Photo editing

[mmcirvin]

I wrote a very basic guide to editing your digital photos with GIMP. This does not tell you how to do anything fancy; it's more on the level of "what can I do to make a crappy picture look sort of OK?"

I hope it is of some use, and that experienced photography buffs do not get too upset that I didn't talk about layers and selection tools and the fancy things you can do with them. There are already tutorials for that sort of thing on the GIMP site; I wanted to fill the gap for beginners who just want to do basic photo improvement.

Comments

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Pretty useful. I was never quite clear on how to use Unsharp Mask myself, but you explained it well.

You might want to add something about using the perspective transforms to fix the barrel distortion that happens with a lot of consumer-oriented digicams.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, you can't fix barrel distortion with a perspective transform, not easily. You can make a stab at fixing it with the "Whirl and Pinch" filter, but it's tricky and not mathematically correct. You need something like the Pano Tools plug-in to do that right, and I've never managed to score a version that will work with Mac GIMP.

[kate_nepveu]

I was just bemoaning the lack of in-print, recent books on the GIMP, having found the documentation less than helpful. Some of this stuff I'd bumbled into myself, but a lot of it was new to me--thank you!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The screenshots are actually a little out of date, because I actually wrote the text and made the screenshots back in February, spurred by my father-in-law's need for advice on photo editing. I ran out of energy when it was time to convert the text to HTML, and it sat around on my hard drive until now; I was spurred to press on because samantha2074 just got an impressive new Sony digicam and similarly wanted editing advice. The free Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) plug-in for BBEdit (combined with the old standby HTML Tidy (http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/), and my venerable site templates) helped me do the rough cut, since its input format is pretty much what I use to mark up plain-text files.

It still needs a few typo corrections and markup refinements, and someday I'll probably redo the figures to reflect the considerably simplified Scale Image and Save As JPEG dialogs in recent GIMP builds, but I figured it was good enough to put up now.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

The current version of Gimp.app I'm using (based on GIMP 2.2.6) actually does have a preview window in the Unsharp Mask dialog box, which is nice.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

So it does! I hadn't even noticed that. Definitely a change for the to-do list...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Poking around, there are some other changes as well: the Rotate tool doesn't seem to start out in grid mode, so I might have to put some notation in there about that. It looks as if there's some feint in the direction of a live rotated-image preview, but it doesn't actually work.