Tag: gimp

Free photo editors for Linux, Mac, and Windows

By John Watson
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Can’t afford Photoshop? Can’t justify the expense? What do you need in a good photo editor anyway? To me, the absolute essential features necessary for any photo editing app are:

  • Layers and layer masks (alpha editing). These features let you selectively apply edits and filters to portions of the image that you control.
  • Painting tools. Brushes in varying sizes and hardness. For painting masks, mostly.
  • Curves. Essential. A curves adjustment tool lets you control color, color saturation, contrast, brightness, and black white points. Curves is often the only tool I use.
  • Color adjustment. Hue and saturation adjustments.
  • Channel mixer/B&W converter. Some way to make black and white photos.
  • Filters. Blur and sharpen. You don’t need page curl or lens flare.

Without further ado, and in alphabetical order, some free apps that fit the bill:

Aviary Phoenix (Web app–All platforms)

The only web/online app in the list that supports layers and masks. “From basic image retouching to complex effects,

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Black and White Conversion: Channel Mixer Recipes

By John Watson
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Black and white conversion is a mysterious process. There are many ways to do it and none is objectively any better than any other for every photo. So, these are guidelines, really, in the spirit of a recipe. But unlike following a recipe for baking a cake, we are not all trying to create the same photo. Keep in mind that every photo is different and will require slightly different values for any image editing technique.

Here’s a photo I took on a hike recently with my kids:

Meadow path

To compare with the channel mixer conversions below, first I’ll show the results from a simple average color desaturation. This is a simple conversion, it’s fast, and it’s very easy to do. In Photoshop it’s Image | Adjustments | Desaturate. In GIMP it’s Color | Desaturate.

deasat1

Many people, myself included, feel that this method often results in lifeless photos. If you’re going to convert this way, you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you also boost the contrast after the fact:

deasat2

I think the simplicity of just desaturating a photo and boosting the contrast has a lot of appeal.

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Screencast: Creating black and white cutouts

By John Watson
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We ran an article last month called Black and White with a Splash of Color. In this video I’ll show you a few additional simple but powerful techniques that will allow you to easily reproduce that effect.

You should be able to use these techniques in any image editor that supports layers and masks such as Photoshop, GIMP, Seashore, and Paint.Net.

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Screencast: Easy exposure blending tutorial with GIMP

By John Watson
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This 2 minute screencast shows an easy-to-use technique for blending multiple exposures (or in this case, two versions of one exposure) to increase the dynamic range of a photograph.

GIMP is free photo editing software for Windows, Mac and Linux.

I published the final version of this photo at Flickr.

Music by Pitx.

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Free noise reduction plugin for the GIMP

By John Watson
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GREYCstoration pluginI’ve been using the GIMP image editor (also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program) (also known as the wonderful, open source, free photo editor with the awful name) a lot lately. Version 2.4.2. I highly recommend a second look if you haven’t tried it recently. The newest version has vastly improved controls for cropping and selections, a foreground selection tool, a healing tool, and better brush management among other enhancements.

But one thing my stock GIMP install didn’t have was a decent noise removal filter. That is, until I downloaded and installed the GREYCstoration plugin. Installing it is as simple as downloading and dropping the plugin into the GIMP plugins directory. Restart GIMP and you’ll find a new menu under Filters | Enhance | GREYCstoration.

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