An experiment with the GIMP

[stevewilliams]

Well today I got tired of not having an image processor at hand, Photoshop is on another PC on the other side of the country.

So I looked on the web and found GIMP, an open-source project. The binaries can be gotten here:

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

Don't know if anyone here uses it, but I was quite impressed, and it cost me nothing. Seems to have everything I used to use in Photoshop, though maybe not quite the ease-of-use.

For this rendering (from a color original) I used the green channel to create monochrome (like using a color filter shooting B&W), applied unsharp mask, then a light canvas filter. It does seem to have a nice selection of filters from the little playing I did.

Steve

[BillD]

I like it.

[stevewilliams]

Thank-you.

Steve

[stevewilliams]

Here's a different rendering, this one prompted by reading an article in the current issue of Shutterbug on how to simulate Infrared B&W in Photoshop. When I tried to do this in GIMP I found there were a number of Photoshop techniques that couldn't be duplicated in GIMP. No surprise really.

I still like the program, but not really satisfied with the results shown here. I'll continue to experiment with it though. It may be if I had a higher quality scan to begin with I could get some better results.

Steve

[jford]

I haven't used GIMP yet, but I'm learning Linux and plan to move my personal systems to that system soon; my laboratory systems have been running Linux since last August or so. I'm quite impressed with the performance I get from machines that are intolerably slow with XP.

[Evil smile] As for [ QUOTE ]
I found there were a number of Photoshop techniques that couldn't be duplicated in GIMP

[/ QUOTE ], you have the source code for GIMP...go ahead and add those features. [Evil smile]

I like the original b/w conversion; I agree with you that this "pseudo IR" version isn't quite so nice, possibly because of the GIMP's limitations.

It's an interesting setting. Where was it taken?

[stevewilliams]

Thanks for the feedback.

As to modifying GIMP, well that is something I have in mind and one of the reasons I started playing around with it. My background is software engineering and I've always wanted to work on an image editing program, but was daunted by the size of the task. With open source one can make a small contribution and still be useful, and I'm impressed with the capabilities GIMP already has.

As to the location of the shot, it was taken in a little town near Cabo San Lucas, can't remember the name now but it's not far from Cabo.

Thanks again.

Steve