mmcirvin: (Default)
mmcirvin ([personal profile] mmcirvin) wrote2005-07-31 07:00 pm

Photo editing

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.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2005-07-31 05:24 pm (UTC)(link)
The screenshots are actually a little out of date, because I actually wrote the text and made the screenshots back in February, spurred by my father-in-law's need for advice on photo editing.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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

[identity profile] manfire.livejournal.com 2005-07-31 05:49 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2005-07-31 05:59 pm (UTC)(link)
So it does! I hadn't even noticed that. Definitely a change for the to-do list...

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2005-07-31 06:18 pm (UTC)(link)
...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.