Difference between revisions of "GIMP/C2/Adjusting-Colours-with-Curves-Tool/English-timed"

|Welcome to Meet the GIMP. Today’s tutorial is not about raw converting but about new coding while doing a real show and to correct some errors from the last tutorial.  

| I want to tell you something about this image . I have made some additional changes while recording the show. As you can see the sea is a bit dull and it’s just gray with not much definition in it and when I switch off the sea layer here and the other layers, you can see there is some definition in this sea.  

|And when I look at the layer mask  you can see that I used a layer mask which is mostly gray for the area I wanted to show. So let’s redo this step again.   

|I have deleted the sea layer and made a copy of the background layer. I name the layer as sea and place that layer below the sky and above the land.  

| I could have worked with the layer I had but I wouldn’t have got a good result because I had used the curves tool to get the sea a bit darker and with that I have destroyed a lot of the colour information which was present in that layer and I’ll get a better result this way here.  

|Now I again add a layer mask to the sea layer, I use the gray scale copy of the layer and add it. I click on Show layer mask and edit the layer mask. I will use the Curves tools and I’ll repeat the same procedure by pulling this down but this time I’ll pull this upper curve up.  

|This area here, I think it was quiet well but you can correct that later on. So let’s choose a soft brush and see that we get this edge here fine.  

|When I disable, show layer mask we can see the stretch seem here on the border between land and sea. Let’s zoom into the image and you can see there is a hallow where the layer mask and the layer don’t work together and I’ll work on it later.   

|Now I go back to the full image with shift + ctrl + E. I select the curves tool and check if I have layer mask selected and I include the sky layer to see the whole image and now I click into the image and play with the curves.  

|Now you can see the hallow between the sea and land vanishes but the sea is now again bit dull. But I can pull the curve up here and I get a clear sea here. And I think I shouldn’t over do it.  

|I can see the sun shine on the sea, the shadow of the clouds, different wave structures and a bit blue colour as it should be on the sea. There is a bit problem with the bright stuff at the edge of the sky because sky  is too brightened up and I can solve that problem in later steps.  

|A tip from John Arnold’s broadcast says that we should go to the full possible amount and then go down with the slider because it is much easier to see the effect when you go down. And we can decide the right amount easily. And I think I have done too much with this part so I slide the slider down and I think this is ok.  

|From where does this bright stuff comes on the horizon? I deselect the sky layer and check but it’s not because of it. So I deselect the sea level and its because of sea layer. And I have to darken this part here. And for doing that I use the gradient tool.  

|I select the layer mask and now select the gradient tool from the tool box and I want to have the land part white and sky part black and want to have the border here. The gradient starts with full white and ends with black. So I zoom into this part,I select the gradient tool and  start around here. While making this line I am pressing ctrl key and left mouse button and pulling in order to get a straight line and leave the button here.  

|You see it worked, the brightness on the horizon is gone and you can see that the layer mask of the land is gone too. Let’s have a look at the whole image and you can see all our edits are gone.  

|Now first I select the rectangle and check if layer mask is selected and draw the rectangle in the sky part. Now when the rectangle is drawn I can do edit work inside it and rest of the layer mask will not be affected. Now I again do the same procedure.   

|Zoom into the bright part here and select the layer mask. I want to have black above and white below, so I start from here, go straight up to the horizon and now you can see  the sea is only white and land and sky layer is black. Shift + ctrl + E, disables all selection, shift +ctrl + E goes back to the whole image and  a lot better now.  

|I want to edit the sky layer in the same way like I did for the land layer. Just double the sky layer and switch to over lay mode. This is way to much so I pull down the opacity slider a bit and we have a bit more contrast in the sky.  

|And now I think the image is nearly ready except for one thing. This wall of the house here is way too dark.  

|This is the case for dodgging and burning. Dodgging and burning is a term out of the dark room days, where you dodg a picture by keeping your hand or paper or something else in the light beam of the enlarger between the enlarger and photographic paper and burning is opposite of that. There you take a paper and cut a hole in a specific form into it and so edit some light to some other parts of the image. It’s quite tedious procedure to figure out which step to be done at what time and you need a lot of sheets of paper for that and when you want to look at such a process, I recommend you to look a film Well Photographer. It’s a film about James and it’s a terrific film even without this a dark chamber seen. I can really recommend you that film.  

|Now let’s see dodgging and burning process. We have a dodge and burn tool in the tool box here but I would like to work again with layer.  

|13.10

|I go to colour channel and I keep 150% for gray and 128% in other channel. This gray colour is 50% gray and I switch the layer mode to overlay and you can see nothing has happened.  

|Now I switch the colours to black and white and select a brush. This brush size is about right.But I decrease the opacity tool let’s say 30% or so. Now I make sure that I have the new layer is selected and change the foreground colour to white and background colour to black and I start to paint the wall here.  

| When we look at the layer here you can see that I have a whiter area here and there are some other parts of the image which could be a bit lighter. For example the rocks near the shore.  

|The best way would be zooming into the image and I can see that now I have made the wall brighter and the structure is nearly gone due to the JPEG compression. But I can repair that by switching the colour and shortcut key for that is ‘X’ key and make it a bit darker here.  

| 16.35

| I think that was too much and I am not so sure about what I am doing there. So undo the step.  

| You can see the technique that I made a layer and made it medium gray & 128% for each channel and change the layer mode to Overlay. Medium gray and Overlay mode does nothing and you can paint into the image with white or black. While painting with white you make the image a bit brighter with black you make it darker.  

|I think now this image is really finished with editing. I wouldn’t work again on it except some of you finds a mistake in the edits I have made today. I hope I haven’t done that and name the layer as dodge and burn.  

| That was it for today. If you want to send a comment, please write to info@meetthegimp.org and for more information go to  http://meetthegimp.org

|I would like to hear from you. Tell me what you liked, what I could have made better, what you want to see in the future.