Mr. Wolfe's Quick Fix :: A Gimp Tutorial

A couple weeks back I had asked which aspects of photo editing people would most like to see covered in a simple step by step tutorial. After basic photo adjustments, the thing people were most interested in was removing the background from an image. So that's what we'll be covering today; bring out the Gimp!

In today's tutorial I will be playing the role of The Wolf and we'll cover a quick image fix, Gimp style. If you have no idea who The Wolf is you need to watch Pulp Fiction again ;) If you would like to follow along but don't have Gimp's free photo editing software feel free to download it here.

Choose Photo

After you download and open Gimp choose a file that you would like to work with, or you can use ours (just right click save). We decided to go with a picture of our business cards; the picture is ok but its uses are limited because of its background. We will walk through removing the image's background step by step. Just click on the pictures as we go to make them bigger ;)

Open Photo

If this is your first time using Gimp, or a computer ;), open a file by going File>Open and then locate and double click on the photo you would like to work with. Once the file is open you will notice several things on the screen. On the left hand side of the screen you will see your basic tools while on the right hand side of the screen you will see your layers, channels, brushes, gradients dialogs etc. Feel free to reposition and resize these window as you see fit :)

Our photo is now open and you can see that it has a black paper background, our goal is to remove the black paper.



Gimp offers a bunch of tools so we're going to take a quick look at a few of them and see how successful they are in helping us remove the background from our image.

Fuzzy Select Tool



The first tool we're trying is the fuzzy select tool. This tool is similar to the magic wand tool in Adobe's Creative Suite software. Select this tool and click on an area on the left side of your image and you will see what it does :) A selection of your image should now be active. Hit delete (not backspace) and this should remove the selected area like so:



That was pretty good but it left a bit of noise around the left side of our image. Let's give the next tool a shot.

Color Select Tool



The idea behind the color select tool is that we can click on a specific color in our image and all parts of our image that are that color will become active and we can edit them. In an ideal world if we click on the black on the right side of our image it will all be selected and we can delete it. Let's click on the black on the right side of our image and hit delete and see what happens :)



Well, good news is this deleted some more of our background, bad news is the black was too similar to the color in our business cards and deleted parts of the image that we want to keep. Let's undo the color select, Edit>Undo Color Select. While the color select tool may work well for your image it wasn't very helpful for ours.

We should now be looking at the same image we had after using the fuzzy select tool. Let's use the fuzzy select tool on the right side of the image (not pictured). Now let's take a look at one final tool.

Free Select Tool

This tool is similar to the lasso tool in Adobe's Creative Suite software. This tool will allow us to lasso and select specific areas of our image. Let's use this tool to select some of the noise on the bottom right of our image. Just lasso around the area.

Once this area is selected we can now hit delete and this will remove the selection.



Wow, that looks like what we're after. The free select tool removed the unwanted black background from our image and didn't leave any noise. Let's use the free select tool to clean up the rest of the image. To do this we're going to outline the area that we want to keep. Once the area that we want to keep is fully selected and active right click>select>invert and then hit delete.



Inverting the selection chooses everyhing except the area we outlined with the free select tool. When we hit delete we are now left with our business cards on a white background. There may be a few spots left so feel free to use the free transform tool to give your image one last good cleaning.

Time to smile, you have now successfully removed the background from your image =) It seems to us that the best technique for removing the background from an image in Gimp would be a combination of the fuzzy select tool and the free select tool.



A quick before and after just to recap:



Now using the image we just created we can make a new banner:



Conclusion

Some quick observations from Mr. Wolfe. Well, it even took The Wolf a little while to pull this one off using the Gimp. While Gimp is a great option for free software it ran a little slow on my computer, granted I could just have too much stuff on my computer so I won't hold this against Gimp. After using Picasa last week (last week's tutorial), Gimp, while designed for more detailed editing, is definitely not as intuitive as Picasa. This was our first time using both programs.

If you found this tutorial somewhat useful and would like to purchase some basic software that would allow you to perform similar tasks (and way more) we highly recommend Adobe's Creative Suite lineup. Mr. Wolfe can make the same adjustments to an image in Adobe's Photoshop Elements software in roughly 3 minutes and 37 seconds ;)

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it was somewhat helpful. If you have any questions just let us know in the comments section and we will be sure to get back to you. If there's anything else you would like to see covered just leave a comment and we'll see if we can make it happen. Have a senioritis day!

One Fix Two Fix, Red Fix Blue Fix :: A Picasa Tutorial

Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, sometimes our pictures don't say the words we would like them to ;) Even with autofocus, autocolor, and various other automatic settings selected, it's still possible to snap a picture that's not really what we were looking for. Often times we don't realize this until we upload our photos to our computer; ask us how we know that one ;)

In this tutorial we're going to take a quick look at how to touch up a photo with Picasa free photo editing software from Google. If you would like to follow along but don't have Picasa feel free to download it here.

If you have just downloaded Picasa (this was our first time using it as well), when you open it for the first time it will do a quick scan of your computer to find pictures you already have. This may take a few minutes depending on how many pictures you have stored on your computer.

Choose Photo

After Picasa has loaded all of your images choose a file that you would like to work with, or you can use ours (just right click save). We decided to go with a picture of our Dr. Seuss print; despite the fact that we were using a good digital camera with autosettings selected the picture came out crooked and dark. We will walk through how we fix this step by step. Just click on the pictures as we go to make them bigger ;)



Open Photo

If this is your first time in Picasa just double click the file you would like to work with to open it. Once the file is open you will see a few things. On the left side you will see your basic editing controls where we can make basic fixes, more specific tuning, and add effects. On the bottom of the window you will see print, export, email options as well as a pretty cool blog this feature.

You will notice that our photo is a bit on the dark side and it's crooked.



The first thing we want to do is straighten the good doctor out. We clicked on the straighten tool on the basic fixes tab and this brings up a slider to adjust our image.



Use the slider below the photo to adjust it until it is straight, or as close to straight as you want it to be :) After some quick tweeking our photo is now straight:



We now want to take a look at adjusting the color. We think adjusting color boils down to personal preference; some people like their images to be highly saturated with very bright colors while others prefer softer looks or even black and white. Picasa offers a lot of color options so experiment a bit, have some fun, and see which settings you like best.

We are going to go with the feeling lucky settings to get things rolling. Just click the feeling lucky tool on the basic fixes tab and Picasa will make some changes. If you don't like the changes just click the Undo I'm Feeling Lucky button on the left. The feeling lucky changes look like a step in the right direction so we're gonna keep them and further tweek the colors with the Tuning options (the middle tab on the left).



We are making the following adjustments to the Fill Light (25%), Highlights (10%), and Shadows (20%) sliders. These are rough values that we used but feel free to use which ever values you like. These adjustments darkened up the blacks and made the colors in the print pop a little more:



Now let's see what the effects tab has to offer. The effects tab contains a bunch of great effects that are all as simple as the click of a button. We're going with the focal black and white effect which turns the image black and white except for a focal point which remains in color. This effect really softened up the background of our photo further emphasizing our print:



The photo is definitely moving in the right direction but we want to bump the colors up just a little bit. To make the colors brighter we're going to use the saturation tool on the effects tab, we used a setting of about 10% but again play with the settings to find what you like.



At this point things are looking pretty good so time to start wrapping things up. The first thing to do is crop your image. We're using the manual crop tool on the basic fixes tab.



Cropping allows you to center your image or remove any unwanted parts of the image background. After cropping our image this is what we are left with:



Lastly we want to save our file (we typically save throughout the entire creating/editing process) and add some tags. Since Picasa is a photo organizer as well as a photo editor if we add tags at this point we can then search for them and make albums of items with similar tags later on. Tagging at this point is probably a good idea if you plan on uploading your images to the web too.



A quick before and after just to recap:



Now using the image we just created we can make a brightly colored Dr. Seuss polaroid:



We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it was somewhat helpful. If you have any questions just let us know in the comments section and we will be sure to get back to you. We are currently working on a tutorial to remove an image's background using Gimp. If there's anything else you would like to see covered just leave a comment and we'll see if we can make it happen. Have a senioritis day!