CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-35. Red-eye can turn a sweet child into a demon! Now choose the Ellipse Select tool in the Toolbox (Figure 2-36).
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-34. Kestrel, sharpened with Unsharp Mask Fixing Red-eye Flash pictures of people, especially children, often exhibit red-eye: pupils reflect too much light from the flash, turning the eye a diabolical crimson. This is particularly noticeable in photos of children (Figure 2-35) since their pupils are especially large. There are lots of ways to fix red-eye, and the best ones require some advanced techniques. But here s a quick-and-dirty method that will work fairly well for most photos. First, zoom in on the image, using the View . Zoom menu, the Zoom button near the lower-left of the image window, or the + key. Zoom in a lot. Make the pupils nice and big. We ll change one pupil at a time.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-32. The Unsharp Mask dialog Unlike Sharpen, which can only create fairly subtle changes, Unsharp Mask can easily go too far in sharpening an image (for instance, see Figure 2-33). In fact, I find that the default values are usually already too extreme, and I decrease them slightly. Figure 2-33 shows the effect of the default values on the kestrel; Figure 2-34 shows what happens if I decrease Amount to 4, and increase Threshold to prevent the sky from becoming grainy. Figure 2-33. Too much sharpening makes an image look grainy or can give it a halo!
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Here s what the kestrel looks like when sharpened (Figure 2-31). Figure 2-31. The kestrel after sharpening. The effects of Sharpen are usually fairly subtle. For more extreme sharpening, use Unsharp Mask (Figure 2-32). Don t be misled by the name, which comes from the details of how it works. Unsharp Mask makes an image much sharper not less sharp but it does that by making a blurry copy of the image, and then using that as a mask for the sharpening operation. Like Sharpen, it brings up a window with sliders and a preview area, but it has three parameters you can control, and it s capable of sharpening an image much more than the standard Sharpen. Fiddle with the three parameters of Unsharp Mask and see what they do. Generally speaking, Radius affects the distance over which the sharpening works; make this bigger for large images, or very fuzzy ones. Amount controls how strong the effect will be; make this as small as you can so as not to over-sharpen and end up with a grainy image, or with halos around the object you re hoping to sharpen. Threshold controls the smoothness of the image; if you end up with grainy areas that should look smooth, such as the sky, an adjustment here may help.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-29. The Enhance submenu Sharpen is very simple (Figure 2-30). It has a slider to change the amount of sharpening, and a preview window to show what the effect will look like. Scroll the preview window to the appropriate part of the image, or use Preferences to increase the preview size. Figure 2-30. The Sharpen dialog
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Sharpening Alas, our images aren t always as sharp as we d like. (Blame it on the camera s autofocus! Yes, that s it!) For instance, the kestrel in Figure 2-28 came out a little out of focus. Figure 2-28. A kestrel, out of focus. The GIMP can sharpen it! The GIMP can t work miracles, but it can go a long way toward sharpening an image that s a little fuzzy. It offers several different sharpening methods. The two most important are Sharpen and Unsharp Mask, both located in the Filters . Enhance submenu of the image window (Figure 2-29).
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-27. A rotated image (not clipped) The Rotate tool has quite a few options. Transform Direction changes the direction of the rotation, and the Preview options work along with it. While Backward and Grid work perfectly for an image with a tilted horizon, there are other times when you want to rotate an object and see exactly how it will look. In this case, set Transform Direction to Forward, and Preview to Image or Image+Grid. Affect lets you apply the rotation to the whole image, or just one layer or path. Interpolation affects the quality of the rotated image. Unless your machine is very slow, you ll probably want to change this to Cubic or Lanczos. Supersampling improves the quality of the image still more, at the cost of being slower. Clip result will crop the rotated image to the same size as the original, as already noted. Constraints lets you restrict the rotation to be an even multiple of 15 degrees. If you don t check this option, you can still constrain the rotation by holding down the Control key while rotating.
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CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS Figure 2-26. The Rotate tool in action: lining up the grid lines Notice that rotating makes the picture larger: the corners hang off the edges of the image. Behind the image, you see a gray checkerboard pattern. This pattern isn t really part of the image; it s how the GIMP represents transparency. Your rotated image is now on a transparent background. If you would prefer that the image be cropped to its original dimensions, with no transparency added, the checkbox for Clip Result in the Rotate tool options will do the crop for you. Alternately, you can increase the image size to show the corners using Image . Canvas Size.
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