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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-25. The Rotate tool With the Rotate tool selected, click in the image to begin the rotation process. The Rotate dialog appears. You can use it to type in an explicit angle in degrees, or to change the center of rotation. Most of the time, though, you won t need to do that. If you have Preview set to Grid or Image+Grid, you ll also see a grid of lines drawn on the image. Now drag in the image and watch the grid change. The goal is to line the grid up to where the horizon should be in the image (Figure 2-26). When you re happy with how the grid lines up, clicking the Rotate button will rotate the image (Figure 2-27). Rotating a large image takes a while: GIMP s progress bar, at the lower-right of the image window, gives you an idea of how long the operation is taking.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Rotating The GIMP offers two types of rotation. One is a quick fix for images shot in vertical format, while the other, free rotation, is a more subtle tool that can correct minor errors made while shooting. Rotating by Multiples of 90 Degrees I shoot lots of verticals: photos where I rotate the camera by 90 degrees to the left or right in order to make an image that s taller than it is wide. That s fine, but when I put it on a website, or load it into the GIMP, everything s sideways! The camera doesn t know that the image should be rotated, so it just saves it in the normal way, wider than it is tall. (Some cameras are smart enough to notice when they re rotated, and save the information to a file. The GIMP currently ignores this information, though some future version may read it.) But fixing this in the GIMP is incredibly easy, using the Image . Transform menu. You can Flip Horizontally, Flip Vertically, Rotate 90 degrees CW (that s clockwise), Rotate 90 degrees CCW (counter-clockwise), or Rotate 180 degrees. (The Flips are different from Rotate 180 degrees because Flip makes a mirror image, while Rotate preserves left and right if you look at the image upside-down.) The final option in the menu, Guillotine, is a different operation (not a rotation) and will be discussed in Chapter 7. Free Rotation Do you ever shoot a photo of a landscape, and notice later that you didn t hold the camera perfectly horizontal? Okay, maybe you don t, but I have to confess I make that mistake from time to time. Fortunately, the GIMP comes to the rescue with the Rotate tool (Figure 2-25). Select the Rotate tool in the Toolbox. There are several other tools that look similar to it, but remember, you can always hold the mouse over a tool (technically: hover) and read the tooltip to remind yourself which tool is which. Now look at the tool options in particular, the Transform Direction option. For correcting a photo with a non-level horizon, set Transform Direction to Backward, and set Preview to Grid.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-24. An image with the colors inverted The Auto menu includes a set of automated functions useful for correcting photographs with poor exposure. They re worth trying if you have a difficult image you re trying to save; if you don t like the effect, there s always Undo. Equalize tries to spread the image s colors out among a wider range of intensities. Most of the time, you probably won t like the effect, but sometimes it brings out detail you didn t realize was there. White Balance tries to correct color casts, and often does a decent job. It s worth trying if you have an off-color image. Color Enhance makes the colors more intense usually too intense, but try it and see. Normalize helps adjust the exposure on under-exposed images. On images that are well balanced except for being too dark, it may help immensely, but if the image s levels are uneven, it will probably just make things worse. Stretch Contrast and Stretch HSV are similar to Normalize except that they operate on the three color channels independently. Sometimes they can help remove color casts.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Desaturate (Figure 2-23) removes the colors from an image, changing it to a grayscale image without requiring you to convert to grayscale mode. The three choices in the dialog let you choose the gray level three different ways, giving subtly different results. Desaturate has no preview, so you ll have to try it and use Undo if you don t like the results. Figure 2-23. A desaturated image Invert inverts every color in the image, turning it into its own photographic negative. This is most useful with black-and-white images, but can have an interesting effect on color images (Figure 2-24).
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Tip Threshold is particularly useful for scans of printed text documents and line art. If you end up with a few extra speckles of the wrong color, you can clean them up afterward using the GIMP s drawing tools (see Chapter 4). Posterize (Figure 2-22) reduces the number of colors in the image, creating a gaudy display like you might see on an artistic poster. You can achieve a similar effect by converting an RGB image to indexed mode, but posterize is a quick way to achieve this effect, and it still leaves you with an RGB image in case you want to do further editing. The effect is most obvious when you use a very small number of colors. Figure 2-22. A posterized image
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Options in the Curves Dialog The Linear versus Logarithmic buttons at the upper-right of the dialog control the way the histogram is presented, just as in Levels; they have no effect on the operation of Curves. At the lower-right are two buttons for Curve Type. By default, the Curves dialog will make a smooth curve connecting your control points; but if you want finer control than that, click on the Freehand button and draw your desired curve directly. At the lower-left are buttons enabling you to Save a curve, or Open one you ve previously saved. This may be helpful if you have a large number of images that all have basically the same exposure problems. Other Exposure Adjustments In addition to the three general tools for adjusting exposure, the GIMP s Colors menu has several other useful tools. Threshold (Figure 2-21) lets you map an image to black and white, adjusting the threshold point between the two. Like Levels and Curves, Threshold shows a histogram of the image s brightness. The area between the black-and-white sliders, colored blue, represents the range that will be white in the final image. You can drag the sliders directly, or mouse down in the histogram area and drag out the area that should be white. Figure 2-21. The Threshold dialog
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS As soon as you click on the line, the GIMP creates a control point: a handle you can use to grab the curve and drag it higher (brighter) or lower (darker). You can go back and click again on an existing control point and slide it up or down along the curve, or you can leave existing control points where they are and click somewhere else on the line to create more control points (Figure 2-20). If you need to get rid of a control point you ve made, just slide it all the way left or right to another control point or to one of the endpoints of the curve. Figure 2-20. Control points in the Curves dialog The advantage of the Curves tool (besides being fun to play around with) is that you can easily control which parts of the image are adjusted. The upper-right part of the curve corresponds to parts of the image that are already bright, while the lower-left part corresponds to darker areas. If most of the image is fine, but there are some bright areas that look blown out and you just want to tone those down, you can make a curve that s straight except at the upper-right, where it curves below the original line to make the bright areas darker. Then if the dark parts are too dark, you can grab the lower-left corner and drag it upward to brighten just those parts. You can make as many control points as you wish, and as complicated a curve as you desire, to fine-tune the correction you will make. (The catch is that such complex curves seldom accomplish much more than a single control point moved to the right place on the curve. But try it yourself. Experiment and see what you can do!)
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Color Correction Finally, at the top of the Levels dialog is a menu allowing you to choose a channel (Curves has one, too). Initially this is set to Value, which you can think of as meaning brightness ; but you can also choose Red, Green, Blue, or Alpha. The three color channels allow you to adjust color problems, such as a yellow cast from a photograph taken indoors without a flash. Color correction will be explored later, in the Correcting Color Balance section in Chapters 6 and throughout Chapter 8, but meanwhile, if you have an image that needs color correction, try using this menu in Layers or Curves. Alpha is a term meaning transparency ; you ll work more with transparency in Chapters 3 and 4. Curves The Curves dialog (Figure 2-19) adjusts many of the same values as Levels, but in a different way. Some people find it more intuitive than Levels; others less so. You ll probably find that you prefer one or the other; which one you use is purely a matter of preference. Figure 2-19. The Curves dialog In the Curves dialog, the horizontal bar at the bottom of the graph represents input values, just like the input graph in the Levels dialog. The vertical bar represents output levels. But you don t need to know that to use Curves. To begin using it, just click on the line and drag it up a little (to make the image brighter) or down a little (to make it darker).
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS HISTOGRAM GAPS If you open the Levels dialog on an image when you ve previously made a brightness, levels, or curves adjustment, you may notice gaps in the new histogram. What do the gaps mean? The following image shows gaps in the histogram after correcting brightness. Logarithmic mode is used to make the histogram easier to see. The gaps represent lost information. When the GIMP uses the input sliders to expand the tonal range of an image, some of the fine differences between pixels at the extremes of the image (in the very bright or very dark parts) may be lost. Lost information sounds bad, but most of the time, it wasn t anything you cared about, or you would have set the sliders differently. But you can see the result in the histogram when you look at the image. This also means that you can sometimes use the GIMP as a forensic tool, to tell whether someone else s image has been edited in this way. Another thing you may notice about the Levels dialog is the Auto button. This is theoretically comparable to the Auto Levels in some other photo-editing programs; but in practice, I find that it seldom helps photographs very much. (This may say more about which photos I try it on than it does about the GIMP s Auto Levels.) It s always worth a try; you can fine-tune from there if it doesn t do quite the right thing, and you always have the Reset and Cancel buttons if you don t like the effect.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS So input expands tonal range; then output restricts it. The leftmost input slider, which represents the blackest pixels in the image, gets mapped to wherever the black output slider is positioned; and likewise the right input slider gets mapped to the right output slider (Figure 2-18). Figure 2-18. The input sliders, after the image s tonal range has been expanded, map to the output sliders to compress the final tonal range. In most cases, full tonal range is a good thing; once you ve adjusted the input sliders to expand your image s tonal range, you wouldn t want to restrict it again. Most of the time, you may not need the output sliders at all. They re there for the rare cases when an image really needs to have a restricted range, or for images that are legitimately lacking some part of their tonal range (no highlights, or no shadows).
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