The Computer Club

Using the gimp, is quite fun and interesting. It has a lot and I mean a lot of features. Gimp is one of the most mature free software applications. Gimp states GNU Image Manipulation Program where you can mainly manipulate your digital images. Gimp specialized in rasterize and you usually will play around with the color tools.

So what do we look in the gimp, we can call a few:

• Photo color manipulation
  
• Photo retouching
  
• Superposition (image mesh)
  
• Drawing digital images
  
• Web prototyping
  
• Effect scripting
  

So let see the first two, both of this are very easy and rich to do on GIMP. Gimp includes a wide range on color tools and been applied to the photography. This tools include:

• Color-Balance
  
• Hue-Saturation
  
• Colorize
  
• Bright-Contrast
  
• Threshold
  
• Levels
  
• Curves
  
• Posterize
  

You might find all this tools under Colors AND the Tools menu. The use and combination of this tools will help you improve pictures that for example are too dark, or the flash shoot on a funny way. Pictures that have yellow light with no flash will be greatly improved balancing the color on the image.

Also combined with mask and layers and locks to manipulate the image at different layers. Other tools such as Paint tools will also combined some more fine tunning on images.

Photo retouching
To heal the image either for scratchs, blurs, or imperfections on the original photo. So let's get some basic knowledge on how to do this.

Reducing CCD Noise Images captured by a CCD or CMOS imaging chip will often have some noise present. This noise typically can be seen as RGB "flecks", especially noticable in the in the shadow areas of an image. The red and blue channels are especially susceptible. Higher ISO settings and higher ambient temperatures increase the likelihood of acquiring this noise along with your image.

Smart Sharpening In this tutorial I'll show you how to do smart sharpening of your images. Applying an unsharp mask to an entire image is not always appropriate. A really good example of this is when you have an image with a lot of high ISO noise or film grain; applying across-the-board sharpening will enhance the noise/grain and make it even more visible, especially in large prints. Often there will be large areas of the image that you know you don't want to sharpen (e.g. a blue sky--the blue channel tends to get a lot of noise).

Regardless if you are experience in image retouching, or you are just beginning using and retouching your images or want to take it to the next level and do a digital image from scratch make sure you check out the Gimp and also try the different tools and follow some the tutorials from the following sites:

Gimp.org Tutorials
Gimp User Group (GUG) Tutorials
Gimpology
Pixel2life
Tutorialized Gimp

Enjoy and start gimping. This tutorials are so awesome I even try a lame atempt to follow one of the tutorials. I might say that it wasn't perfect but it came pretty close to the original tutorial: