This week I am absolutely late with the show. I recorded on the weekend and had to find out later, that I had messed up the sound.
As an emergency fill in I made this. It’s a project I wanted to do for a long time – and did now without anny planning and preparation. I even forgot to take a tripod for the video camera with me. But the lab provided a clamp for Erlenmeyer flasks. Worked great. 
I got the idea from Allan J. Ager and Simon Taylor from the Tips from the Top Floor Forum.
You can download the four finally used files and a shrinked xcf file as an archive. The full resolution output is here.
UPDATE: Newer versions of GIMP don’t add an alpha channel automatically to a new layer. Add one for each layer except the bottom one!
The TOC
00:24 Welcome
00:33 Introducing Simon Taylor
01:20 Taking the source images
04:23 Choosing the images to use
06:30 Select the parts to use
10:02 Fine tuning the edges
18:20 Fine tuning the individual pieces
23:40 Crop to the final size
24:30 Use copy visible to get a completed layer
25:40 Curves adjustment
28:44 The End
TOC made by paynekj
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.
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Tremendous, I loved every minute of it and, what’s more, another application o layers. Thank you.
Slip of the finger – of layers
Great show, Rolf. Filming yourself while photographing yourself while posing yourself. If you only had a video camera while posing, it would have been very Escheresque.
Those little remarks as “after this unpaid commercial” give these shows a nice personal touch. Keep it that way.
Finally, the Copy Visible option is something which I have been looking for quite some time. Until now I have been copying layer by layer and then merging the copies. I knew that there had to be a more elegant way. Thanks for this little secret.
Wow! This was a fun episode. Great work, Rolf.
Personally, I’d use layer masks for this sort of stuff, not the eraser. Other than that, yet another great video.
Also, one small tip: For navigating in the image when zoomed in, press the spacebar on the keyboard. When moving the mouse with that key pressed, the “focus” in the image will move.
Another very enjoyable episode and as always a great tutorial on GIMP itself. I look forward to each episode! I do have a variation of your project. If you trying to take a picture of something like a building that has people constantly in the way you can do the same technique of locking the camera’s exposure and taking multiple images over time as people move in and out of the frame. You can then take the images into GIMP and do the opposite of your video by adding the parts of the picture that do *not* contain the people and create a final image without the people.
@Serge: I thought about taking a picture of the video camera in the lab clamp. But forgot about that. Filming while filming me taking pictures of myslef would really have been a crazy touch.
@Torbjorn: Layers would have been the better alternative but I wanted to keep one level of complexity out of the process.
With layer masks I would have made the full layer invisible and revealed only the important parts.
@FG: You stole content from the next show!
That is indeed a good method to get rid of people and moving traffic. If you do this over a longer period, the moving shadows will make some headache.
(Again, my preference:) I would create a rough selection first and then add the mask with the “Selection”-option. In other words, exactly what you did, only instead of inverting the selection and deleting, I’d add the mask.
opps, sorry
@FG: No way for you to know. Keep on doing it!
I haven’t watched the show yet, but look forward to it. I did a similar thing recently that you can see on my photoblog.
Oh, awesome idea from FG! I’ve never thought of that
Hi, great tutorial, i enjoy it a lot. I did it with myself too.
The post itself is great but I had some trouble loading this post to my Ipod video. I hope this problem will not persist
Keep up the good work
@ Dejan: Interesting – I too could not get this episode to sync to my ipod. All the others have gone over fine. I don’t know what’s different with this one.
[...] followed this. We need video tutorials on digikam like [...]
Some time ago I did this:
My attempt With Gimp of course.
Great show! Btw, the link to this page (http://meetthegimp.org/episode-044-splitting-myself/) is missing on the “Get all videos” page.
[...] Episode 044: Splitting myself! [...]