Difference between revisions of "GIMP/C2/Comics/English-timed"

|Welcome to the spoken tutorial of Meet The GIMP. My Name is Rolf Steinort and i am recording this in Bremen, Northern Germany.  

|In the beginning I will do something that I always forget to mention. I always forget to save the image before doing anything to it.  

| ‘xcf’ is the Gimp native file format and it keeps all the layers information in the file. Never save anything in Gimp as JPEG or tif or so, if you want to work further with it. You can export from there to every format you want to but for anything you want to do further work with, use XCF.  

|This statue here is very well placed and I think, it is one of the corner points of this image. So let me 1st take away this stuff here.  

|This is best done by Cloning Tool and I don’t have to work very precise here because all this little stuff will vanish in the final image. So i select the clone tool and change the size of the pen. Now I press Ctrl and Click to get a starting point and now I simply start to paint. But before starting that i change the Overlay mode to Normal mode, opacity to 100 and now let’s start painting.   

|So the guy is gone. That leaves the clutter here.   

| 06.33

|The comic image basically consist of three parts. 1st there are the black patches or dark patches with no colours, which gives structure to the image. Then there are the lines which defines forms and items in the image. And then there is colour and we will start as in the tutorial with the patches. And for that  

|I select the Threshold tool and click into the image and pull the info window into the image. You see here the image is black and white. This tool divides the image into black and white. If the pixel is lighter than at the moment 82 then the combination of average value of red, green and blue is white. And if the level is below 82 it becomes black.   

|Now we face the 1st problem here. When I draw this slider around the effect is very dark.  

|Now i have to use different ink layer for this image. So lets start from the lighter side, like this one here and go back into the image to 100%. I double this here and select the threshold tool and pull this slider down. But before that i have to make the top layer invisible.  

| I make a copy of this layer and make it visible and now I am working on this layer. I have to look for the middle terms here. This part of the face, I think this works quite good so i look around in the image. The statue is fine too. This image has a good definition here and near my hand the line is invisible and that is called optical illusion. I think this is fine and it should be in the image.  

|Now i select the Threshold tool make the line here visible and look at the bright parts to get little bit of definition so i slide this up.   

|Now I have 3 copies of my ink layer. 1st is ink light .  

|Now lets look at these 3 layers and decide which one is to use mostly.   

|I think ink layer is a good base, because this is too light and this is too dark. So I put this layer in the bottom and I add a layer mask to the dark layer and the light layer. I add a layer mask in black which is fully transparent. So everything here gets invisible.   

| 12.25

| So I select the brush tool here with normal mode and opacity 100%. I think I shall use a hard brush and the pressure sensitivity should be the Size, so when I press the pen on the surface the dot will be  larger.

|My foreground colour is white. So lets start. I think the left part of the face should be brightened.  

|I press 1 to zoom into the image. I think this brush is too small so i scale this a bit up.  

|But perhaps it is too bright.This has to be either black or white.  

|So i switch the colours with ‘X’ key and paint this over again here. But i think i can leave this out here and put the next layer above that.  

|Simply leave it as it is. I can add another layer easily and now i paint for the dark parts with the white colour. Lets see if I can reveal here a little bit. I think this is too much.   

| Here there is some work still to be done but I will leave it to this here and look at it after I am done with the next step with the lines and then I can adjust here. This has to be brightened up. So we'll look at the edit there.  

|The lines are the edges between different colours. So i go to Filters, then we have edge-detect, and here I have difference of Gaussians edge detect.   

|If you increase the number the lines get wider and you get more of the details in the image. I would prefer something around 10 but i can go to 30 and then decide where exactly i should stop.  

|I set the layer mode this layer to Multiply and for the colour rising I will later need to reduce the white in the image. Now lets just checkout if we have got this right upto now. So I will switch the lines layer on and off and you see here there is some definition when the line layer is on. And now I de-select the dark ink layer and keep the light ink layer.  

|The structures that I wanted to have in with my dark ink layer is visible in the lines layer so I will leave the dark ink layer switched off.   

|I dont think there is a need to combine these layers here. I will leave it as it is, so that i can change something and it will be in the final image.  

|For getting colour in the image I copy the background layer and name it Colour and put it on top and set the layer mode to Colour. But it doesnt look good so i should change the mode.  

|The image has got little bit of colour in here. But I want more saturation so again i make the copy of background layer and name it Saturation.  

|I set the layer mode to Saturation . I think this saturation mode already works and the effects are very good. There should have been more flatness in the colour and the hand is not looking comic. I will look where this comes from so I can now start to play with this sliders. Going down with saturation, gets little bit flatter, and looks more like water colours, so this is a strange effect.   

|Now I can start to play with the layers here. So I switch off the lines layer and you see here that this is not the effect from the lines but from colours and saturation. Now I can make some adjustments. Because i still have the layers here.  

|Now i paint in this part. This is too much.   

|You can do a lot of changes here and i dont know if i am on the right track. But I like it upto now. Let’s see what else we can do. 1st thing is we can use a different layer than the lines. So I switch off the lines and I get very strange colours because now I have again a white background so add another layer here and set it to white and use multiply mode and fill it  with 240 grey.  

|Now I have got nearly the same image as with my lines here. Let me switch them on. I have the lines information coming out but this comic effect is still there and i can look what’s better.   

|Lets try some different tricks. I double the colour and the saturation layer and do something with them. Here I just try to get the details out of the image so go to Filters, Blur and Gaussian blur. .  

|You see that the colours has got little bit smoother. So let's do this on the saturation copy also. Go to Filters, Repeat Guassian Blur.  

|And now I have really flat image with flat colours. So i switch on the original colour and I get a strange effect here. Let's rename these layers as saturation blurred and the colour blurred.

|If i combine the blurred saturation with the unblurred colour , i get some colours here which looks quite a bit strange. I would like it, if it was not especially on the nose here. So switching this back on and I have this effect here. You can imagine if you reduce the blurring you get sharpe details.  

|This is a real play ground. You have a lot of possibilities here like how to do this, what to do, what to tinker with. Its really fun to do this.

|I am not so happy with both versions of this image. I like the structure here and the flower and the statue the pot here. I don’t like all the details near the hand and in the face, this could be little bit more flat. In the blurred on I like the details in the face and near the hand but I don’t like the flower which is completely blurred away.  

| 30.03

|So now i can combine the two images and I will start with colour blurred because I like the over all appearance of this more than of the saturation blurred. But I switch on all the layers and add layer mask to saturation blurred and colour blurred and I add a black layer mask fully transparent.   

|And now i'll start working on saturation layer mask so i select white as my foreground colour and select the paint brush here. Now i start painting.   

|I just paint over the parts where I want to have little bit more flattens in the image. This will look a bit strange because now I have the colour layer switched on.  

|So now i select everything by pressing Shift+ctrl+A and copy it by Ctrl + C, go into the image and press Ctrl + V and click on Insert This Floating Selection and with Ctrl + H or with the anchor layer I have my copy here. So you can copy these layer mask too and I think I will leave this image here.  

|Lets recap this. You first copy the image layer and an inked image with the threshold tool. Look for areas which you want to have black or very dark.  

|Then you copy again the base image and make a colour layer. Set the colour mode to colour.  

|And finally you copy the base layer last time and make a saturation layer and here you set the layer mode to saturation and now you play with the opacity of the different layers or at some layers. Just play around. The results are well mixed but some are stunning.