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CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING 387 Figure 10-7. Hard light is an easy and fast way to bring out color in an image that has no bright areas. The left half of the image is the original; the right half has been self-composited with Hard light. Using Overlay or Burn to Cut Through Haze I live near a major city, and it s frequently smoggy or hazy. When I try to take long-distance shots with my camera, I m often disappointed: objects that seemed perfectly clear to the eye are buried in haze in the photograph, as in Figure 10-8. Figure 10-8. You can barely see the city for all the haze.
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386 CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING Figure 10-6. Look at all the detail you can see in areas that were previously just mud, particularly the building at center right. Note In some cases, especially when you re just trying to lighten up a portion of a photo, you ll find Dodge mode works a little better. But most of the time, Screen is just right. Using Overlay or Hard Light When Light is Flat When you find yourself confronted by an image that s just way too flat and has no significant bright areas, self-compositing using Overlay or Hard light mode can help bring out color and detail. Hard light will tend to overwhelm any bright areas in the photo, so confine it to dull, washed-out images only. Figure 10-7 shows the striking difference it can make to a dull image. For images with very bright colors or a lot of detail, Overlay is more versatile.
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CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING 385 Let s take a look at some of the corrections you can make by compositing an image with itself. Using Screen Mode for Dark Images Sometimes you pick the wrong f-stop. Sometimes the camera guesses the exposure wrong. Especially aggravating, sometimes there just isn t enough light where you want to shoot such as in Figure 10-5. Figure 10-5. A dark indoor shot from Las Vegas When your picture comes out too dark, you can try to adjust the color, brightness, and contrast to get the perfect balance. But there s a much quicker way to get nearly ideal brightening. First, go to the Layers dialog and duplicate the Background layer. Next, change the resultant layer to Screen mode. Usually, that s all you have to do. In some cases, the result will be too light, but you can adjust that by turning down the Opacity slider. Other times, such as with this picture, the original was so dark you need to lighten it further. In that case, just duplicate the second layer and you ll get a third layer, already in Screen mode. The picture will become even brighter. Figure 10-6 is the result of two additional screen layers. Of course, if your second or third layer goes too far, you can adjust Opacity on just that layer to get exactly the right level.
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384 CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING But don t stop there. As long as your color layer is different from the original, you can apply layer modes to see yet another array of effects for instance, a red layer in Overlay mode turns the car purple while keeping the metallic look of the original blue paint (Figure 10-4). Figure 10-4. Overlay mode turns the car purple. Of course, you can make several copies of each part of the car and color them differently, or just paint solid colors on the overlay layer; you can make a two-tone, or add stripes. Then switch layers on and off to see which color or pattern you like best. (This is also a good way of testing hair colors on a photo of yourself before you take the plunge and dye your hair magenta!) Some modes, such as Multiply, will probably look strange at first. Don t forget to also try changing Opacity, which will usually make any mode give a workable result. It s very difficult to predict the effects of the layer modes on various color shifts you may make, even if you re experienced with these modes. The bottom line? Try them all and see. Improving Photos by Self-Compositing with Layer Modes Think way back to Chapter 2, where you used tools such as Levels and Curves to improve the brightness of an image. You can make similar changes by using layer modes, sometimes with a much better result. Just make a copy of the image, right on top of the original, and experiment with the layer mode of the top copy.
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CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING 383 Figure 10-2. Make a layer consisting of just the colored part of the car. Figure 10-3. Now that looks racier!
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382 CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING For instance, have you ever wondered what your car would look like in another color? A professional paint job costs a fortune, but with the GIMP it s both cheap and fun (Figure 10-1). Figure 10-1. The car is okay in blue, but would it look better in red? Begin by selecting the part of your photo you want to colorize using the techniques you learned in Chapter 5. In this case, that would be all parts of the car that are blue. Tip For this kind of operation, you ll often find that a combination of selection techniques works best. On the car, it was easiest to start with Fuzzy Select (Select Contiguous Regions), which caused some overrun. Then use the Lasso or the QuickMask to fill in selection gaps and cut away any excess. Copy your selection and paste it, which will make a new floating layer. As usual, convert it to a regular layer with the New Layer button (at lower-left in the Layers dialog). If you made the background layer invisible, your new layer might look like Figure 10-2. Now, color the layer. You can use the Colors . Colorify filter (Figure 10-3). Look for Colorify in the Filters menu in GIMP versions prior to 2.4. Or just use Fill With FG Color to get a flat color it won t look good right away, but it will look fine when you combine it with layer masks.
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Advanced Compositing CHAPTER 10 Compositing is a fairly general word. In its most general sense, it means combining two or more images of any sort even small elements such as a circle, a shadow, or a text layer to make a new image. You ve already been doing that throughout most of this book. In this chapter, I ll cover a more specific meaning: blending two or more existing photographs to make a new image. (In some cases, the two photographs may be copies of the same photograph, as you ll see.) You ll learn some tips for improving photos that weren t covered in the chapters on photo retouching, and tips for extracting detail from a photo that you may not have known was there. You ll learn to create artistic renderings of your photos (without needing GIMPressionist or similar plug-ins), and how to combine photos in interesting ways. You ll learn how astronomical photographs are made, and how to use astrophotography techniques to take photos you didn t think your camera could capture. Finally, you ll learn how to make panoramic images, including some tips on how to shoot them in the first place. The chapter will cover the following: Colorizing images Improving photos by self-compositing with layer modes Making photos into art: self-compositing with modifications Compositing unrelated images Image stacking Stitching panoramas Colorizing Images Did you ever have an old black-and-white photograph you wished was in color? Or maybe you have a color photograph, but you don t like the real colors. You may want to colorize a whole image, or perhaps just a part. Colorizing a black-and-white image is really just a variation on the sepia photo technique you learned in Chapter 8. Instead of using a light brown tone, just experiment with various colors until you hit the combination you re after. But what if you want to alter the colors in an image that already has color?
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 379 Summary By now you know how to create your own brushes, patterns, and gradients. You know all about perspective and how to use it when drawing, how to make shadows, and how to make text or other objects fade out using layer masks. And you have some idea of the effects you can achieve by combining the GIMP s many layer modes in your drawings. Next, it s time to revisit photographs, and see how you can use some of these same techniques to make your photos better, or to combine several photographs together . . . a process called compositing.
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378 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING In Figure 9-51, there are two segments. The first (leftmost) segment is active, since that s the one with the blue bar below it. Its left endpoint color is blue, and its right endpoint color is yellow. The second segment has a yellow left endpoint, and a blue right endpoint. Each segment will fade from the color at one endpoint to the other. How fast it will fade is controlled by dragging the midpoint slider (the white triangle). Drag it to the right, and you ll see more blue; to the left, and you ll see more yellow. Tip To make an abrupt cutoff, like Romanian Flag (as opposed to Romanian Flag Smooth ), make the left and right endpoints the same colors. You can control many aspects of blending, and add or delete segments, by right-clicking in the gradient to get a context menu (Figure 9-52). Figure 9-52. The Gradient Editor s context menu When you ve edited a gradient to your liking, the Save button adds the gradient to your GIMP profile. You don t need to choose a filename or file type for it: GIMP will handle that for you. Most people won t ever need to create or modify a gradient. But for those who do, GIMP s Gradient Editor gives you plenty of power to do whatever you need. Experiment and see what it can do for you.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 377 Making Gradients You can make your own gradients, too, by using the Gradient Editor. The easiest way to learn the Gradient Editor is to edit an existing gradient. Select a gradient similar to your goal, duplicate it, then click Edit to get the Gradient Editor (Figure 9-51). You can also find it in the context menus of the Gradients dialog (right-click on any gradient in the list, and then select Edit to edit that gradient, or New to make a new one). Figure 9-51. The Gradient Editor Caution Make sure you duplicate an existing gradient before running the Gradient Editor. If you try to edit one of GIMP s built-in gradients, many functions in the dialog won t work because the gradient will be opened as read only. At the top of the Gradient Editor is the name (for a new gradient, Untitled ). You can change this to the name of your new gradient. Below the name is an image of the gradient as it currently looks, and below that, an area for range selection sliders (the blue-and-white bar with black-and-white triangles). In the range selection area, black triangles define segments. Each segment has two endpoint colors. White triangles represent the midpoints of ranges. The currently selected range is blue; the others are white.
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