148 - gimp week

So I wanted to do some gimping that did not involve color boosting as the main fix. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get to that this time around. I really like photos that have an antique-look to them. Or photos that have a prairie-look to them. I haven't yet taken a photo that I've been able to properly prairie-ize, so I present to you the last photo for this gimp week series.



It is, once again, of the color boost variety. This is a self portrait, as seen through Ian's sunglasses, when I was in Santa Fe for a conference recently.

147 - gimp week

This is another photo re-do. The original made an appearance on the blog exactly one month ago. It was published to the blog at a time when I was really seeing the advantage of boosting colors and contrast. I saw the original, and it just looked so dull, especially since I wanted to depict the awesomeness of what happened to this tree after being struck by lightening!

So here you have it. The photo re-do.

This tree was struck by LIGHTENING!

146 - gimp week

Welcome to the barn, where I live. We have the greenest grass and trees in the entire world. Or at least Gimp will make you think so.

For this photo I adjusted the color curve to resemble the one below.



I don't even know what is on each scale, but I know that this new color curve makes me happy. The curve started as the straight diagonal line through the center. I pulled the left end low and that seemed to majorly increase all of the saturation, which made the barn a bit more red and the grass and trees Very green. Then I pulled the right end high and that made the sky turn a very nice cyan, along with softening up the color of the roof of the barn.

145 - gimp week

For day 2 of Gimp week, I present to you this lovely photo of a dumpster. I had my polarizer on for this photo, so the blue sky was about as blue as it could be. Then I did some Gimp magic. I selected a small box just around the dumpster and made it extra-red. Then I selected a rectangle at the top that included all of the blue sky and made it slightly more blue, but I couldn't go too crazy or the trees that cut into the rectangle would have been all messed up. Then I just boosted the saturation to a really high amount. I think I might have lessened the lightness (thereby making it slightly darker) just a tad too.

Ta. Daa.
I actually took this photo specifically for using it in Gimp and playing with the color saturation since the blue and red were so great to start with. The edited version is SO much more vibrant, and I love it!

144 - gimp week

Hello all. I'm trying something new for this week. Lately I have been editing a lot of photos using Gimp which is basically a free equivalent of photoshop. It wasn't super easy to start using, but after playing around with it for months, things are going more smoothly. I didn't want to be one of those people who was always editing photos. In fact, I even refused to crop photos until I got to my seventy-first photo. But now I am starting to learn to use edits as more of an extension to the camera. I still strive to get exactly the photo I see with my eye, but sometimes I like to edit the photos in ways that are totally not possible to do with a camera alone.

So for this week (and possibly times in the future as well) I present to you all photos that have been edited in ways in which I prefer the result over the original photo.

For today, I present to you a better version of the tulip from last month.


This is how bright these tulips actually looked. However, they were located in a sort of median, and so, with cars on all sides of me, I ended up being careless and not paying attention to the fact that I was over exposing my photos. But alas, Gimp saves the day, and returns my photo to what I had envisioned.