Falling Water Creek, somewhere in the Ozarks. This is another pseudo-HDR, made with UFRaw, GIMP and Qtpfsgui. I purposely underexposed and shot in RAW, then used UFRaw to make seven versions, each one stop lighter than the last. I created the HDR in Qtpfsgui and touched it up a little in GIMP.
This is a pseudo-HDR photo. I really don’t know much about HDR photography at all, but I figured I would give it a shot. I used just one image taken with my Nikon D3000 in RAW mode. I set the exposure for the lighter sky, because details can be brought out of the dark areas in RAW photos. I opened the image up with GIMP/UFRaw four separate times. Each time I changed the EV in UFRaw to be two steps apart and saved it as a new image. I had -2, 0, 2 and 4. Then I ran Qtpfsgui (worst name for a program ever) on the four images and used the Mantiuk method on them. This is the result. The landscape is not as bright as I would like, and there are some strange things going on in the clouds that I’m not really happy with, but overall I think it was an interesting exercise.
Taken just after sunset at Petit Jean Mountain.
I took this from the top of Petit Jean Mountain. I'm trying to learn how to photograph stars. I have plenty of room for improvement, but I think this one is pretty decent for a beginner.
My dog Ida shakes to dry off after getting a bath.
There are a lot of tutorials out there that tell you how to simulate tilt-shift photography (actually the technique is just tilt simulation, but I’ll call it tilt-shift since everyone else does) in Gimp. And those tutorials are okay, but all the ones I’ve seen take a rather simple approach that leaves some elements of the image blurry when they shouldn’t be. So here’s my way of making the best tilt-shift simulation in Gimp.
A good candidate for tilt-shift simulation is a photo that is taken from high up and far away from the subject. While it’s not completely necessary, the end result will be better if you choose an image with this perspective. For our tutorial, I have chosen this photo I took of Arkansas Nuclear One from the top of Mt. Nebo.
This is a completely unedited photo straight out of the camera. It was a hazy morning, so the photo lacks contrast and sharpness. We’ll take care of it in the next step.
Now you’ll want to do your typical photo editing, like adjusting colors and whatnot. One important step is to make sure your image is as sharp as possible. A particularly good method for sharpening is the high pass filter, but if you don’t want to install that plugin, you can use the less-effective Filters → Enhance → Unsharp Mask. If you use the high-pass filter, be sure to flatten the image afterward. Here is my photo after adjusting curves and sharpening:
On your layers palette, click the background layer and then click the duplicate layer button below the list of layers.
Make sure you have the duplicated layer selected, then click Filters → Blur → Gaussian Blur. The photo I’m working with is 10 megapixels, so I’m going to set the blur radius to 50. Your mileage may vary. Just be sure to look at the preview window and choose a blur radius that you’re satisfied with. Here is what my photo looks like after adding the blur:
In the layers palette, right-click the blurry layer and choose Add Layer Mask. In the dialogue box that pops up, choose to initialize the mask to White (full opacity). For more explanation of layer masks, check out my tutorial: Everything you need to know about Gimp layer masks.
From the toolbox, choose the Blend tool (I think it should be called the Gradient tool, but I digress). Set your foreground and background colors to black and white, respectively, by clicking the reset button right below it. In the tool settings, change the shape to Bi-linear.
Now place the cursor at the point in the center of the area you want to be in focus. Draw a vertical line to the edge of the area you want to remain blurred. To keep the line vertical, you can hold down the Ctrl key while you draw it.
This will create a gradient across the layer mask, with its darkest part in the center (where you started to draw) and fading to the lightest parts at both the top and bottom (where you finished drawing). It masks the blurred layer in those areas, making the sharper image on the layer beneath it visible.
For my photo, I have made just a very thin strip for my gradient. In this screenshot, you can see the black gradient on the layer mask thumbnail on the right.
A lot of tutorials skip the next step and go on to manipulating the colors, but that’s where they fail and this tutorial succeeds. To make a more realistic miniaturization of this image, the tower of the power plant needs to be in our depth of field, along with the steam coming out of the top. So we’ll take care of it in the next step.
I went walking around at Mt. Nebo today and saw these lovely ladies:
I got within 30 feet of these deer, and they were completely aware of my presence. I guess they were just accustomed to being around people, since they were in a state park.
I came home and looked at the picture. The deer were coming through a little dark against the bright green grass in the background, so I opened up Gimp and after adjusting some curves, I duplicated the background layer, then switched its blending mode to Dodge. Then I made a layer mask and used the paths tool to select just the deer. After that, I inverted the selection and filled the layer mask with black so only the deer were getting dodged. The effect was pretty harsh at 100 percent opacity, so I pulled it down to about 25 percent. After flattening, I applied a high pass filter to sharpen it up just a little bit. The grass was still dominating the photo, so I decided to desaturate it using the lightness method. I didn’t crop the image because I was satisfied with the composition.
A while back, I wrote a post about making panoramas in Gimp using the Pandora plugin. I recently became aware of another way to make panoramas and it’s a much more robust tool. It’s a free and open source application called Hugin. It’s available at hugin.sourceforge.net for all platforms, and prebuilt packages also are available in the repositories of many Linux distributions.
There are a ton of options in Hugin, so many that I almost got option overload in my head. But sticking to the basics, I was able to get a nice looking panorama in just a few minutes. Once Hugin does its thing, you can export it as a TIFF or JPG or PNG, then open it in Gimp for further editing if you desire.
Here are a couple of examples of panoramas that I made with Hugin:
Instead of trying to explain how to use Hugin, I’ll just point you to the excellent tutorials that have been made available.
