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.