Photo Study - Sunshine by Phatpuppycreations

Click on the photo to view it on Flickr.

This fun photo was assembled using a series of various stock images from one of my favorite resources for free stock images, DeviantArt. With the help of layer masks and layer modes, this photo was made. personally. I think I would have removed the blue hue from the neck of the giraffe, and simontaneously modified the color of the field to match what the sunset would create with an orange colored layer mode set to either overlay, color, or maybe even both. A really good example of this can be seen in my gimp tornado tutorial. In that tutorial, I modify the originally green hues of a field to a very yellow tone to better match the tone that the sky would create.

Click here for the gimp tutorial on how to make a dramatic tornado scene.

The sky on this photo looks really good, and even if the sun rays are real, they could have just as easily been made digitally much like I had done in this sun ray photo I made using gimp:

 

Click here for the gimp tutorial on how to make sun rays using gimp.

All-in-all, I thought that this photo was very fun and it was a pleasure to stumble on it. Please go check out more work by phatpuppycreations, there are a lot of very cool photos there.

Gimp Tutorial - Isolating a Background using Color

Earlier this week I mentioned on Google+ that I discovered something about gimp that was pretty huge, something that would change how I edit photos forever.

Since then, I've been determined to figre out how to boil this small bit of information, and show you just how much this can help your layer masking and isolating backgrounds, especially in the studio scene and landscape photography.

I finally decided to simply do what I do best - record a gimp video tutorial using the method that I discovered, and share it with everyone.

Click here for the gimp video tutorial.

Awesome Gimp Script - Copy Layer Mask From Above

The wonderful thing about open-source software is that anyone can modify their version of the program at their own free will.  What's even better, is that the open source community loves to share how they customize their own version of their program to fit their needs, giving you the ability to duplicate their customizations.

In a recent conversation on the GimpChat forum, we talked about how to duplicate a layer mask using Gimp and in the process uncovered a fantastic script that copies the above layer and turns it into a layer mask.

I went ahead and put the file together for download here.
This script came in with great timing, because I've stumbled on a very fascinating find that will help everyone isolate foreground images from background images in a new way.  I hope to have a tutorial written up on this soon.  Until then, I recommend that you brush up on your understanding of layer masks using gimp, you'll want to know about them when I post this tutorial.

PS: I use this script in this gimp video tutorial.