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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

minifig051 wrote:
Squid wrote:

I take a grayscale picture then add the colour carefully with the brush tool on the colour setting.  I can use that to add red, or switch it to a colour like grey to desaturate.  Also, the smudge tool has a very useful colour setting which can be used to just smudge the saturation itself.

I tried a go at Isaac's hair again.  Not it's almost perfect, but not quite.

There is an easier way.

Coincidentally, I recently learned how to color in a black and white photo using Photoshop in Photography class. What you do is use the Magnetic Selection tool to outline the area you want colored. Then you hit the Quick Mask Mode button near the bottom left to touch it up a bit (use the eraser tool to remove parts of the selection and the paintbrush tool to add to it). I don't exactly remember the next step (I'll have to look at the instruction sheet I got), but somehow you get that selection on another layer and fill in the selected area with the paint bucket. Then you adjust the opacity of the layer until it looks right.

Is there a way to blur the edges of the lasso selection once you've made it?

I tried using it on a picture, but the edges are way too abrupt.

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

Since we're on the subject, is there an easy way to isolate an object (a minifig) from the foreground  of a picture and get rid of the background in GIMP?  I've tried, but every time I end up with the "amateur photoshop user cut-and-paste" look, and/or delete part of the minfig itself.  Also, it's horribly difficult.
Maybe I just need more practice (haven't taken a stab at doing something in GIMP in ages...).

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

FlyingMinifig wrote:

Since we're on the subject, is there an easy way to isolate an object (a minifig) from the foreground  of a picture and get rid of the background in GIMP?  I've tried, but every time I end up with the "amateur photoshop user cut-and-paste" look, and/or delete part of the minfig itself.  Also, it's horribly difficult.
Maybe I just need more practice (haven't taken a stab at doing something in GIMP in ages...).

There is no real easy way. There are tricks to getting a cleaner cutout and/or making the process faster, but all methods involve some tedious work. Here are some suggestions:

  • Make the image as high of a resolution as possible with subject perfectly in focus. The sharpness of the edges will cause it to look significantly better when manually cutting out with the lasso or spline tools.

  • Try making the background a solid color, either green/blue (for chroma keying if that's your style), or white/black if you'd like to keep the edges of your cutout to be a consistent color.

  • Use tools and plug-ins that are made for this kind of thing. A quick Google search yielded some built-in functions of Gimp besides the obvious and tedious lasso option.

In the end, everything comes down to the effort you put in. Whether or not your end product is what you wanted, you'll be better for it in the long run.

Best of luck with whatever you end up doing!

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/q71/s720x720/1468519_762851427062373_1430209157_n.jpg

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

Wow, that looks great, and difficult to achieve. Nice and shiny.

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

You should definitely use the black and white/red effect for film posters or similar. It looks awesome.

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

In this case, the phone has an odd shiny metallic look to it that the previous pictures didn't have.  I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but I personally prefer the earlier look.

Last edited by Mr Vertigo (December 10, 2013 (02:37pm))

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

I noticed the shiny look too.  It looks EXACTLY like chrome red pieces, and I'm not sure what that's all about.
I gotta say, the greyscale with the single colored item looks beautiful.

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

JonnDthunDer wrote:

I noticed the shiny look too.  It looks EXACTLY like chrome red pieces, and I'm not sure what that's all about.

Neither am I.  I apply the red colouring the same way, but somehow it makes it look a bit shinny, a bit too shinny.

This it my first attempt to apply it to an actual red brick in this lighting.

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Re: The Photo Manipulation and Creation Thread

Hello All,
  I've trying to make a stop motion series using wooden Brio-type trains using free software tools as much as possible.  I had a heck of a time wrestling with image capture tools like LinuxStopMotion etc... until finding Boats Animator finally came to the rescue.  Now I'm finding post-production to be even more of a challenge...  Whenever possible I always try to do anything graphics related in Inkscape as I find it much more user-friendly than GIMP.  I also really like the U/X in Tupi2D but it still has a long way to go before maturity and its not really meant for live-action/stop-motion anyway. 
  My biggest problem is finding any way to edit a full sequence of images instead of going through each one.  AFAIK, there's no way to edit sequences in Inkscape, be it through an "open as layers" dialog or otherwise.  Which leaves me with GIMP...  in Gimp 2.8 its pretty easy to open a sequence using the "Open as Layers" command under the file menu. At first glance there seem to be plenty of tantalizing options, but none are remotely intuitive and relevant documentation is either nonexistent or hiding between some kind of jargon-heavy search term... Unlike Inkscape, for example, there's nothing in the way of tabs or a drop down menu to select the layers you have opened.  It was only after searching the help forums that I learned you have to open Windows/Recently Closed Docks/Selections,Layers,Tool Options to get a dropdown menu showing the layers. Once I finally figured that out, there are a number of animation tools under the Filters, FX-Foundry and Video tabs which looked promising enough.
  The problem is the layer window won't allow me to select more than one layer at a time!  In most situations one would expect to simply hold down shift while clicking the first and last layer in the series, but the menu only seems to let you toggle visibility with a checkbox.  Otherwise you can only edit one layer at a time.
 
  There are a lot of other things I could use help with when it comes to GIMP but editing layers in a sequence is probably the biggest blocker right now as I don't see myself applying a filter/effect to each image 100 times for a single scene...

  So thats my main question...  Can anybody suggest how, or where to find out how to apply edits to a sequence of images opened as layers in GIMP?  Better yet, does anybody know if something similar can be accomplished in Inkscape?  That would be a dream come true!