GIMP/C2/Comics/English

Time	Narration
00:18	Welcome to the spoken tutorial of Meet The GIMP. My Name is Rolf Steinort and i am recording this in Bremen, Northern Germany.
00:27	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.
00:45	So I go to File, Save as and save this as comic.xcf
1:12	‘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 but for anything you want to do further work with, use XCF.
1:45	So what to do? 1st thing is I have to clean up this image a bit.
1:59	There are two problems here, 1st the guy behind me.
2:15	And 2nd is this clutter below here.
2:21	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.
2:36	So I zoom into the image and select the Pen Tool.
2:50	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 cloning 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.
3:42	mage get's a little bit cloudy so i select another circle to paint. And now I go here to the border and paint.
4:39	So the guy is gone. That leaves the clutter here.
4:44	I want to keep the flower pot here but this stuff here has to go.
5:03	I will take care this border of the flower pot in a moment.
5:24	If I would keep this image in this way, you would see these traces of cloning but they will vanish when I switch on the comic mode.
5:43	So now lets do a bit about the flower pot here.
6:06	I think i should clone from this point.
6:26	It doesn't look very convincing in this zoom step but I think it will work.
6:34	The comic image basically consist of three parts. 1st there are the black patches or dark patches with no colors, which gives structure to the image. Then there are the lines which defines forms and items in the image. And then there is color and we will start as in the tutorial with the patches. And for that I double this layer and call it ink.
7:20	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.
8:09	Now we face the 1st problem here. When I draw this slider around the effect is very dark.
8:21	This value here 129 would be nice for the left part of my face, the shoulder and for the statue.
8:35	This would be nice for the eyes here
8:43	And this for other eye.
5:48	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.
9:45	I think this value is good for this part of the face.
9:55	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 this line here visible and look at the bright parts to get little bit of definition so i slide this up.
11:07	This looks better.
11:11	Now I have 3 copies of my ink level. 1st is ink light .
11:27	Top layer is ink dark.
11:33	And lets name the middle layer simply ink.
11:43	Now lets look at these 3 layers and decide which one is to use mostly.
11:52	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.
12:29	When I draw white on this layer mask of the light layer, the image will be revealed in it. 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 onto the surface the dot will be larger.
13:20	My foreground color is white. So lets start. I think the left part of the face should be brightened.
13:34	I press 1 to zoom into the image. Think this brush is too small so i scale this a bit up.
13:53	That looks better.
14:00	But perhaps it is too bright. (long gap , hemant plz check)This has to be either black or white.
14:47	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.
15:14	Now we are more concern about the areas and about the structure, so I should forget about the lines and just look at the structure here.
15:30	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 and i think this is too much.
15:56	I want to make the face a bit darker.
16:08	And ear also.
16:19	I think that’s too dark.
16:34	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.
16:56	In this step i have to add some lines and this can be done by doubling the background layer and putting it on top and naming it lines.
17:11	The lines are the edges between different colors. So i go to Filters, then we have edge-detect, and here I have difference of Gaussians edge detect.
17:34	The relevant slider is the Radius and if you decrease the number the lines get finer.
17:46	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.
18:10	When i go to 30 i dont get the edges but areas and 12 would give this here.
18:28	And I think I will settle 10.
18:38	I set the layer mode this layer to Multiply and for the color 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.
19:20	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.
19:43	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.
20:09	Next step as I said I have to reduce the white channel here, and it can be done with the levels tool and I reduce the level upto 240.
20:29	When i switch off this layer you can see that I have a gray background and little bit of color information in here.
20:41	For getting color 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.
21:07	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.
21:25	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 come from so I can now start to play with this sliders. Going down with saturation, gets little bit flatter, and looks more like water colors, so this is a strange effect.
22:20	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 colour and saturation. Now I can make some adjustments. Because i still have the layers here.
22:48	I want to lighten the face, so I select my ink light layer, select a brush with white foreground colour.
23:09	I zoom into the image.
23:17	Reduce the size of the brush and scale it a bit and now I start to paint the eye here.
23:33	That's too much.
23:49	This looks better.
23:53	Now i paint in this part. This is too much.
24:02	You can imagine there can be lot of modifications in here you can make in the image, by changing these areas here.
24:55	This is Ok.
24:59	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 up with 240 grey.
26:00	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.
26:28	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 i go to Filters, Blur and Gaussian blur.
26:56	And here I choose a value which gives a nice effect.
27:11	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.
27:29	And now I have really flat image with flat colors. 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.
28:04	If i combine the blurred saturation with the unblurred colour , i get some of 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 sharper details.
28:37	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.
29:09	The authors of the original tutorial has done a tremendous job.
29:25	I am not so happy with both versions of this image. I like this 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.
30:04	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 full transparent.
30:39	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.
30:58	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 not switched on.
31:49	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.
32:35	I think it’s so quite nice example and in the end i play a bit with this sliders.
32:57	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.
33:13	Then you copy the base image again the layer and make a line layer with the edge defect filter and then you set the layer mode to multiply.
33:32	In this layer you reduce the white to a gray about 240 with the levels tool.
33:45	Then you copy again the base image and make a colour layer. Set the colour mode to color.
33:59	Then you copy once again the base image and make a color layer . Set the layer mode to colour .
34:09	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.
34:35	For more info goto http://meetthegimp.org and to send a comment, please write to info@meetthegimp.org. Good bye.
34:50	This is Hemant Waidande dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial Project.

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