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

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Most Popular, Tips and Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.