GIMP has almost as many features as Photoshop but it doesn’t cost the earth.
I visited the Leuralla Toy and Railway Museum the other week and took this photo of an old warning sign.
It’s amusing but it needs some work, right? Being an old-fashioned sign I wanted to add a vintage feel to it. I also wanted to bring out the red in the paint to exaggerate the warning itself. This is where you can yell “Bring out the GIMP!”
Before exporting the image from iPhoto I gave did a quick crop and straighten.
That’s better.
Saturate and contrast
Next, I opened the image in GIMP and selected Colors -> Hue-Saturation and increased the saturation to 100. I also selected Colors -> Brightness-Contrast and increased the contrast to 40.
Now the text of the sign stands out and the red is nice and bright.
Add the vintage effect
Lastly, I added a vignette to give it a more vintage feel. I followed an excellent tutorial at gimpology.com on creating vignettes to do this, so I won’t repeat the steps here. (Note: I didn’t complete the last step of this tutorial which was to add a transparent magenta colour layer over the whole composition.)
And here is the final result. Click the image for a larger size in Flickr.
Makes you think twice about littering.
Try GIMP yourself
GIMP is my new favorite editing tool.
If you’d like to try out GIMP you can download it from the GIMP Website and there is a manual available at GIMP Documentation. I found the following post extremely useful in downloading GIMP for Mac:
