f/4.0; 1/13sec; 58mm; ISO 400

This is one of my quick tips that I haven’t mentioned before because I was afraid it was some sort of “fad” for me. I often find that I do some trick when editing that after a while I stop doing because I think it looks stupid. But I’ve been using this particular method for a quite a few months and I still try it on a lot of my portraits.

You guys know I usually like to describe what exactly is happening and why it works to produce a better photo. But to be honest? I don’t know the math behind this one or why it always seem to like how it looks on portraits. But… I do like it on portraits!

The first step is, if you don’t already have it, get the FX-Foundry suite of scripts for Gimp, as described in this post. Then open a photo to edit. I’m going to edit this photo of yours truly:

Me, unedited. I'm not very excited.

Most of the FX-Foundry scripts I use when editing photos are in (obviously) the Photos menu option, but there’s a Toolbox menu option as well:

Under Toolbox there is an option for Lasm’s Channel Extract. This is what I use almost exclusively for converting images to black and white because it gives you a bunch of different options, each as a new layer in your photo. But maybe I’ll talk about that some other time. For the purposes of this tip, all you have to do is deselect the “All Channels” option and select only the L channel. Then say OK. You’ll end up with a photo that looks like this:

Me: as a ghost!

Now just switch that layer to Overlay and play with the opacity. This is my photo at 75% Opacity:

Oh, now I'm excited. This looks better!

And that’s it! Here’s the original for comparison:

Still not so exciting, is it?

I’ve tried this on a lot of portraits and usually like it (no editing technique works for all photos, so yes, there are times it looks pretty horrible), but for a quick and easy edit of a photo, I think it adds something without a lot of work. For instance, this particular photo I was just uploading to show some friends my new hair cut, and I didn’t want to go to a lot of trouble, but I think this 2 second edit is much nicer than the Straight Out Of Camera shot!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

ps. don’t forget, there’s still time to submit photos to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group to be eligible for tomorrow’s Wordless Wednesday! July’s theme is Statues/Parks!

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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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I love sharpies.

I hope those of you in the States had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend – I know that I did, and I’m not looking forward to getting back to the daily grind!

During the month of October, I was tweeting and posting on flickr some daily “quick tips”. I didn’t make it through the entire month, but I did promise to share all the tips over here, so here are the 26 Quick Tips I have to share – no matter what kind of camera or editing software you use, I think you’ll find at least one tip that applies to you!

Use Ctrl+Shift+O in Picasa to open photos in an editor

Those of you that have been reading for a while know that I use Picasa to organize and tag my photos, but that I use a combination of UFRaw and Gimp to edit them. I even wrote once about how I would find the photo in my file system in order to open it for editing (and someone was nice enough to point out the File –> Locate on Disk option. Even better, though, I found the File –> Open File(s) in an Editor option. Which is also activated by Ctrl+Shift+O. Since I have Gimp set as my default editor, with the UFRaw plugin, it automatically opens my Raw files in UFRaw!

Use Levels to make the foreground pop

I used to take a lot of pictures with the cheap version of lighting – the lamp on my side table. I would turn off all the other lights in the room to make the background as dark as possible, and I’d end up with photos like this:

Before Levels

The background is darker than the foreground, but youc an still see the outline of the entrance to my dining room. A quick adjustment of Levels in Gimp, gave me this:

After Levels

It’s such a small adjustment that I feel makes a big impact.

Shoot in Continious (Burst) Mode

Maia

When do I find it the most helpful? When taking photos of living things. It’s really great for group photos – the more chances you have to get everyone’s eyes open at the same time, the better! But even that photo of my cat Maia you see here, it’s from the middle of a group of photos where her eyes are droopy or squinty. I happened to get just the one where she’s looking clearly at the camera.

Try Different Sharpening

Did you know that FX Foundry has six different methods for sharpening photos? I have to admit I still use the default Unsharp Mask that comes out of the box from Gimp the most, but there are some photos where other methods just seem to work better. If you’re unhappy with one method of sharpening, but sure to try some others. You might get a feel for which methods work best for which type of photos (and if you do, let me know!)

Reformat your memory card, not just delete

I’m not going to prentend to understand all the ins and outs of data storage, but my basic understanding is that when you delete the files, they still remain there somehow, but if you reformat the card, you’re really wiping out all the data. While this might sound scary, I’m assuming you’re not reformatting until you have those photos backed up anyway. The real reason to do this is that if you reformat every time, you’re less likely to get a corrupt card in the long run. I repeat that I don’t really understand why this is (although, I suppose it makes sense if deleting isn’t really “cleaning things up” and your start piling more things on there, things could get confusing), but I will say I’ve always reformatted and never had issues with a corrupt card (*knocks on my wood desk top*), and I have friends who were just deleting and have had issues.

As for how to do that, check out the menu system in your camera. In my camera (a Canon Rebel XTi), it’s under the first orange (tools) tab, at the bottom it says Format. And yes, you should format the card in camera, because your camera is formatting it specifically for itself. Related, you should avoid using the same card in different cameras, if you’re lucky enough to have more than one camera!

Think about the background!

Grassy background

Think about the background for your photo. If necessary (and possible), move your subject to an area where the background “fits” more. For instance the photo you see here is one of my last CSA baskets of the year. I don’t usually take the baskets directly to my back yard, but I felt the green grass was a more appropriate background than the kitchen counter for a basket full of fresh veggies (and had the added benefit of there being better lighting out there).

Use everyday objects to spice up your photos

Yoshi!

Play with layers in Gimp scripts!

Most of the Gimp scripts I’ve used create at least one new layer to my photo, often changing the blend mode and/or opacity of that layer. I like to play with those layers – changing around the blend mode on some, removing others all-together, playing with the opacity, etc. I usually end up with something I like better, but even if I don’t, every time I play with the layers I gain a better understanding of the different blend modes in general and of that script in specific.

Surround yourself with creative friends

If you’re feeling like you’re in a rut creativity-wise, just surround yourself with creative friends. They don’t need to know a thing about photography, in fact, it’s often nice to get a completely different perspective than someone who already has their own photographic style. I’d rather here the outrageous “can you do this?” ideas and say “well, no, but that gets me thinking… I could do this…”. For instance, in October, I did my first Senior Photo shoot – for the younger brother of a friend of ours, there were five of us out there, including the subject of the photos, and we all had similar personalities and shared a crazy sense of humor. Not only did it make the day fun, but we all contributed different ideas for some of the more creative senior photos I’ve ever seen! It was really a blast and got me excited about photography again.

Turn off “Shoot w/o card” mode

When I first got my camera, it would allow me to shoot photos without a memory card in the camera. There was no internal memory, so all this did was display the photo on the LCD screen, and then it would be gone forever without any way for me to transfer to my computer at a later time. Can you imagine how dangerous this is? I could have taken the memory card out to transfer photos to my computer, never put it back, and then gone out on a long photo walk without ever realizing that there was no card in there! I don’t know if your camera even has this option or not, but for me (once again, with a Canon Rebel XTi), it can be found in the menu under the very first tab, there’s an option called “Shoot w/o card” and I have it set to off. When it’s set to off, the camera will tell you there’s no memory card in if you try and take a photo.

Turn off the beep!

I suppose this one is more of a personal preference, but I hate when my camera beeps when the auto-focus focuses on something. I find it distracting – especially when I’m “in the zone” taking photos and I just want to feel the camera in my hands. I know that sounds pretty cheesy, but it’s true – I find the beep a bit too… technical? I don’t know how to describe it. Anyway, I first turned off the beep when going to a wedding when I didn’t want the beep distracting other guests of the wedding when taking photos of the ceremony, and then I realized I really preferred it that way, so I kept it off. Once again, I don’t know how to do this on your camera (if yours even beeps at all…), but on my camera it was in the first tab of the menu, there was an option called Beep, and I set it to Off.

Hoodie

Zoom In

You don’t always have to see all of something to know what it is, so really zoom in and fill the frame in order to get more interesting photos of everyday things. For instance, to the left you can see the hoodie that I bought when on vacation this year. I knew I wanted a photo of it because it was the only new thing I brought home from the vacation, but pictures of hoodies aren’t really exciting. I’m not saying the photo you see here is the most artistic photo ever, but I think it’s a bit more exciting than typical clothing shots I take.

Lazy Vignettes

I’ve written before about a few ways to create vignettes in Gimp, and that’s just a couple of a handful of different ways I’ve done it before, but they all require a bit of work to get themd one. Sometimes, when I’m feeling lazy, I’ll just run the LOMO script from FX Foundry, because one of the layers is a vignette. I can just remove all the other layers and I’ve got a vignette with little effort!

Buy a remote trigger!

I did an entire year of daily self portraits without a remote for my camera. I have no idea what I was thinking. After I got one I realized how much I love it even when NOT doing self portraits (though, they’re definitely pretty handy for that). If you don’t already have one, I urge you to buy one (or ask for one for the Holidays!). They’re pretty inexpensive as far as camera equipment goes, and I think you’ll find you’ll use it more than you might think you would.

Also, for those of you that wondered, because I did before I bought one… I can only speak for my Canon, but if I have my lens set to Auto Focus and click the button on the remote, yes, it auto-focuses just like if I hit the shutter on the camera itself.

Set textures to Burn for a more grunge look

I’ve written about adding textures to your photos using Gimp, but I told you to set the blend mode to Overlay. If you set it to Burn, you’ll get a grungier look, like you see in this photo:

Setting textures to burn gives you a grunge look

Shoot in RAW to correct colors

It’s much easier to correct the color balance of photos if you shoot in RAW. You know how when you’re shooting photos you can select what white balance you want to use? Well, when you shoot in RAW, your RAW editor (I use UFRaw) will allow you to pick whatever white balance you want to use after-the-fact. In fact, you can even use sliders to get the white balance to an exact amount, and not just use the preset ones that come with the camera. I understand that shooting in RAW isn’t for everyone, but adjusting the color balance is something that I have really come to appreciate a lot.

Save your Curves settings

I actually just talked about how to do this in this article, but just remember, you can save your Curves settings. This is especially useful once you get into adjusting the Red, Green and Blue curves. You often end up with some cool effects that you might want to duplicate later.

Don’t always focus on things

Bokeh Tree

I don’t think you need to know what something is in order for it to be a good photo. For instance, I love this out of focus picture of a tree in my backyard. It’s not just playing with bokeh, though. Zoom in on things so close that it’s hard to tell what it’s a picture of (I seem to recall a magazine I read as a kid doing this and you were supposed to guess what everything was) or play with colors. Just try to play around remember there are no hard fast rules when it comes to photography.

Try rotating backwards

I know I’ve mentioned it more than once on this site, but I prefer to rotate backwards in Gimp. Just set the Direction radio button to Corrective (Backward), and then set the Preview dropdown to grid, then try rotating. Instead of your picture moving when you move the mouse, the grids will move, which means you can align the grids up with something on the photo that you want to be level. This is hard to explain, but pretty easy to use. Try it at some point if you’ve never done it and see if you like it better.

Watch that Reflection

When I was talking about using everyday objects up above, I mentioned that I like to use mirrors sometimes. I, obviously, did that for the photo at the top of this post, but be sure to watch out what’s also in the reflection. I wasn’t thinking at first and set up the mirror in my bathroom because the light is actually really good in my bathroom. But then I realized that it wasn’t just the Sharpies getting reflected! So I moved the mirror out into the hallway and what you see is a white wall instead!

Pick an organization system and stick to it!

There’s no much point in taking photos of memorable events and things in your life if you can’t find them later. I don’t think there’s anyone “right” way to organize your photos, but I can say you should really thinking about what’s going to work best for you… and then stick to it. I didn’t give it much thought at first and when I finally did and decide what I was going to do, it was easy to do going forward, but none of my old photos were organized that way, so it made it harder to find my older photos, and a pain to go back and reorganize them all (in fact, I still haven’t finished after coming up with my system over a year ago).

If you care, my basic system is as follows: Whenever I upload photos of my memory card, I put them in a folder on my drobo (a fancy external harddrive that automatically saves all the files on multiple drives incase one dies) that’s named “YYYY_MM_DD – short desc”. that’s obviously the date followed by a short description of what’s in the folder. For instance, I have a folder called “2010_10_05 – Smashed phone” from when I dropped my Android phone and the screen shattered back in early October. Then I review all the files in Picasa to decide which ones I want to edit (by hitting Ctrl+Shift+O!), and edit them in Gimp. Once I’ve saved them, they show up in Picasa, where I mark them with a star and tag them. I mark them with a star because I save all my photos, even the “rejects”, but if I ever want to see just the “good” photos, I can filter by the starred photos in Picasa. After they’re tagged, I export them to my laptop harddrive (usually resized, sicne I don’t upload the full size images most of the time). This way I have them there for uploading, and so that if I’m on the road and someone wants to see a photo, I can pull it up.

Remember that Canvas Wraps actually wrap

I love the canvas wraps I have in my house, and I often debate ordering some more – but one thing you really have to keep in mind when ordering them is that part of the photo actually does wrap around the frame! For instance, here’s a picture looking up at one of my wraps hanging on the wall:

bottom part of a canvas wrap

As you can see there’s a good portion of the photo that’s not seen when you look at it straight on. So, before you order a wrap, make sure there’s not a vital part of the photo (like somone’s eye!) that’s going to to be hidden on the side of the wrap.

Use the crop tool to see the Rule of Thirds lines

You may know that the Select tool in Gimp has a Guides dropdown that allows you to see the Rule of Thirds guides as you select parts of your image, but if I want to quickly the guides on my photo as a whole, I prefer to use the Crop tool. Why? Well, it has the same guides dropdown, but the reason I prefer the crop tool is because if I make my select bigger than the photo itself, it “snaps” to the outside edge of the photo. If you try this with the select tool, it doesn’t do the same thing – so in order to select the whole picture you have to actually carefully select just the photo. The crop tool is just easier!

Now I know where I was!

Take photos of signs

When I go on photo walks, I like to take photos of signs of where I am. It isn’t because I necessarily think they’ll make good pictures, but mostly so that when I finally get around to editing the photos (sometimes a month later), I can remember exactly where I was! For instance, when I went to Conneticut earlier this month, I went on a walk around Williams Park, which I’ve been to a handful of times but can never remember what it’s called. With a photo of the sign, it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember!

Put the camera down!

Feeling frustrated? Not like your photos? Sometimes I think the best solution for a creativity block is to just put the camera down for a few days. Don’t force yourself to take photos just to do it. From my personal experience, at least, I started to resent the camera and found I wasn’t taking pictures because I wanted to but because I felt I should. Once I took some time away and picked up my camera because I wanted to, everything felt much more natural and I started to get better photos.

Lie down for a different perspective

Some of my favorite photos have been taken while lying on the ground. Don’t take all your photos from standing up or sitting down. Get up high and down low for some different perspective.

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f/4.0; 50mm; 1/100sec; ISO 400

I know there are Cross-Processing filters available for Gimp and Photoshop, but sometimes I just prefer the simple method of adjusting my curves to give it that Cross-Processed look.

To show you what I’m talking about, here’s the photo I’m starting with – all I’ve done is converted it from RAW using UFRaw (upped the saturation during the process), and opened it up in Gimp:

Original Photo

Now, let’s edit it!

Getting Started

As always, the first thing I do when editing my photos is create a duplicate layer. The second thing I usual do is adjust the levels. All I did was move the left slider to the right a bit:

And that gives me this, which I really consider my “starting point” for editing:

With Adjusted Levels

Now, let’s play with the Curves to give it a Cross-Processed look!

Adjusting Curves

I’ve talked about adjusting the Curves when editing photos a number of times (with this post probably having the most examples), but up until this point, I’ve only ever talked about the Value channel, which lets you adjust the tonal value of each point in your photo – basically how light or dark certain parts of your photo are. But did you also know there are other chanels? Red, Green and Blue to be exact! And this is a way to make certain pixels in your photo more or less Red, Green or Blue.

Let’s take a look at at this particular curve for the Green channel (also, I cricled the channel drop-down in case you hadn’t noticed it before):

Green Curves

See the Black-to-white bar across the bottom? And the black to Green along the y-Axis? Think of the black to white as the “before” and the green bar as the “after”. At the left side of the curve, I have moved the curve below the line – so basically I’m saying for my darker pixels (x-axis is at the black end), I want them to have less green in them than they did before (y-axis is closer to black than pure green). On the right hand side of my curve I have moved my curve above the line – so I want my lighter pixels to have more green in them (x-axis is closer to white, y-axis is closer to pure green). Here’s what my Leaf looks like now:

After the Green Curves shown above

Notice that the leaf itself (which was one of the lighter parts of the photo) has more of a green tint to it, while the fence behind it – the darkest part of the photo – is more red (because there’s less green in it now).

Whether you understand all of that or not, I’m still going to show you one of my favorite combinations of Red, Green and Blue curves. First, set your Green curve like what I have above (it doesn’t have to be exact, just make a slight S-shaped curve like that). Change your Red curve to look like this:

Red Curves

Now make your Blue curve look like this:

Blue Curves

And that combination is what I call my Cross-Processed combination. This is what my photo looks like after applying all of that:

Cross Processed

Now, the important step! You can save those curves settings so you don’t need to look up this entry the next time you want to duplicate this Cross-Processed effect. Just click the little + sign next to the Presets dropdown:

Save it!

It will ask you for a name (I call mine xproc, if you care), and now you’ll have it forEVER. Actually, you won’t… because if you’re anything like me, you’ll lose it one day because even though you back up all your photos in case your computer crashes, you won’t remember to back up all your settings and preferences from Gimp, and you’ll lose all of them. Including these saved settings. You CAN back them up to a file using the little triangle next to the + sign and choose Export Settings to File.

Final Steps

No matter which method you like the best above, I’d still end with some sharpening, because this isn’t the sharpest photo ever. Even though FX-Foundry offers a bunch of different sharpening filters, I have to admit, I’m still a bit partial to the good old stand-by: the Unsharp Mask directly from Gimp itself (under Filters –> Enhance –> Unsharp Mask). My typical settings are as follows:

• Radius: 2.0
• Amount: 0.85
• Threshold: 4

And that gives me this:

All Done!

By the way, some of you may realize that I recently posted this photo on flickr but it looked slightly different. That’s because I also added a cyan and magenta layer to the photo, setting both layers to Screen mode at 10% Opacity. You can see that final image here.

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f/4.0; 105mm; 1/100 sec; ISO 400

When I first decided to download gimp and start editing my own photos, I was intimidated. I knew there were so many options when it came to editing photos because I’d see what others had done to their photos. So… where should I start?

To be honest, I don’t know where the best place to start is – maybe some people learn best by diving right in and following complex tutorials, but I prefer the little-by-little approach, and if you’re the same way, here are some basic tips when it comes to editing photos for the first time.

Disclaimer: I use Gimp to edit my photos, I’ve always used Gimp, so I’m writing from that perspective, but many of these tips apply to whatever editing program you decided to use.

Pick a Photo You Already Like

The first step to editing photos is selecting which photo you’re going to edit. I think it’s very important to pick a photo you already like. First of all, it’s much easier to improve a photo that you already like than to try and “fix” a bad photo – in fact, I personally frown upon trying to fix any photo by editing unless it’s the only photo you have of a particular subject and there’s no way of getting another. But I suppose that’s an entirely different topic. The other reason I think it’s a good idea to start with a photo you alredy like is that you’re probably going to spend a lot of time in Gimp (or the editor of your choice) as you start trying different things, and I’d hate to have you staring at a photo you don’t even like that entire time!

For this entry, I’m going to start with this photo, from a recent vacation that I went on – this is the photo completely unedited:

Pretty, but a bit bland

Create a Duplicate Layer

I mention this one in almost every Gimp tutorial I write, but I think it’s especially important when you’re new editing Think of layers as a stack of papers – some can be semi-transparent, some are solid layers, some of stuff cut out of them so you can see the piece of paper below it, etc. When you first open Gimp, you have one piece of paper with your photo on it, and you could start making changes to that piece of paper, but then if you wanted to compare that change to the original, or get rid of that change completely, the only way to do that is to undo. If you create a duplicate layer first, you now have two pieces of paper with your photo on it, you can make changes to the top piece of paper and make it invisible in order to compare it with the original, or just delete it if you don’t like the changes at all.

To create a Duplicate Layer in Gimp, you can either press Shift+Ctrl+D, go to Layer –> Duplicate Layer, or right click on the Layer in the Layers dialog and select “Duplicate Layer”.

Start with Levels

I first talked about levels a long time ago, and you can read more details there, but the quick version is that you can use levels to make the dark part of your photos darker and the light part of your photos lighter. This is a great way to add some contrast to your photos, and is such a great thing to start with if you’re new to editing photos because all you have to do is move some sliders, and you can see the changes to your photo as you slide them.

To bring up the Levels dialog, go to Colors –> Levels.

For this particular photo, I wanted to make the darks darker, but left the light part of the photos alone. Here’s what my Levels dialog looked like:

Making the photo look like this:

A good first step, I like the freshness of the colors more now

Play with Layer Blending Modes

Remember how I said layers were like pieces of paper all in a stack? Well, that analogy falls apart a bit when I start talking about Layer Blending Modes. I can’t seem to put into words what Layer Blending Modes are, but the idea is basically that you can take a layer and make it have an effect on the layer below it. Different Blending Modes will have different effects. I reviewed all the different Layer Blending Modes in this post, but I’m only going to mention the two right now – Overlay (or Soft Light) and Screen.

Overlay and Soft Light always give me the same result. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not.

So, try this with your photo – create another duplicate layer and then switch the blend mode to Overlay like so:

It should add even more contrast to the photo, and in particular for this photo, I think it made the details in the flower really stand out:

Even the background colors look deeper now.

Now switch the blend mode to Screen. This is going to make the photo much lighter. The only reason I really mention this is because if this is your first attempt at editing photos, I’m going to assume you’re not shooting in RAW yet, and the easiest way to make an underexposed photo look properly exposed with shooting in JPG is to use the Screen mode. It’s making my photo look really washed out (as you can see below), but keep this in mind for some of your too-dark photos!

Oh my - a bit washed out now!

If you change the Blending Mode, and like the effect, but think it might be a bit too much, play around with the opacity slider (shown on the left), to make that layer a bit more transparent, which will then decrease the overall effect it has on the photo.

As for this photo, I’m going to use the Overlay blend mode at 75% Opacity.

If playing with Layer Blending Modes is really getting you excited (and I don’t blame you – I love ‘em!), I suggest you check out these two entries on iffles.com – Using Duplicate Layers and Using Solid Color Layers.

New Layer from Visible

Let’s say you liked the look of your photo with a duplicate layer set to Overlay at 75% opacity, but you still wanted to do something else to the photo – like sharpen it, which is what I’m going to talk about next. If you were to do it to the top layer, you’d only be sharpening the layer that’s at 75% opacity. If you were to sharpen the layer below it, you wouldn’t be sharpening the Overlay layer. So, if you want to sharpen everything that you see now, you’d want to create a new layer that looks like exactly what you see now. To do that go to Layer –> New From Visible

Note: This will put the new layer directly above whatever layer you currently have selected. So if you happened to have the base (non-Overlay) layer selected, it’s going to put it below the overlay layer, which is going to make what you see change because you’ll be applying the overlay to the new-from-visible layer, so it’s like applying the overlay twice. If this happens, just drag that layer to the top! Did that make sense? If not, just ask… I’m not sure I worded that well…

Sharpen

There are about 5.3 million different ways to sharpen a photo in Gimp. Or at least it feels like that sometimes. For your first time, I’m going to suggest the oldie-but-goodie “Unsharp Mask”. To pull it up, go to Filters –> Enhance –> Unsharp Mask. If you care about what all the values in this dialog stand for, check out this post. If not, just throw in the same numbers I usually use, which are 2, .85, and 4, as shown below:

Now watch your photo as the filter completes, because often the difference is so subtle that you won’t notice it unless you actually watch it change. Or, if you have a duplicate layer (or a New from Visible) layer, you can just make the layer invisible/visible to see the before/after.

You can see my final sharpened photo at the top of this entry.

Next Steps

If you’re using Gimp, I would definitely suggest downloading some scripts. You can search the gimp plug-in registry or, if you’d like to see which ones I’ve reviewed here on iffles.com, check out the Gimp Script Showcase category. Gimp Scripts are very much like Photoshop Actions (I’m assuming, as I’ve never actually used Photoshop) – they’re just things you can run on your photos in order to give them a certain effect – like vintage, cross-processed, warm or cool the photo, etc.

The next thing I would suggest is to search for gimp tutorials. Just searching google will bring up a bunch, but if you’re into the video kind, I highly recommend Meet the Gimp.

Finally, if you’re ever curious about what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, you can follow my flickr stream – as I write down the editing process I use in every single photo I upload. In the interest of saving me some time, I don’t upload the originals, too, but if a process every sounds interesting enough that you’d like to see the original for comparison, I’m always willing to upload it.

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f/4.0; 1/30sec; 105mm; ISO 400

I know a handful of digital photographers that don’t edit their photos much – if at all. I have a lot of respect for those photographers, actually. Not only because they can create beautiful photos without touching them up, but because they can actual resist the urge to edit.

That being said, I think there’s a lot of good reasons to edit your photos. It’s not because I think it fixes bad photos, it’s because I think it transforms good phtoos into interesting photos. It gives them an extra pop, a new perspective, or a creative twist.

I’ve gotten asked a few times how I know what to do with a photo once I open it in Gimp. Sometimes, the photo just speaks to me, and I know I want to just adjust the curves, or transform it into black and white, but often I don’t know what to do with a photo, and I’ll play around with it until something jumps out as being “right”.

And so, the concept of this post is simple. One photo, edited four different ways.

The original photo can be seen above, though I feel I should probably mention when I say something is “Straight Out of Camera”, that’s not really true. I shoot in RAW, and the photo you see above has been converted to a jpg by running it through UFRaw.

Adjusting Curves

This is pretty much the first thing I do to almost every photo. I wrote about using curves back in these entries. In this photo, as with most photos, I wanted to use a simple S-shaped curve. However, because the budding flower was already starting to look a little blown out, I kept the right part of the curve just about on the line instead of pushing it over and blowing out the bud too much. Here’s what my curve looked like:

Here’s what the edited photo looked like:

Adjusted Curves

Not a huge difference. This is actually where I stopped when I originally posted this on my flickr account, though. Sometimes, all it takes is a subtle difference for me to really like a photo.

Black and White

It might seem a bit odd turning a photo of a flower – known for the color they add into the world – into black and white, but I think black and white photos really bring out the contrast and texture in photos, and I love the texture of the bud of this flower, so I’m gonna try it.

I started with my curves-adjusted photo above instead of the original. Then, the way I usually convert to black and white is to use Lasm’s Channel Extract from FX-Foundry. I liked the Green layer the most, which looked like this:

Green Channel

I wanted to adjust the levels, though, to make the darker parts a bit darker and to lighten up the mid-tones. Here’s what my Levels window looked like:

This makes my final B&W photo to be this:

Black & White

A lot of times when making a black and white photo, I check it out in a different tone by using the “Eg Duotone Simulation” script from FX-Foundry. Running that using the Sepia (red) tone gives me this:

Duotone

I’m just throwing that in as a bonus edit… so perhaps I should call this post One Photo, Four and a half Ways :)

Warming and Cooling

Remember the Warming and Cooling Filters? When I wrote that post, I had a lot of fun editing a flower photo and pushing the limits of that filter, so I tried it again with this photo. The first thing I did was duplicate my curves-adjusted photo again to a new layer. Then I ran the Brauer’s Warm filter and set it to overlay at 100% opacity and that gave me this:

Brauer's Warm

I love this. I feel it both warmed it up and gave it more definition – especially the leaf in the background.

Lomo

There is one script I probably use more often than any other when editing photos. Anyone who follows my flickr stream (and actually reads the “how I edited this” I put in the description of every single photo) probably already knows what it is. Hands down, it’s the Bercovich Lomo script that’s part of the FX-Foundry package. However, I rarely use it “as is”.

When that script runs it creates for layers – two that create a dark vignette border around the photo, one that adds a “white flare”, making the center of the photo even brighter and what I like to call the base layer, which is where the main photo manipulation actually happens. I understand the script is trying to duplicate a certain type of photography, so I know why they made that manipulation look the way it does, but I rarely like it as-is. What I do think it works great as, though, is setting the blend mode to Overlay over your original image. And that’s exactly what I did with this photo. I also (as I often do), decreased the opacity of the white flare layer, down to about 60%. Here’s that image:

Bercovich Lomo

Comparison

Here’s the original photo along with all the edits so you can see them all “side by side”:

Original Photo

Adjusted Curves

Black & White

Duotone

Brauer's Warm

Bercovich Lomo

Do you have a favorite? Mine’s the Brauer’s Warm one, personally. But I think the point here is to really show how editing a photo can really change the feel of it, and also that I don’t think there’s any one right way to edit a photo, it’s just what you happen to think that particular photo is calling for on that particular day.

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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 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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