Lilahpops

A curves adjustment can dramatically change the look of your photo

I took this photo the other day on my way home from work.

This friendly fellow was hanging about with his horse pals under the tree in the background to the right. That was going to be my composition, some horses crowding into the shadows of the tree to escape the glare of the sun. But as soon as the horses saw me at the fence they decided to come over and say ‘Neigh‘.

I had the camera on auto settings, the only change I made was to set the macro. Being a lovely rural area I wanted to give it a more country feel. The result ended up looking quite ‘retro’. So, “Bring out the GIMP!” and let’s get started.

A quick word about GIMP

I have written previously about the GIMP here. GIMP is similar to Photoshop but it’s free. You can find out more about it and download your own copy at the GIMP Website and there is a manual available at GIMP Documentation. I found the following post extremely useful in downloading GIMP for Mac:

• How to install GIMP on Mac OSX

Saturate the colours

The first thing I did was a quick auto-levels adjustment at Colors -> Levels -> Auto. Then I bumped up the saturation at Colors -> Hue-Saturation and moved the saturation slider up to 50.

Now for the curves adjustment.

Go crazy with curves

I’m relatively new to curves and have recently been experimenting with the color channels. I followed the advice at Layers magazine on boosting the individual RGB color channels.

See the difference each change makes to the image:

Red color channel

Green color channel

Blue color channel

Tighten the image with a crop

A quick crop, making sure to keep the fly-away hair of the mane intact.

Almost done. The image is now too saturated so back to Colors -> Hue-Saturation and move the saturation slider down to -20. Experiment with the different saturation and curves settings for the best results.

Et voila! Click the image above to view it at a larger size in Flickr.

Save your image

I have been saving the image in the its native GIMP .xcf format and then saving a .jpg copy to load to Flickr. To save it as a .jpg or .png etc go to Image -> Flatten image and then choose File -> Save As …

Related posts

• Saturate the colors in a photo with GIMP
• How to resize an image in iPhoto
• Add special effects to your images with iPhoto
• Use the tools in iPhoto to edit your images

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:

• How to install GIMP on Mac OSX

Related posts

• Give you photos a retro feel with the GIMP
• How to resize an image in iPhoto
• Add special effects to your images with iPhoto
• Use the tools in iPhoto to edit your images