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 the newer version of UFRaw. f/4.0; 1/800 sec; 67mm; ISO 200

I mentioned previously that when I got my new laptop set up, I downloaded the newest versions of UFRaw and Gimp and was happy to find some additional features in them and promised to come back and write about them in more detail.

I’m going to start with UFRaw today. If you need a refresher, I originally wrote about UFRaw here – and everything I wrote about there still exists today, there’s just some additions.

My favorite addition – and, in fact, the only one I’ve used so far – is the Lens Correction tab, which looks like this:

As you can see, it already knows that I shoot with a Canon Rebel XTi. If I click the two little gears next all the way to the right of the Lens box, it will fill in what kind of lens I used, as well as adjust some parameters in the section below:

So, the section below that gets shown by default is the Lens distortion tab (it’s the one selected above that looks like a blue square with arrows pointing in). It automatically switches the dropdown to the PanoTools lens model – I’m assuming it does that because it’s the only model that it can adjust automatically for you. There are other models available, but it would require manual adjusting of values, and since I’m not quite sure what all of them do, I’ve been sticking with the PanoTools one. You might have figured out that the goal here is to get a photo that you could use in a panorama. Have you ever noticed that when you take a couple photos in a row to stitch them together, that they often don’t look quite “right”? It often looks a bit wavy – kinda like it’s going in and out. This is because your lens distorts the image some on the side, and this tool here is trying to correct that. Which I find to be nice even when I’m not doing a panorama.

For instance, check this example out. The image you see below is the image Straight Out of Camera (SOOC), and if you hover over it, it will switch to the automatic lens distortion correction from UFRaw (the last time I did hover-overs a couple people complained, so if you’d rather open the images yourself and compare, you can: SOOC, Corrected).

I think you can really notice on the sides of the room – it doesn’t look like it’s bulging out quite as much. This is the type of thing that I might not have noticed as I was glancing at the photo, but as soon as I see it fixed, I can definitely seen an improvement.

One thing I really like that UFRaw does, is that it sites where the formula it’s using come froms, as you can see at the bottom of the tab:

That link goes to here, in case you wanted to check it out.

So. The other tab that I’ve played around with in the Lens Correction section is the Optical Vignetting tab, which is one over the left (a red, green and blue rectangle):

Once again, the goal here was to correct things that would really show up when doing a panorama. If you switch the Model dropdown to 6th order polynomial, you’ll see some sliders and – once again – a url at the bottom that explains where the formula is coming from:

The reference this time is for this site, where you will see the type of thing it is trying to correct. What I like to use this tab for is to add some subtle vignetting to my photos. Remember I talked about a couple ways to do this in gimp a while ago, but this is really a lot easier if you’re going for the subtle approach. Just start moving the sliders to see what they do. For example, I started with this photo:

SOOC

… and then I moved all three sliders to the right in order to get this:

With Vignette

And there you have it – my favorite new features of UFRaw!

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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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f/4.0; 1/10sec; 55mm; ISO 800

I got a message on flickr recently about how I took and edited the above picture, and so I thought it was time for another “How I took it” segment over here.

The Set-up

The set up for this shot was not very complicated, and I’ve re-enacted it below:

The Set-up itself

The section marked in blue is where the light from the bathroom was hitting my hand. As you can see, I used a very fancy tripod called A Kleenex Box. The reason I did this was that my traditional tripod didn’t get low enough for my liking, and my camera already had the little shoe thingy for my regular tripod on there, and honestly, I got it on so tight I can’t get it off now, so I had no way of putting my camera on my gorilla-pod. Sooo…. the Kleenex box worked.

To the right of the banister there on the right are the stairs to the main level of my house, and I was laying on those stairs and had my hand out front of me so that it hit that light in the section in blue.

I had all the lights off in the hallway, and in order to add some extra oomph to the light coming from the bathroom, I had a small spotlight pointed at the door, like so:

Doesn't everyone light their photos from the toilet?

There are a couple things to note in this photo. The first is that the light is not shining directly out the door, I was afraid that would make the light a bit too harsh, so instead it’s pointed AT the door itself and not the opening.

The other thing has nothing to do with the photo itself: see those two switches on the wall there? Those turn on the light/fan in the bathroom (which is one of the quirks of living in a house built in the 1920s), which make it really easy to turn off the light while someone else is in the shower. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

Taking the Photo

I wish I had taken notes when doing this, because I did struggle with this one. I mentioned that I had all the lights off except for the ones in the bathroom, so that made it tough for the autofocus to figure out what it needed to focus on. I can’t remember what I ultimately worked, but I know I tried the following things:

• Tried and tried and tried as-is with the wireless remote
• Turned the lights on, used the remote trigger to take a picture and then went back and set the camera to manual focus, turned the lights off, and went back to the same place.

This process probably would have been easier if I had a second person around to switch the camera to manual focus and turn the lights off for me. But John was off playing Halo or something, and who am I to disturb Halo? (hint: NO ONE disturbs Halo.)

One other thing to note – I purposely under-exposed this shot by 2 full stops.

Editing the Photo

Really, this is where the magic happens. Because get ready to see the photo SOOC:

SOOC = Straight Out Of Camera

Not quite so dramatic, right?

Now I’m going to recreate the process. I took notes on what I did, but not any exact values, so it might turn out looking slight different than how I edited it the first time, but we’ll be pretty close. Hopefully.

So, the first things I did was convert the photo from RAW using UFRaw. I didn’t use the auto exposure, because it was trying to get all of the photo exposed somewhat properly, including the wall and floor which I wanted to be underexposed. So instead I manually moved the slider until my hand seemed to be exposed how I wanted it, and ended up with this:

First brought into Gimp from UFRaw

At this point, you might be really annoyed by the fact that this photo isn’t level. And I am, too, but I’m not going to fix it. Because ultimately I want the whole background to be black anyway, so you won’t notice that the floor isn’t level – and the way it is now, the beam of light is level, and I like that. So, all I’m gonna do now is crop it to get rid of my chin:

Cropped!

Next I used the Lasm Channel Extract from FX-Foundry to convert the photo to black and white. I’m pretty sure I ran it with Red, Green, Blue, L, A, B, and Value checked. Ultimately, I ended up liking the Green and Red layers the best. Liked the Green because it had the wall and floor the darkest:

Green channel

…and I liked the Red because of how bright my hand (and more importantly, the reflection of it) was:

Red Channel

So I dragged the Green layer above the Red layer and set it to Overlay at 70%:

And so now my photo looks like this:

Green channel over Red channel, set to Overlay at 70% Opacity

Getting closer, but I need to make the background darker. So I create a new layer from visible (under the Layer menu) and bring up the Levels (under Colors –> Levels). I want everything that’s Dark to be Really Dark and I want everything that’s in the middle to get darker too, so I move the left and middle sliders both to the right some (I don’t want to move the right slider, because I’m happy with the lighter parts of the photo – the stream of light and my hand/reflection). Here’s what my levels look like:

And now here’s what the photo looks like:

Final Photo

Which is pretty darn close to the first one I edited, so I guess I am getting better at writing down the steps I take so I can duplicate them later.

If you have any additional questions about this photo, or any other on my flickr stream, feel free to ask! I always include a short description of how I edited each photo, but if you’d ever like to see the before photo, or more detailed steps of what I did, I’m always willing to share!

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Here’s the photo I’m going to be working with today. Nothing too exciting, just happened to be the next on one my list of photos to edit:

f/4.0; 1/40 sec; 105mm; ISO 400

So, let’s play around with it…

Warm it up

This is probably the way I use solid color layers most often, because it’s so simple and a really easy way to warm up a photo. Simply create a new layer, and when the New Layer dialog box pops up, select whatever fill type you want, then change your foreground color by clicking on it in the Toolbox (see image to the left), to a nice reddish brown color (you can see the color I picked in the screenshot below) then select the Bucket Fill Tool (which looks like a bucket with paint pouring out of it) and click anywhere on the photo. Your photo should now look completely brown, and your layers should look something like this:

On a side note: I could have set the foreground color first, and then when I created my new layer, I could have selected to fill it with the foreground color. I have no good reason for not doing this, other than I guess I forget most of the time.

Now, switch the Blend Mode of the brown layer to Overlay, and adjust the Opacity until you like what you see. In my case, I dropped the Opacity down to 80 and my photo now looks like this (original on the left, with the brown overlay on the right):

Warmed Up

If want to warm up the photo and give it a washed-out feeling, switch the Blend Mode to Screen instead, which now makes my photo look like this (once again, the original is on the left):

Warmed Up and a bit vintage-y, too

Man, I love that. Can you see why I do this so often?

Cool it down

I bet you can guess what I’m going to do here. Do everything exactly as I described above, except instead of using a reddish-brown color, use an aqua color, like so:

Here it is set to Overlay:

Cool. Probably a bit too cool for this photo, actually.

I have to admit, this really doesn’t do much for this photo – but I’ve played around with this on some self portraits sometimes.

Setting it to Screen mode doesn’t have the same overwhelming awesome effect that doing it with the brown layer did (of course, I suppose that’s just a personal opinion). Here it is with this photo:

Set to Screen

Which I don’t like. but I did try this on a self portrait and liked the sort of ethereal feel it gave to the photo:

Aqua set to Screen on a self portrait

That’s at 50% opacity for both photos, by the way.

Try Other Colors!

I highly suggest playing around with other colors to see what you can come up with. A favorite of mine is a dark magenta-ish color, like so:

And here’s what my photo looks like with that color at Overlay, 80% Opacity:

Magenta Overlay

And at Screen with 65% Opacity:

Magenta Screen

Huh. I really don’t do this often enough! It’s really easy to get caught up scripts and actions and you forget what dramatic impacts simple little things like this can have on your photos!

Multiple Layers

Here’s where we get really crazy! Try playing around with different colored layers set at different blend modes and opacities. The possibilities are really endless, which I suppose is nice and all that, but because of that, it really takes away from the “quick and easy” aspect of adding this solid colored layers. So, if one layer isn’t really doing it for me, I typically try these three layers: an aqua, magenta, and yellow:

Now, I created these layers myself, but if you want to cheat, the Vintage-Look Script found here (and reviewed by me as part of this entry) will create three very similar layers that you can use (as well as a black and white layer that you can choose to delete if you’d like).

Anyway, I set my aqua layer to Screen mode at 10% Opacity, my magenta layer to screen mode at 50% opacity and my yellow layer to Overlay at 20% Opacity and I ended up with this:

Three Layers - working together!

Even though this is a bit more of a pain than just a single layer, it’s also nice, once you have all the layers, to really play around with the opacity sliders and see what effect each color really has and how they all play together.

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I have two methods that I’ve used to do this, so I’m going to show you both of them using one photo so you can compare them and decide for yourself which one you like better.

First off, though, here’s the image I’m starting with:

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

Everyone say hi to my nephew! This photo was actually taken about a year ago, though, and darn if kids don’t grow up so fast, so he probably doesn’t look much like this anymore. He’s still just as cute, though.

Anyway, let’s work on those eyes.

Dodge and Burn

I first learned about this trick from an article on DPS that was written specifically for Photoshop, that I was able to adapt slightly in order to use it in Gimp.

First, I duplicate the layer. I know I’ve said in the past that I might be a bit too addicted to duplicating layers, but I really think it’s important this time around.

Then, I zoom into my photo a lot so that the eye takes up a significant portion of my screen and then select the Dodge / Burn Tool (whose icon looks like the one you see to the left). The idea here is that we’re going to burn the dark parts of his eye (the center and edges) to make them darker and dodge the mid-tones of the colored part of his eyes to make them brighter.

(wow, I really got a bit uncomfortable writing that I was going to burn my nephew’s eyes.)

So. First, I switch my brush to a fuzzy circle and then hold them up to his eye to make sure the circle is about the same size as the darker circle around the outside of his eye, like so:

Next I select the “Burn” and “Shadows” radio buttons, then I drop the exposure down to anywhere between 20 and 35. I did 25 in this case. Then I carefully draw around the edge of the colored part of the eye to make it just slightly darker. After that, I like to bump up the exposure to 35 before darkening the middle of the eye – the higher the exposure, the darker the burning is going to be. If you want, you can also play with the Opacity slider to get a similar effect.

Here’s what the eye looks like close-up after I’ve burned the edge and center of the eye:

Now, switch to the Dodge radio button, select Midtones and drop the exposure down to 15 max (I usually do 10, which is what I’m doing now for my nephew’s eye). If you want, you can use a bigger brush for this part, because now we’re going to be brightening the brown part of the eye, which isn’t quite as small as the edges, obviously. Here’s what the results of the dodging is:

It’s a very subtle change, yes. But check out the before and after of his eye not-so-zoomed in:

The reason why I always create a duplicate layer before playing with the eyes like this is because it’s really easy to overdo this effect when you’re all zoomed in and not realize what it really looks like. If you have a duplicate layer, you can scale back the effect by decreasing the opacity of that layer without having to Undo a whole bunch of times.

Here’s my nephew with both eyes dodged and burned:

After Dodge and Burn

Here’s the original photo again:

The Original Photo

The difference is obvious (to me, at least, I hope it is to you, too!), but not over the top. If you like this method, but want it a bit more obvious, just use higher values for the Exposure and/or when using the dodge tool, experiment with doing it to the highlights instead of the midtones – this will make things even brighter.

Sharpen and Curves

This next method I adapted from a Pioneer Woman tutorial (I love her, she’s near the top of my People I Love Who Have No Idea I Exist list).

Note that I’m going back to my original image – so there’s no dodging and burning done to the eyes at this point. This is a separate option. I’ve never tried both effects together. I imagine it might be a bit too pop-y though.

First, guess what I do? Duplicate the layer!

Then, using your lasso tool (with a feathered edge, that way the effect you’re about to do won’t be so obvious at the edges), select around the colored part of the eye, like so:

Then go to Filters –> Enhance –> Unsharp Mask, and following Ree’s advice, I set the Radius to 3.6, the Threshold to 0, and then slide the Amount until you can really see the effect. In this case, I have it at 95:

Now I go to Colors –> Curves and give it just a slight S-curve:

This is going to make the darker parts of his eye darker and the lighter parts lighter.

Here’s a before and after of the eye close up:

Here he is with both eyes done in this method:

After Sharpen and Curves

And for comparison, here’s the Dodge and Burn method again:

After Dodge and Burn

And finally, here’s the original one last time:

The Original Photo

In this particular case, I happen to like the Sharpen and Curves method, but I often prefer the Dodge and Burn (I’ve noticed that I like Dodge and Burn better on bright blue eyes, and Sharpen and Curves better on darker eyes, but even that isn’t a steadfast rule).

Before writing this entry, I searched the internet for other Eye-popping tricks and found a bunch – more than I had time to test, though a common theme was sharpening and increasing contrast one way or another. Is there a method you use that you swear by? Let us know!

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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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One of the images I created using this method

So, this is the entry that has taken me over a month to write, for multiple reasons. A reader asked if there was a way to do HDR images in Gimp, and the short answer is No. The long answer is that a lot of people have tried to fake it (there’s actually a gimp script you can find here that will do it for you), but it seems the ones I have found have either giving you a “crazy color pop” effect (which is what the script I linked to above does) or an “increase the dynamic range” effect – much like the FX-Foundry script I talked about here.

This tutorial is going to try to merge BOTH of those effects into ONE photo. If you’re only interested in one or the other, I suggest you check out the approriate script above.

This method is adapted from this method on instructables. In fact, that method is shorter and probably less confusing, but the results weren’t exactly what I think of when I think “HDR”. That being said, the first half of my tutorial is almost exactly the same as that one, so if what I’m writing below seems a bit overwhelming, you might want to try following that one a few times first.

So. First. I assume that you either have three images – one that’s exposed “properly”, one that’s underexposed and one that’s overexposed – either because you took three actual images at different exposures or because you’ve used the exposure slider in ufraw (or the RAW editor of your choice) to produce those three images (which is what I did).

Here are my three photos:

underexposed

overexposed

"properly" exposed

Now, I open up all three in Gimp as multiple layers in the same photo and order the layers as so:

By the way, perhaps I’m admitting something I shouldn’t here, but it took me a bit of a while to figure out how to open up multiple photos in one image in Gimp. As I mentioned above, I’m converting from RAW here using UFRaw, so each time I press “OK” in UFRaw to open it in Gimp, it creates a separate Gimp window. So I copy and paste from there into my original file in the other Gimp window. Then, the key is, you have to press the “new layer” icon at the bottom of the layer dialog box (it looks like a piece of paper). If you have your three separate images already (outside of Gimp), you can drag them from the file system into Gimp, and it will automatically create each of them as separate layers.

Anyway, notice that I have my “properly exposed” layer (which I labeled as just “exposed”) at the bottom with my underexposed image on top of that and the overexposed image at the very top. For now, let’s make the overexposed layer invisible so that we’re looking at the underexposed layer.

Remember I’ve talked about Layer Masks before – the general idea is that you add a layer mask to one of your layers, and then if you paint black on that mask, that part of the layer will be transparent and if you paint white on the mask, that part of the layer will be opaque. So, the idea here is that we want the dark parts of this layer to be transparent (we don’t want to see them – we want to see the “exposed” layer below it instead), and the lighter, exposed parts (like the sky in the upper left) to be opaque.

The way we’re going to do this is by creating a duplicate layer of the underexposed layer (I know this might not make sense at first, but keep reading, I think it’ll all come together for you in a minute). Now desaturate it (I just used the default Colors –> Desaturate). When I first did this, the sky was still pretty gray in my photo, and since I really want to see the sky from this underexposed layer, I fix this by adjusting the curves (you can do this with Levels, too – whatever you’re more comfortable with, just play with it until you get the parts of the photo that you really want from your underexposed photo to be pretty white instead of gray). This is what my black and white layer looks like:

underexposed as black and white

Now, we want to turn that into the layer mask on the underexposed layer. So, select all of the black and white layer (by going to Select –> All or just hitting Ctrl+A), and copy it, then go back to the “under” layer and right click and Add Layer Mask (just pick whatever option it defaults to when it pops up, you’re just going to turn it into your black & white image anyway). Now, with the layer mask selected hit paste (Ctrl-V). Notice that you get this “Floating Selection” layer. Right click on it and select “Anchor Layer”:

And now it turns that into your Layer Mask! Now we don’t need that “underexposed copy” layer anymore, so you can right click on it and delete it. When you do that, you can see the results of your layer mask on the under layer. Here’s what my Layers look like now:

… and here’s what my image looks like now, (as a reference, that’s the original “exposed” version below it for comparison – notice the difference in the sky in the upper left):

With the underexposed layer mask

"properly" exposed

Now let’s concentrate on the overexposed layer and make it visible again. We want to do the opposite with this layer as we did with the underexposed layer. We’ll start off by duplicating the layer and desaturating it, which looks like this:

Desaturation of the overexposed layer

Now, if we were to turn that into a mask, the overexposed sky would be visible, instead of the nicely-exposed area on the right. That’s not what we want! In fact, that’s the opposite of what we want. So, everything that’s white we want to turn black and everything black, we want to turn white. Luckily, there’s a menu item that does just that. Go to Colors –> Invert and now it looks like this:

Inverted!

Now, we’ll turn that into a layer mask just for the overexposed layer just like we did the underexposed layer mask: Copy layer, create layer mask on overexposed layer, paste, anchor layer, then delete the black and white layer. Now our photo looks like this (compared with “exposed” again – notice how there’s more detail in the door area on the right):

Both under- and over-exposed layers have masks

"properly" exposed

Well, more of the photo is exposed properly now, I guess, but it still doesn’t “pop” like I want it to. Note: This is where my tutorial differs from the instructables one. This is also where I start having trouble describing what I’m doing, so if you’re not following along, PLEASE ask questions. So, I’m going to create a duplicate layer of both the underexposed and overexposed layers. So now my layers look like this:

If you’re doing this yourself at this point, you might notice that the photo changes appearance when you do this – I’m not posting that change in look here, since that’s not my final goal here, I want to play with those duplicate layers first. I’m going to change the blend mode of the underexposed copy layer (so, of the two underexposed layer, the one on top) to Burn and the blend mode of the overexposed copy layer (the layer on the very top) to Dodge. Now, start playing with the opacity of all four layers (all but the “exposed” layer, that is). I can’t give you some magic formula here, because I’ve done this a couple times on a number of different photos and I like something different each time. But I will tell that for THIS photo my layers (from top to bottom) are at:

• overexposed copy – dodge – 100%
• overexposed – normal – 75%
• underexposed copy – burn – 100%
• underexposed – normal – 75%

And now my photo looks like this:

After adding the Dodge and Burn layers and adjusting opacity

I’m still not completely happy with it, but it’s getting closer. Now I make a new layer from visible (found under the Layer menu) and make sure it’s at the top of all my layers:

First I go to Colors –> Hue-Saturation and bump up the saturation, and then I sharpen the photo and I end up with this as my final Fake HDR Photo:

My interpretation of fake HDR

I really don’t know what you guys are going to think of this, because honestly? I don’t like it! Which is probably another reason it’s taken me so long to write this entry. I confess: I don’t like most HDR photos! I think it’s one of those things that a lot of people like, and a lot of people don’t like, but whether you like it or not, it exists, and it’s popular, and so it can’t be ignored, which is why I really did my best to duplicate it the best I could here. When I think HDR, I think of the following things: No overexposed or underexposed areas of the photo, bright colors that pop, and a somewhat cartoon-y feel to them. And I guess the photo you see above has all of those things?

I tried this tutorial on a few other photos. Sometimes it turned out pretty good (like the photo you saw at the top of this entry – I actually really like that photo)

Sometimes it turned out really bad:

Yeah, this is kinda scary looking, actually.

I think it was all the thin branches in that one that really threw the whole thing off.

Anyway, if you try this tutorial, let me know what you think – I won’t be offended if you hate it, I promise. If you like HDR photos – do you think this is an ok interpretation of it?

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So, instead I’m going to write a follow-up to this Gimp Quick Tips entry, and give you MORE quick tips! How exciting!

New Layer From Visible

You guys all should know by this point that I like to play with a lot of layers. Sometimes I’ll end up with multiple layers with all different blend modes and opacity and I realize that I want to do something to the image as a whole and not just one of the layers (like adjust the levels, or sharpen the photo). I used to right click on each layer and select “merge down” to combine two layers together into one, but that was a pain because it sometimes took a while if I had multiple layers, and I’d also lose all those individual layers I had.

The fix? Go to Layer –> New from Visible. Which does exactly what you think it would do – it creates a new layer that contains exactly what you see on the screen RIGHT NOW. Yay!

Dragging Guide Lines

Are you playing with the perspective a photo or rotating it and wish that you had a guide line to base it off of? You might have realized you can add guide lines to your photo by going to Image –> Guides –> New Guide, but then you have to know either what pixel you want the guide at, or at what percentage, and sometimes you just want to place one where you want it by yourself.

Well, you can! Just click and drag from the ruler at either the top or left side of Gimp and you’ll be dragging a guide line:

In order to to remove the guide line, make sure your “move” tool is selected (looks like the icon you see on the right), and you can drag the line around again and to remove it, drag it back up into the ruler again. You can also remove ALL guides on your photo by going to Image –> Guides –> Remove All Guides

Dragging Images into Gimp

So, you’re working on a photo in Gimp and you want to add a texture to it that you have in your file system. Did you know you can drag and drop it from the file system into your image in Gimp and it will add it as a new layer for your automatically?

Show Layer Mask

We’ve talked about Layer Masks before, but I always like giving a quick recap each time, because if you’ve never used them before, I know they can be confusing. A layer mask is something you can add to your layer and then paint either white, black, or shades of gray on it to control the opacity of certain parts of a layer. Basically – a pure white layer mask (which is what a mask is by default) means your entire layer is completely opaque. But if you were to draw a black line right through the middle of it, everywhere you drew the line would be transparent – so you could see through to the layer below.

Often I find myself creating my own layer mask, or using a script that adds a layer mask for me, and I want to see the mask itself. Usually when working with the masks, you see the result of the mask (so, your layer turns more transparent or opaque) instead of seeing the black and white you’re painting with. To see the mask itself, right click on it and select Show Layer Mask:

And now you’ll see the mask. You can edit it, too, of course, from here. To go back to how it was before, just right click on the mask again and select Show Layer Mask again to uncheck it.

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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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