Meet the GIMP!

I shot pictures of my colleagues at work for a farewell book. One image came out with a real drunkards nose - much too red. Not so nice.

I just doubled the layer, inverted it (Color/Invert) and set it to overlay mode. Ghastly. Then I added a layer mask in black, (hiding everything) and painted with a soft brush in white (with low opacity) over the nose. Worked really well. Gradually the skin looked better. This worked too on some blotches on the skin.

Sorry, I can’t show the image here.

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As I should have known, Belize is a small country in middle America. Next to Mexico and Nicaragua. I should have known because our fair traded Bananas are from Belize. But this video is not about Bananas, it’s about this image made in the shadow on a bright tropical day.

You see the problems in the original top-left. The background is a bit too bright  and the woman way too dark. But two layers in overlay mode of an inverted desaturated copy of the image helped a lot. The final touches came by applying a layer for dodging and burning, also in overlay mode, and painting on it in white. All Croat to you? (Not Greek this week, see this blog entry.…) No problem, after the video you’ll understand.

Overlay mode does strange things, even the explanation in the help pages is a bit cryptic: “Overlay mode inverts the pixel value of the lower layer, multiplies it by two times the pixel value of the upper layer, adds that to the original pixel value of the lower layer, divides by 255, and then multiplies by the pixel value of the original lower layer and divides by 255 again.” I’ll think about a way to get that a bit easier to swallow.

The Linux Darkroom is an interesting collection of links and program descriptions. Definitely worth to look at - and perhaps you have something to add.

You can find the file used in this episode at the usual place.

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