Clone

On this photo I had a lot of work to do.  Unfortunately the grit and dirt on the SLR's lens is just getting worse and worse. While I was in Arizona with family, every single outdoor photo looks this terrible... Luckily I have developed some editing skills. See if you can spot all my edits. 

 No spots, no tag on Alexis's dress, and I look skinnier.

So, with this one I used the clone tool to blot out my eyes. I then used desaturate to turn the picture black and white. After than I used bucket fill to add the strange coloring lines around my face, on my lips, around my eyes and on the sheet behind me. I played with it until I got something I liked. I then used the smudge, paint, and clone tool to smooth out my hair and skin. My goal was to get myself to look like a chalk drawing or a digital painting. After I just added one of my quotes and gave the word layer a Gaussian blur so it would blend and seem like it belonged there.

The Haunted (possible photos all unedited)

Dodge, Burn, and Filters

 Dodge and burn. While not something I am good with yet I did make some progress on learning how to use the tool.

One the elephant necklace I tried out the oilify tool and burn out the background a bit. I like how they turned out. I haven't used this filter much. Here are the three progressions. 

 I used a self portrait and just played with  Curves, Desaturate, and Predator.

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Adjustments With Gimp

Separated myself from the background using the little lasso. Opened them both as new layers on a new project. 

 The section with just me still somehow attached itself to a white background. Managed to keep the hole open on the background I cut out. I put my cutout layer behind the background and played around until it was in place the best I could. Used the smudge tool to blend edges clean. Much improved. Kept layers separate so I could edit the color on them separately.  Here I changed the color of the sheet and tried to get myself and my shirt back to as normal a color as possible. This is about my real skin tone and the shirt is spot on. Sheet looks like it was always blue/green. Experiment successful. Go Gimp! =)

If you are wondering about my hair, I just cut right through the stray hairs and left them to be edited with the background. Because they were almost black anyway, they melded back with the cutout fairly effortlessly. The stray hairs seemed to help meld the two parts back together again. 

 In The two above I played with different lighting, coloring and filter tools. I think the red is my favorite. Very much like a graphic novel. In the blue/green with black and white me, I changed the sheet to look like canvas. Kind of a cool effect I think. 

 On The two above, I somehow lost my ability to edit the layers separately. I think I saved instead of save as or something else. Not sure. I just played with filters and lighting on these ones. The different tools I used really took away any seams I had left and they seem to have completely melded these two cut outs together.

Second picture to come.

Original. Was covered in water spots from dirty lens. Removed them with the Picasa retouch tool. Easy and handy. Easier than I thought.

Desaturate and Brightness/Contrast. I was trying to create an amateur photo from the 50's. Other than the car being the wrong model, I think successful. Reminds me of my grandmas old overly lit photos.

Curves, brightness, and contrast. It's a bit instagram, but I sill like it for the way the clouds turned out.

Threshold 216/255. Face cut out of another picture, made into layer, resized, adjusted threshold, placed, and flattened image.

Flipped, cropped, and used Posterize Level 2, nothing more, nothing less... I might be getting tired...