GIMP III

For the last gimp-related project of this term, the main task consisted of blending all the recently adquired skills together to form a new picture which was supposed to look enhancingly better than the previous ones. The desired outcome was to manage to insert successfully a face into the lemon's picture.

As always, we began with a basic photograph of a lemon. It was possible to choose among the immense varieties that the Internet provides, regardless of color, size or format. My choice, rather simple if you think about it, was to merge the lemon with John Lennon's face. At first, it began as a joke, because I intended to call the project "John Lemon", but then everything got a bit more serious when I started working on the photos and met my first and main obstacles: cutting and deleting completely parts of one layer without it looking too unrealistic. Of course, I am no professional, but I'm quite pleased with the final outcome of every layer.

To add a little extra interest, I duplicated one of the layers so that the whole face of the lemon looked better in contrast with the lemon skin, and by doing so I found myself knee-deep in mistakes. I had, then, to spend an awful lot of time adjusting John's skin to the double layer, manually blurring some parts.

When this came to an end, I thought about whether the project could be considered as finished or not. The final result was more or less splendid, except for the lack of a mane of hair, which I had deleted prior to merging the layers. So I searched for a fitting picture, then came to face the same problem again -- it's very difficult for an amateur to cut parts of the photograph and have it look mildly decent. Nevertheless, some sessions of hard work later, I finished pasting the hair into the lemon, and then proceeded to work a bit more with the layers' appearance.

And here is the result:

GIMP II

As a second project in our GIMP lessons, I was asked to produce an advertisement based on a photograph of my high-school about a play that will be represented as part of our extracurricular program so that my classmates and I could explore the tools GIMP provides and hone our recently acquired skills.

For me, it has not been an easy task because of the layers and the perspectives that I had to work with in order to make the picture look fitting. There were several layers to the photograph, one of them consisting of the background (that is, the original one), then some figures as the main characters of the play (which I decided to place in front of the high-school building), text to advertise the play and a framed picture of the author of this latter to make a bit more funny and pleasant at sight.

Nevertheless, I will most likely not be sharing the picture itself because of privacy reasons.



GIMP I

Photoshop is the main software people use when they wish to touch up a photograph, yet very few know of GIMP, which is incredibly similar as to its functions and luckily cheaper, because it is for free and you can download it from its web page: http://www.gimp.org/windows/

The very first project we started in our Computing lessons was about getting used to work with layers, and the main objective was to successfully insert a picture, not at all related with the one to be used as background, into another  and the result being somewhat decent. Of course, not many of us had used this software before, so it's taken more patience that we had expected, but the results are indeed satisfying.

Working with pictures is something very fashionable these days, making them look better or simply eliminating parts of it that we don't like very much. And whereas it could seem devastatingly impossible to do so without the experience it takes to master Photoshop, GIMP provides simpler, much handier tools to help you.

I am quite delighted with how my project has turned out, even though I'm well aware I could have done much better, but it's a first for me, so I'm really happy about the results.