I love pho­tog­ra­phy and as much as I try to get the image right in cam­era when I press the shut­ter release there are just some times when you need adjust some over­ex­posed bits or pos­si­bly do some cus­tom edit­ing to cre­ate a minia­ture look or selec­tive colour­ing. What­ever the rea­son might be there will be times when you need to edit your images. A full out copy of Pho­to­shop is more than $500. Even Pho­to­shop Ele­ments clocks in at $100 or so which is not super expen­sive but still, if I have an extra $100 I’m putting it towards a new lens or maybe that new tri­pod that I need.

In my last blog for Photography.ca I wrote about Picasa. Picasa does a won­der­ful job of basic photo edit­ing, how­ever, it just doesn’t cut it for any­thing really detailed. When I need more detailed edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties I use Gimp. Gimp is a won­der­ful piece of soft­ware avail­able for free use for Win­dows and Mac users as well as the orig­i­nal Unix plat­form. A com­pan­ion prod­uct called ufRAW, also free, allows Gimp to open and edit RAW image files and since I shoot almost exclu­sively in RAW for­mat it was a nec­es­sary add-on.

Gimp will do a lot more than I am capa­ble of doing and I have still used it to do some amaz­ing things. Like Pho­to­shop it allows you to edit images using mul­ti­ple lay­ers, has many dif­fer­ent fil­ters and scripts that can change the look of your images (or parts of it) and also pro­vides many dif­fer­ent tools to work on your images. In this blog post I’ll edit an image and pro­vide some screen shots to give you an idea of the capa­bil­i­ties of this won­der­ful piece of soft­ware, how­ever, to really learn how to use it visit the tuto­ri­als page on the Gimp site.

In order to give you the broad­est tour pos­si­ble I will take an orig­i­nal image where I’ve done a fair bit of work on the image and walk you through the edit­ing steps that I took to get it the way I wanted. Some of you out there may be much bet­ter at photo edit­ing and so you will undoubt­edly see areas where I am doing some­thing wrong. Please feel free to com­ment below so I can learn more about how to do this stuff properly.

Let’s start with this pho­to­graph of a but­ter­fly. Here’s the JPEG ver­sion cre­ated by export­ing from Picasa with default set­tings. All things con­sid­ered it’s not a hor­ri­ble shot of the but­ter­fly but the com­po­si­tion is kind of blah and the butterfly’s cam­ou­flage makes it dif­fi­cult to see. Let’s open it in Gimp to see what we can do with this bor­ing image.

First up, since it’s a RAW and I have ufRAW installed it auto­mat­i­cally opens in ufRAW for me.  Here I can make adjust­ments to the RAW image before jump­ing into the Gimp edi­tor proper.  For this image I’m going to make a few adjust­ments here so I end up in Gimp with the basics already com­pleted.  This is the gen­eral process for me.

Liv­ing in Hal­i­fax, Nova Sco­tia, Glenn Euloth enjoys trav­el­ling on the pho­to­graphic jour­ney.  Visit www.euloth.com to join him on the trip or find him on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum under the nick­name of Iguanasan.