the photos as a “him” and I know have some readers who actually know how to tell the difference in these things, so if said goose is actually a “her”, I apologize)

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This photo doesn't have anything to do with this entry, it's just what I was editing with taking screenshots. f/4.0; 1/640sec; 70mm; ISO 200

I love Gimp – I think you might have all realized that by now. But there’s one thing Gimp can’t do all on its own. And that’s editing RAW files. The good news is, though, that there are other options. The first option is that your camera probably came with some software that allows you to manipulate RAW files. I’m guessing mine did, because I know it came with software, but I’ve never installed it. That’s because your second option is to use some sort of free software.

There is, of course, a third option, and that is to pay for software, and that opens up a lot more doors – and I’m assuming gives you better products, too – but part of the idea behind this website was to show you cheap/free ways to develop your photography habit (get it? Develop? I crack myself up).

So, the two free programs I hear about most often are RawTherapee and UFRaw. I had plans to use both of these products and give you a comparison and tell you why I liked one of them more than the other, but to be honest, I still haven’t tried RawTherapee, and I find myself wanted to discuss the adjustments I make to my Raw files, so I’m going to forge ahead and just tell you how I use UFRaw. I’m guessing that the options I use in UFRaw are also available in RawTherapee, so if you’d like to try that, feel free! But for the sake of this entry, I’m only going to talk about UFRaw.

Download and Install

Before you even download UFRaw, please check the list of supported cameras to make sure it can support your RAW files (notice that being the list of “Cameras supporting DNG” there’s a long list of “Other supported cameras”).

Once you’ve determined you can use UFRaw, you’re going to have to download and install it, obviously. You can download it from this page, and you’ll see it’s available for about 20 different distributions of Linux, as well as Mac (note: if you’re already using the GIMP on OS X application bundle, the gimp plug-in is already bundled in with that, apparently), and Windows.

It’s been a while since I installed UFRaw, but if I recall, the installation was really straight-forward and simple.

If you use Windows:

I’m just going to make a special note here – if, like me, you use Windows (not saying I’m a fan of windows, just being honest here.), you’ll notice that there’s two options for installing it. The first option is the “MS-Windows for dummies”. The second option is “MS-Windows for geeks”. This is the first part of the instructions under MS-Windows for geeks:

I build UFRaw using a cross-compiler in Linux. It is also be possible to build UFRaw in the Cygwin environment, which imitates the Unix environment on MS-Windows. After setting up the environment and installing all the required packages the installation procedure is the same as for Unix. If you want to compile UFRaw in another environment or with a different compiler then you are on your own.

If that does not make any sense to you, just do the “for dummies” one. I won’t hold it against you – because that’s what I used, too!

Opening a RAW file:

There’s a couple different ways to open your Raw files in UFRaw. You can open UFRaw itself and you’ll be presented with a dialog box that allows you to select a Raw file:

Or you can right click on your photo and select Open With –> UFRaw:

Finally, you can just open your RAW files directly into Gimp – so however you typically open them there (whether it’s dragging them into Gimp or doing a File–>Open, or whatever you do) and it will automatically pop open UFRaw.

Making Adjustments

So, here’s what UFRaw looks like when you first open a RAW file with it:

Click to make bigger

As you can see, there’s a number of things you can play around with here, but I’m going to concentrate on three things for this “intro to UFRaw” entry: Exposure, White Balance and Saturation. Why? Two reasons: they’re easy, and they’re the three things I use most.

Exposure

The first thing you probably want to play with is this slider in the upper-left:

It’s the exposure slider. So, if your picture is a bit underexposed, slide it to the right. If it’s a bit overexposed, slide it to the left. IS THIS NOT THE COOLEST THING EVER???? This slider was half of the reason I started shooting in Raw. I’ll get to the other half in the bit.

If you look a few buttons to the right of the exposure slider, you should see the button you see to the left of this paragraph. It’s the “auto exposure” button. Sometimes this button is a one click exposure fix. Sometimes, though, it gets confused by really bright things in your photo (like the sun) and wants to make you photo really underexposed just to make sure that no spot is overexposed. Still, I usually start off with using it just to see what it suggests and adjust from there.

If you’re curious about what parts of your photo are over or under-exposed, look down in the lower-left of UFRaw and you will see these checkboxes:

See how it’s telling me that that 12, 21, and 8.8 percent of my red, green and blue channels are overexposed? If I check that checkbox and hit Indicate, it will start flashing the overexposed areas on the picture. Neat!

White Balance

This is the second half of the reason I started shooting in Raw. Sometimes it’s really hard to get the white balance right in camera. Or sometimes we actually get it right, but we want to make the photo look warmer or cooler on purpose. changing the white balance of a Raw photo is so easy!

Underneath the Exposure slider there’s a row of tabs. If this is the first time you’ve opened UFRaw, you should be on the White Balance tab already (which is the first tab and it looks like an old-fashioned scale with blue on one side and red on the other. Oh, ha! I only just now got that. Balance. Scale.). So you should see the following:

The first thing in that section is a dropdown that contains some default White Balance settings:

But you can also manually adjust the white balance. Here’s a tip: you do NOT need to select Manual White Balance to adjust it, so just pick whichever white balance is closest to what you want, and then start moving the sliders below the dropdown. The one I adjust most often is the Temperature one. Moving it to the right makes the picture warmer (so more reddish/orangish/yellowish), and moving it to the left makes it cooler (more blue).

You’ll notice there’s an eye-dropper next to the sliders, too, so if you have a perfectly gray point that you want to base your white balance off of, you can click the dropper, then click on that spot in the photo and it will adjust the white balance using that. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve EVER used this – other than playing around with it.

You might need to adjust how much green is in your photo, too, which you can obviously do with the slider under the Temperature slider. I probably only have to do this in about 5% of my photos.

Saturation

I often add some saturation into my images in UFRaw. I know it’s easy to do in Gimp, too, but I prefer to do it to the Raw file. The Saturation tab is the fifth tab and it looks like this:

Pretty much the only thing I do here is play with the Saturation slider – making it less than one will desaturate the image (setting it to zero will make it completely black and white), and setting it above one will make the image more saturated. When I do adjust this, I typically set it between 1.3 and 1.6.

Denoise

Ok, I lied, one more thing really quick. If you go back to the White Balance tab, you’ll notice there’s a Denoise slider at the bottom of that section. If you have a photo with a lot of noise (one taken with a higher ISO, for instance), it’s often helpful to play with this slider to remove some of that noise.

An Important Piece of Information!

At this point, I want to be sure to mention: UFRaw REMEMBERS all your settings from one photo to the next – so if you have it on Auto Expose with a Manual White Balance and Saturation set to 1.60 – it will use those settings by default on your next photo.

Opening the file in Gimp

This step is slightly different depending on how you opened the image. If you did one of the first two methods I mentioned (opening UFRaw and then selecting the file, or right clicking on the file and selecting to open with UFRaw), you’ll see a Gimp icon in the lower-right:

Clicking this icon will open the file in Gimp.

If you opened the file directly in Gimp and then the only options you see fewer options, but one of them is OK:

Clicking OK will open the file in Gimp.

For more information

There was recently an article on DPS about using UFRaw, and the person who wrote it does some different adjustments than I typically do, so for another “intro to UFRaw”, be sure to check out that article!

For a bit more advanced (but also more in-depth) reading, be sure to check out the user guide on the UFRaw website.

And if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask in the comments. By the way, and this applies for all entries, if you ask me a question in a comment, I’m usually pretty good about answering them – but I do so as a reply to the comment, which should automatically email you with the email address you used in the comment form (or Disqus/Twitter/OpenID account). So, if you’ve asked me something, watch out for an email at that address.

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One of the things that has always bothered me about rotating images in Gimp is that I have to manually crop the image after in order to get rid of all the transparent pieces that are left behind.

I don’t mind doing things manually because it gives me control, but what I wish I had was something that would automatically crop to the biggest image possible with now transparent bits, and then let me crop more after that if I desired – that way I’d be sure that I wasn’t accidentally including a bit of transparency in my crop.

I found two tools that are giving me a starting point. Let me show you what I’ve found.

First, I’m starting with this image:

Now, you already know I like to rotate by using the Corrective option and selecting to preview it with the grid, but this time, I also selected “Crop with aspect”. You might guess what this does – it automatically crops the photo after the rotate so that it has the same aspect ratio as the current photo.

It’s not quite as automatic as I’d like, because after rotating, my image still has the transparent “border” around it, like this:

So, it crops it, but the canvas size remains the same, so you can see all the transparent bits behind your cropped image. Easy to fix, though! Just go to Image –> Autocrop Image and voila, you have your automatically cropped image:

Using a Script

The other option I found was this Post Rotate Crop tool. So I installed it (if you don’t know how to install scripts for Gimp, check out this post).

This one is meant to be run after any transformation – like rotate, perspective, scale and shear, so I went back to the original photo and rotated it again, this time with the Clipping set back to just Adjust, and then I ran the script, which is found under Tools –> Transform Tools –> Post Rotate Crop. I immediately fell in love with this script when I saw all the options:

Not only does it have the one thing I really wanted – Maximize by Height and width – but I can even input an exact aspect ratio in the text fields that are being covered up by the dropdown in that screenshot, and have it crop to that – so if I know I’m ultimately going to print an 8×10 photo, I can automatically crop it now! How cool!

Here’s the photo now with the maximum height and width picked:

Don’t think it looks much different than the auto crop I used in Gimp before? Well, it is! In this photo, I’ve shaded the area that the clipping using the rotate tool resulted in:

As you can see, there’s a good number of pixels on the right that were saved using the Post Rotate Crop script.

The biggest downside of the script is the amount of time it takes to run (which really isn’t too bad, but it is longer than just doing the clipping in the rotate tool). Still, I plan on using it from now on.

By the way, after some additional editing, I ended up with this as my final version of that photo:

In conclusion, I really love the Post Rotate Crop tool, and highly recommend it!

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This is the image converted directly from RAW to jpg with no adjustments. As you can see, the sky’s a bit blown out – especially near the tree branches – and the building is a bit dark, especially at the bottom.

The important part is that you have two versions of your photo – one that’s exposed correctly for whatever is bright (like the sky in this case) and one that’s exposed properly for what is darker (the building, in this case).

There’s a few ways you can do this:

• Use a tripod and take two photos. This is the best way to go if you’re taking a photo of something completely still – like this landscape. I, unfortunately, didn’t do that.
• Shoot in RAW and use your RAW editing program to give you two different exposed photos – this is what I’m doing with this photo.
• Shoot in jpg and edit the photo – this is the last choice, as far as I’m concerned. There are definitely reasons to shoot in jpg – and some cameras only allow you to shoot in jpg – so at the end of this entry, I’ll give you some tips on how to get your two images when shooting in jpg

So. Here’s my two images that I got from my RAW editing program (once again, I’m currently using UFRaw, which is a free program that you can install as a plug-in for Gimp, which is why I use it, but since I haven’t tried any others yet, I’m hesitant to recommend it as a Raw editing program of choice):

Here comes the most important part when using this filter: You must have two layers in your image and the bottom layer has to be the lighter one (exposed for the building, in this case) and the top must be the darker one (exposed for the sky):

Now all you have to do is run the filter found under FX-Foundry –> Photo –> Enhancement –> Dynamic Range Extender. Here’s the dialog box you’ll get:

So far I’ve just used the defaults every time and not had any problems. In this case, I end up with this final image:

For comparison, here’s the original again:

Tips for JPGs

So. You’re shooting in jpg only and your image is properly exposed for the sky? Try this to get one properly exposed for the building: In Gimp, create a duplicate layer and then set the blend mode to Screen. Still not light enough, do it again. As soon as you get too bright, just set the opacity lower on the final layer until it looks about right. Here’s my “Exposed for Sky” image with two duplicate layers set to screen mode – the top-most one is only at 70% opacity:

After it looks good, right click on the top layer and select “Merge Down”. Keep doing this until all your Screen layers have been merged down (note: if the only layers you have are the original layer and your screen layers, you can also do “Flatten Image” – which gets rid of ALL your layers and just gives you one layer that looks like exactly what’s showing in Gimp right then).

If you’re image is properly exposed for the building, the technique is the same, just use the Multiply blend mode instead of Screen. Note: this often does not give you great results – in fact, it looked like crap when I tried it with this image – the problem is that if something is blown out, it’s really hard to get those details back. So, if you’re shooting in jpg and you think you might want to try this technique, be sure to expose for the sky and not the building (or land, or whatever you’re shooting)

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The most popular way of sharpening photos in Gimp is probably the Unsharp Mask, but today I’m going to show you a different option using this High Pass Filter – an option that’s built into Photoshop.

I don’t want to go into too much technical detail on the difference betwen the two (if you’re interested, there’s a great article here) – but the short of it is: the Unsharp Mask will look for lines of contrast differences in your photo and make the dark side lighter and the light side darker. The High Pass Filter will turn most of your image gray, only producing visible lines around what it determines to be the edges in your photo. You can then use a layer blend mode to make those edges sharper.

Let’s see them both in practice, with this image I took of the Bellagio Ceiling when I went to Vegas last year:

It’s not an amazing image, but maybe with a bit of sharpening we can make it better.

First let’s try to Unsharp Mask, which is found at Filters –> Enhance –> Unsharp Mask. You have three options:

• Radius – Remember how I said that the Unsharp Mask looks at the edges in your photos and turns the darker side lighter and the lighter side darker? The Radius determines how wide of a space that darker and lighter part will be. The higher the number, the wider the space.
• Amount – This is how much darker/lighter the areas around the edges will get – the higher the number, the darker the lights will get and the lighter the darks will get.
• Threshold – This is basically how sensitive the mask is to edges – the lower the number, the more things it will think are edges. Using a higher number will leave more subtle edges untouched and only sharpen more pronounced edges

For some reason, and I can’t remember now why I got stuck on these numbers, I’ve always started off with the values 2, .85, and 4 respectively:

Let’s compare a before and after of just one part of the photo to see the effect it had. The top image is before the Mask was applied, the second after:

While you can see a slight haloing effect, it’s not too bad. I could play with the settings more (perhaps decrease the Radius and Amount), but it’s hard to see the haloing in the photo as a whole (at least at the size I’ll post online), so I’d say this is good enough. Here’s the final image with the Unsharp Mask:

Now let’s take a look at using the High Pass Filter. After you install the Plug-in, the filter will show up under Filters –> Generic –> High Pass Filter.

Here’s the default options for this filter:

Also, this is where you’ll see the biggest downside between this High Pass Filter and Photoshops – no preview. This is annoying because it’s hard to figure out the radius you want to use without being able to see the final product, so we’re going to have to do some guessing and checking here.

We’re going to stick with the Mode of Colour, because that closely duplicates the High Pass Filter in Photoshop… and quite honestly, it’s the only one I’ve used, and it’s worked, so I’m going to stick to it!

The goal at this point is to get our image so it’s all gray and only the edges stand out. Let’s see what our image looks like with the default settings:

Uhhh, well. We got the all gray part down, but the edges don’t stand out too much yet. I hit undo and did some more guessing and checking until I got the radius to 25 and now it looks like this:

And now we’re done!

No. I’m kidding.

But we’re close! Next, I change the blend mode of the High Pass layer to overlay:

Let’s compare the one part of the photo again. Once again, unedited on top, using the High Pass Filter below:

And here’s the final product:

Not too shabby! I think in the case of this photo, the High Pass Filter technique worked better – but I’m not confident that it always will. I don’t have enough experience yet to really know which one will work better when, and I’ve read about professionals that use both and use Layer Masks to hide one and display the other just in certain parts of the photo, but honestly? I can’t be bothered with that! This isn’t how I make my money, and my professionalism isn’t on the line, or do I have clients breathing down my neck. I’m just a woman typing away in Notepad right now, and uploading my images to my flickr account. No offense to those of you who follow me on flickr, but I can’t be bothered with such techniques at the moment. So from now on, I’ll try one or the other and just leave it at that!

By the way, if you try using the High Pass Filter technique, you can play around with the Opacity of the layer and also try switching it to Hard Light (for more of an effect) or Soft Less (for less).

Stay tuned later this week, when I show you how to use the High Pass Filter for the opposite effect – smoothing skin!

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