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It’s just a bit after Midnight here in Germany – and so at least for nearly half the world still Friday, July 24th. And that is the second birthday of Meet the GIMP.

I cover two questions for this is the first HD show – and it took ages to render. I will have to adjust my workflow. I start with a problem of Ivo, the producer of Autozine – an online car magazine made with GIMP. He wants to change reality a bit and move letters around in an image.His images are in the companion file.

Then I tackle selective sharpening again after I got a question about how to further control the sharpened area. In episode 6 I constrained the sharpening to the edges in the image – here I reduce it to parts of the image.

In case that you wonder why there is no sharpening while I paint the antenna – have a look at the “eyes” in the layers dialog box…..

This post will be updated tomorrow – then there will be also a mobile version and the companion file. Good night!

Mobile version of the vido is in the making is ready – I hope it will play everywhere.

There are comments about problems with iTunes and this episode. Is there anybody who can play this in iTunes?

The Mobile Version is a quick and dirty build with Handbrake. Does it play? Where? Where not? And why is it so large? Update: newer version in a bit larger and different encoding. Please check!

Tags: clone tool, selective sharpening
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial, meetthegimp | 55 Comments »

 

 Podcast Video (28.3MB) [30:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Torrent: Download
 The files used in this video: Download

Again I steal an idea from the forum. It’s making fake tilt shift images. They look like images of model railway landscapes but are made from reality. Have a look at the forum for links to images by Bert and others.

I do half of the work in this podcast – planning the image and give the real world a plastic look. Next week I’ll add the focus blur that is so typical for macro shots.

But at the start I show that I have learned something from Philippe: Look carefully at an original. The image on the right is a H0 scale model in the sand on the Weser beach – real plastic.

The companion file contains the original shots – the xcf will follow next week.

The TOC

00:30 Fake tilt shift images
01:50 Analyzing a macro shot of a toy
05:30 The real image
06:30 What shall be in the focus?
13:00 Rotate before crop and resize
16:00 Inside out crop
17:30 Scaling down
18:00 Analyze the plastic look
19:30 Selective sharpening
24:30 Unsharp mask for getting the plastic look
28:50 Specular highlights

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Tags: inside out crop, selective sharpening, sharpening, tilt shift, unsharp mask
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 4 Comments »

 

 Podcast Video (38.7 MB): [18:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Torrent: Download

Every digital image needs sharpening. But sharpening increases the noise in the image. In this episode I show a way to sharpen only the areas that need to be sharpened – the edges between different colours or levels of brightness. All the other parts of the image are left alone and so the noise stays down.

Sharpening should always be the very last thing you do with your image.

Chris Marquard explained sharpening in Photoshop Corner No. 4 in his Tips from the Top Floor podcast.

I got the described method from the Gimp tutorial page.

Wikipedia describes the underlying process in this article about the unsharp mask. The links at the bottom of the page are very informative.

Meet the GIMP! is now listed in iTunes and Podcast Alley. If you like the show please let the people there know.
You can leave your comments on this blog, write me a or go to the Tips from the Top Floor Forum.

The TOC

00:22 Welcome
01:00 The original image
01:25 Why we want to selectively sharpen
02:38 Copy the layer and add a layer mask
04:00 Edge-Detect on the layer mask
06:40 Blur the layer mask
07:12 Increase contrast using curves
08:34 Sharpen the image
10:25 Fine tuning
14:35 How sharpening works
15:49 tips from the top floor
18:26 The End
TOC made by paynekj

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Tags: selective sharpening, sharpening
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 10 Comments »