Gimp 2

work in progress

This page will highlight and explain the curriculum offered in GIMP 2.

Working with Digital Photos

From the first GIMP class we should be familiar with rotating and cropping tools. These two tools are very useful in righting skewed photos. While rotating, one good way to ensure a flat horizon is to drag a false horizon down from the ruler bar to line your photo against as you rotate.

The crop tool allows you to easily trim out a perfect square from the tilted picture.

Once you are satisfied with the remaining image, there are a few ways to improve the color richness and clarity. My favorite is adjusting the levels but there are many different ways to manipulate the image's color.

Colors

Adjusting the levels of light in your photographs manipulates the color levels in your photos and fixes any brightness/contrast issues. The tool to do that is found under the image menu item Colours>Levels. It brings up a "Levels" dialog box.

You can ask GIMP to automatically find the best levels for your digital photographs by pressing "Auto" in this box. You must click "Ok" to finalize the adjustments.

It is also possible to manually adjust the sliders or use the eyedroppers to find perfect black, white etc. Hover the mouse over the eyedropper icons to see what reading it will take.

For color photos you can adjust the Red, Green and Blue levels separately for more control. This is quite useful in under or over-exposed pictures.

Washed out images will often also benefit from more Saturation, found under the Hue/Saturation tool, and over-saturated photos can be lightened with the levels or with Brightness/Contrast.

Experiment with the various color tools, it is an easy way to really change the tone of a photo, and don't forget you can always undo it if you don't like the changes!