to whom it may concern

Note: someone else called this an isaac-edit. I only borrowed the term for the title. Definitely not narcissism, just a poor attempt at humour.

That may or may not have been necessary.

I’ve only just started to notice how much Calvin & Hobbes is a cleverly structured satire on American culture and society. To a degree it’s completely obvious and up-front, as seen in the above excerpt, but… yeah. Cheers to you, Bill Watterson.

An oddly large number of people have asked how the stuff in photog is done. My photo work (not really inclined to call it ‘photography’) can more or less be summed up in the same way as Calvin describes real life vs tv. Hyper-reality, I suppose. Lights and shadows and perfect faces.

I mean, really, the stuff I do is really straightforward. The idea is just to show you the world through brighter eyes, and it really doesn’t take a whole lot of work to make that happen. Not to ruin the suspense or anything. (Actually, to completely ruin the suspense, scroll all the way to the bottom before reading futher.)

But, as long as a few of you want to know how to achieve similar effects.. wish granted. Begin.

gnu image manipulation program – GIMP

GIMP is a fantastic raster image editor that can be reasonably called a photoshop replacement for people who aren’t likely to be familiar with photoshop, as they won’t know the difference anyway. Also, it is cheaper. As in free.

Your first step is to procure a copy. Windows users can download the installer here, which I think should take care of most of you. Linux users either already have a copy or are intelligent enough to get one on their own, and Macfolk probably already have photoshop because they can afford it. (Some of us have to pay for school. >_>)

grab the source photo

For the purposes of this psuedo-tutorial, we shall use the image linked just above, lent by the estimable anthony r hook.

Go ahead and open it up within GIMP (File → Open).

quick tour

Take a couple moments to get an idea of where stuff is within GIMP. By default, there are two system windows – one on the left with the tool palatte pallate palate palette, and one on the right with the layer manager in the top half and some other things in the bottom that you can probably figure out with a good work ethic and an iq of more than 60.

When you open the image, note that it appears in its own independent window and can be put wherever you like. (Bonus points if you can make the windows look like the face of Marilyn Monroe.) Also note the menu bar at the top of the image window – File, Edit, blablabla Filters. All of these can also be accessed by right-clicking on the image itself, which could conceivably save you at least three seconds in total by the time we’re through here.

the only heading I can think of is “curves are attractive”

Curves are possibly the most important tool you will ever use.

I recommend that you write that line down and repeat it to yourself in bed at night. Then make sure you know how to open the Curves dialog (Colors → Curves) and scratch a diagram of the dialog-opening into your left forearm until it forms scar tissue. Probably a better conversation starter than whatever you currently have on your coffee table.

As indicated in this screenshot, I typically use an S curve on the Value channel (channel selector’s near the top of the Curves dialog). If you’re still with me at this point, you’ve likely gathered how this thing works – pure black is in the lower left, pure white is in the top right. Dragging points on the curve has the effect of redistributing light and shadows, as it were. This sort of S deepens the shadows and intensifies the light, which (you may have guessed) is pretty typical of my photos.

I do a similar thing with the Red channel, though not quite as drastically. Lowering the curve in the lower left removes red from the darker portions of the image, which has the effect of making the shadows look more blue-green. Raising the top-left a bit makes the light warmer. The two points in the curve combined make the photo look just a bit more.. old-school?

Blue gets sort of dipped completely, if that makes any sense. Removing blue makes everything more red/green, again warming the light.

I didn’t touch the Green channel for this one, but feel free to experiment. “Always experiment.” That one can be tattooed on the back of your right hand.

Before clicking OK, toggle the Preview checkbox at the bottom of the dialog. This will show you the before and after versions of the photo, which might surprise you the first time you do this. If you get the curves right (“right”, whatever, there’s more than one “right” in this case), you’ll have achieved the hyper-reality effect that I mentioned earlier, and it may give you pause when you realize how bland the original – and by extension, a large portion of life – actually is.

Leastwise, that’s what it does to me.

v is for vicarious vignetting

Wiktionary defines a proper vignette as a picture which vanishes gradually at the edge. Such a vignette effect looks sort of like this.

What we are doing here is not a proper vignette. Quite honestly, I think the proper vignette is tacky and rarely used tastefully.

That said, I’m not even sure what to call this. If you have a better term, do enlighten me.

Grab the Ellipse Select Tool from the palette (or hit the E key), and draw an ellipse as shown in this screenshot. (Hint: the selection can be moved and resized after it’s initially plotted.) Right-click on the selection and go to Select → Feather. Enter 550 pixels as the feather selection value. Right-click the selection again, click Select → Invert. Copy your selection (ctrl+c or Edit → Copy) and paste (ctrl+v or Edit → Paste). If you look over to the layer list in the right-hand GIMP window, you’ll see that a “Floating Selection” layer has appeared. Click the New button (the little page with a yellow star in the corner, left-most button under the layer list). See the little eye buttons next to the two layers you have? Click the one next to the “Background” layer.

You may or may not have any idea what you just did, but hiding the original layer like that should have cleared things up. Basically, you created a fuzzy frame to go around your photo’s subject matter – in this case, the tower – and put it in a layer of its own to be manipulated. The Feather function “feathers” the selection (e.g. makes it fuzzy; I typically use a feather value of roughly half of the selection’s width, but feel free to… feather to taste, I guess), and Invert simply inverts the selection so that we’re selecting the outer part of the photo, rather than the ellipse in the middle.

I’ll now assume all of that made sense and move on.

layer blending (or: modes are your friend)

Before proceeding, turn the Background layer back on (little eye thing).

Now look just a little bit upward – see the Opacity and Mode selectors? Opacity controls opacity (cleverly), and Mode controls awesomeness. Open up the Mode drop-down selector and observe. These are generally known as “blending modes”, and are defined by About.com as “allow[ing] you to adjust how one layer or color mixes with the colors in the layers below.” For the programmers and/or math majors among you, this definition should suffice.

At some point in time, I recommend that you open up a random photo in GIMP, duplicate it (right-click the layer and click Duplicate Layer), select the duplicate and go through all of the modes available to you. Having an understanding of what each one does is important – a lot of cool (and/or useful, but useful isn’t as fun) stuff can be done with these.

Of them all, I most often use Multiply. Followed by Hard Light, Overlay, Screen and Value, in that order.

And yeah – surprise – we’re going to use Multiply. Ensure that you have the vignetteish layer selected and change its mode to Multiply, as shown in the screenshot. This has the effect of intensifying the light/shadow/color surrounding the subject of the photo, which is both cool (y) and makes the stuff in the shadows less distracting. (Actually, I’m also going to go in at this point and darken the stuff in the bottom further – screenshot of what I’m doing.)

the end, and some epilogue things

And that’s more or less all there is to it. This wasn’t a terribly extreme edit, I grant you, but it should give you some ideas to work with. More could be done on this one, likely – were I a little more motivated, I might consider using the Clone tool to remove the branches sticking in from the left edge of the frame. Though this raises an important point – I try not to mess with what a photo contains. Most often, I don’t alter reality – I enhance it. (Or what I consider ‘enhancing’, at any rate.) My goal is to draw your intention to another way of looking at the world, and yeah, that occasionally involves removing distractions, but the priority isn’t ever to clean it up. It’s… to make life look like I think it was meant to be seen. Make it look its best.

Just… for the record. The final image is available here in fullsize, but don’t focus on making it look like that. Look at the original, and make it more alive. … Or dead, depending. Just keep in mind that death can also be vibrant.

Hit me up with questions, if you wish. Send me stuff you’ve worked on, if you like.

Cheers –

Tags: blathering, calvin and hobbes, gimp, humanity, tutorial | Hackery, Visual | Comment? (several)

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