Hello and welcome to yet another
tutorial by Davies Media Design my name is Michael Davies and in today's
tutorial I'll be showing you an easy 10 step process for editing your photos in
GIMP. But of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to
my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always we have tons of GIMP video and
text tutorials on here so definitely check that out. You can also enroll in my
best-selling GIMP 2.10 Photo Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro
Photo Retoucher on Udemy. And you can support our channel and help us grow by
becoming a Patron on Patreon. And I'll include a link to this as well as all
the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. So this
tutorial is a basics on photo editing using GIMP. So whether you are a new
photographer or your new to using this free and awesome program GIMP - maybe you just want to learn an easy process for editing your photos start to finish
every time. So a quick disclaimer every photo is different, so even though you
can use this process each time you edit a photo the settings are going to be a
little bit different every time - especially depending on the lighting and
the time of day you took the photo, the type of camera you used, the type of lens
you used. So there's many different variables when it comes to taking photos.
Keep that in mind when you are using each of these tools. Don't just save the
settings and use the same settings every time - it could ruin certain photos
whereas other photos might look great. So just something to keep in mind here at
the beginning of this tutorial. But let's go ahead and dive in here. So this was
the final photo that I edited for this tutorial here but I'm gonna come over
here to my file manager and find the file that I want to open here in GIMP. I
just typed here in my search bar. And so what I want to do is I want to right
click on my file and go to "Open with" and choose "GIMP," and this is just one of the
many methods for opening photos into GIMP. So here we have our original photo.
So the first step in my photo editing process is to crop and scale the image.
So what I'll do is I'll come over here to the crop tool located in the Toolbox,
and I can just draw my crop here to whatever I want it to be. If you want it
to be a certain aspect ratio you can set that over here - or even a certain size,
you can type that over here. I'm gonna check the fixed aspect ratio option and
type 1920:1280. So that's telling GIMP that I want this to be 1920 wide by
1280 tall in terms of the aspect ratio. The actual size of the crop is going to depend on how large or small I draw this.
But you can see that as I drag this it's maintaining that aspect ratio that we
set there. So I'm just going to crop that right there. And I'm gonna click inside of here. And now our image is cropped - and by the way
I did have my "Rule of Thirds" guides set here - and that's why you saw those lines.
That just allows you to see, you know, where your subject is within this rule
of thirds principle that's found in photography. I'm just gonna grab another
tool here and hit ctrl+Z because that did crop that right there. Alright, so
once I've cropped my image I want to go ahead and scale this image down. You can
see up here at the top that my image is over 5,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels. That's
a pretty large image, and if you did want to use this for something like printing
it on a poster or just using this where you need a larger image you can go ahead
and keep this as large as you want but I think when you're just editing general
images in GIMP and maybe uploading them to social media or on your website you
do usually want to scale them down just because they're not only easier to work
with, you know, within GIMP - GIMP is going to work faster - but also it's going to
take up less room wherever you're storing this. So, if it's on a website, you
don't want an extremely large photo to be stored on your website it'll slow
your website down. But anyway, to scale this I'll go over to Image>Scale Image,
and right here I could set my width and height and you'll see I have a
chain-link icon right here and it's locked. That means this is going to
maintain the original aspect ratio of the image, which just means the
proportion of the width to the height. So I'll type in 1920 and hit the tab key
and that will automatically adjust my height to 1280. And then I do want to
keep this resolution set pretty high to 300 just in case we want to print this.
72 pixels per inch is more so for a web so if you are using this photo for a
website, go ahead and keep your X&Y resolution set to 72 pixels per inch. And
I'll set my quality interpolation at "NoHalo." And I'll hit scale and that will scale our image down a bit. I'll hold control and use my mouse wheel
to zoom in and that just gives us a better view of the image. So next what I
like to do is use the Shadows-Highlights tool. And I do have an entire tutorial
dedicated to this tool on my YouTube channel. And so what I do to access this
tool is go to Colors>Shadows-Highlights and this will bring up my Shadows-Highlights dialog box. This is going to allow me to bring up the details in the
shadows, and also either bring up or tone down the details in the highlights,
while also shifting the white point - and shifting the white point is going to
make our image basically either brighter or darker overall - again I have an entire
tutorial that goes over the details of this tool. But what I'll do is I'll grab
my shadows slider and I'm just gonna slide this up a little bit, and you can
see the darker pixels within the shadows of my image will start to brighten up a
little bit and that's just allowing us to recover some details. In this case,
because a lot of the shadows are in the background of the image, I don't
necessarily need to turn these up that much. Really if even at all. But then I
can come over to my highlights and you can see that as I drag my highlights up
you can start to see where the highlights are in the image - which is
pretty much right here in the top right corner of the image. Some of it is on her
hair which is pretty nice because it does give her sort of like a natural
hair light there. And by the way this photo was taken in pretty much all
natural lighting conditions, and a little bit of artificial light from diffused
light sources. I'm not going to get into light sources too much right now but
that's why this is a softer looking image there's just a lot of natural and
diffused light on here. So I can just adjust the highlights here, and I could
check the preview box and you can see there's a before - there's an after. So
this is looking a little bit brighter. I actually don't need to make it that
bright. And then the white point adjustment is basically going to make
the entire image brighter, not just the shadows or the highlights. So you could
see that's just shifting the white point a little bit and it's causing there to
be brighter and more white pixels in here. So there's a before and there's an
after. So that looks pretty good to me. And I'll just go ahead and click OK. So
for the third step in my color editing process I like to use the color balance
tool and you can find that over here in Colors>Color Balance.
So what the Color Balance tool allows you to do is adjust the colors in your
shadows, mid-tones, and highlights of your image. This is super useful because often
times when you take a photo with your camera, either due to the lighting
conditions or the camera itself, or whatever other factor is going on with
the colors - you know, maybe what the person is wearing at the time of the
photo shoot - your photo is going to basically produce some colors that you
don't necessarily want in an image or it's going to produce maybe too much of
one color, or maybe just the overall colors are off in the image. So usually
you just need to tweak the colors a little bit in your image. If you took the
image properly, which I think was the case for this photo shoot that we did,
you don't usually have to make too drastic of changes with the color
balance tool. So don't, you know, try to really add a bunch of red in here, add a
bunch of magenta - and you'll see what I mean by that in a second here. So let me
go ahead and start editing this photo and I'm starting with the mid-tones here,
and so what this is doing is its allowing me to add either red or cyan to
the mid-tones in my image. And so red and cyan are basically opposites, so whenever
you add one of one color or whenever you add more of one color, I should say, that
is going to basically take away from that other color. So here you could see
we're taking away cyan and adding red or if we go the other way it's doing the
opposite. And it's basically up to your eye as to whether or not you want to add
more or less of a color. So it's kind of up to personal preference, and also, like
I said, just the individual photo you took and the various colors going on in
the photo. In this case I personally like the mid-tones having a little bit of
cyan in here, so I'll stick with that. And you can see I only added -2.5. Negative just means you're going to the left with the slider,
positive means you're going to the right. And so now I'm just going to do the same
here with each of the colors and the different ranges of my image. So green
and magenta both do not look great, you know, adding a bunch of that either way. I
do think magenta looks a little bit better, so I'm going to go ahead and
stick with that. And now I'm going to adjust my blues and yellows here.
And so in this case I think the Blues do look a little bit better so again you
could see I'm making very minute adjustments here. I even just added a
tiny bit there and that made a little bit more of a difference. So here is a
before here's and after, and this is just for the mid-tones. And we're going to
come back here later with the color temperature tool and we're going to
adjust the color temperature. So if you think this looks a little bit too cool
right now don't worry we are going to go back and we're going to edit this with
another tool. So now we're going to move on to the shadows tool, and this will
adjust the colors in the shadows of my image. So, again, we're just going to use
the eye test to see which looks better. That obviously looks way too artificial.
You could see there's too much cyan showing up here in the shadows and so
let me see what this looks like with a little bit of red. And so in this case
it's actually the opposite. I think the red looks a little bit better in the
shadows. And now I'm going to move down here to the green and magenta option. And so
again I think magenta actually looks a little bit better. And then we're going
to move on to yellow and blue. This time I think adding a little bit of
blue helps and so here's a before - here's an after. Next I'll move on to the
highlights range and I'm gonna do the same thing. Using the eye test, I'm going
to adjust the colors here. And just determine from the eye test which one looks better. So you'll notice that for the mid-tones and the shadows I added
more blue, but for the highlights I'm going to go with a little bit more
yellow. The reason for that is that the highlights are more of her hair and
where the sun was coming in. Those are colors that I want to come off as yellow
or almost like a golden color in the final image. So I am going to stick with
yellow on those. I don't want to cool off the highlights because I think that just
doesn't look right. So I am going to add a little bit of yellow to this.
And here's a before, here's an after. And I'll click OK and there is our photo
after the color balance adjustment. So step four in this process is adjusting
the levels of the image and the reason I did the levels after the color balance -
because I know some of you are going to contest the order of this - but the reason
I'm doing the levels after the color balance is that if I do the levels first,
and maybe I make a wrong adjustment to the levels and I turn up the highlights
a bit too much and then I try to edit the colors, some of the colors will end
up looking a little bit too artificial in the final image. So for that reason
I'm using the levels tool after the color balance tool. So I'm going to come
over to Colors>Levels, and that'll bring up the Levels dialog box. So the purpose
of the levels tool in this case is to adjust the brightness of the shadows,
mid-tones, and highlights in our image. And that is as opposed to the color
balance tool which allows us to adjust the colors of those three ranges in our
image. So in this case I'm just adjusting like the brightness or the darkness. So
by making these adjustments we are actually affecting both the brightness
and the contrast of the image, and so this is almost like a more advanced
brightness contrast tool - which is another tool found in GIMP. I'm not going
to go over that in today's tutorial. But let me go ahead and make adjustments to
this to show you guys. So this arrow over here is going to adjust the shadows of
my image - this black arrow. So I'm just gonna drag that right to where the
histogram ends. If your guys' histogram goes all the way over to the left, you
can just drag it in a little bit and just do it until, you know, it looks good
on your image. But when I do that you'll see that darkens my image overall, and
that's not entirely what I want to do. So what I can do is I can drag my
highlights over a little bit - so that is this white triangle over here, this white
slider. So if I drag this up too much it'll create overexposed parts of my
image, and that's not what I want to do. I'm gonna drag this down a little bit
until my image is a little bit brighter but not too bright. So this is just using
that I test to find a happy medium. And I'm gonna grab my mid-tones - and this
allows you to either brighten or darken the image through the mid-tones. So this
can help you find a pretty good balance between the shadows and the highlights
because we can bring out the mid-tones now. I actually am going to turn my
highlights down a little bit here. And so here's a before - so you can see
the image isn't quite as bright and doesn't have as much contrast. It's a
little bit flatter of an image - and then here's an after. A little bit brighter, a
little bit more contrast. I do want to turn the brightness - the highlights I
mean - down a little bit, and then maybe tweak the mid-tones here.
It does take a little bit of playing around to get the settings right where
you want them. So there's a before, there's an after. That looks pretty good
so I'll click OK. Alright so now that we've improved the
brightness and contrast of our image through the levels tool, next I'm going
to start working a little bit more on the colors of our image. We've already
done that with the color balance tool, but step 5 is to now use the saturation
tool to help bring out some of the intensity of our colors in our image. So
you can access this tool by going to Colors>Saturation. So whether you want to
increase the intensity or decrease the intensity of the colors in your image is
going to depend on the image itself. There are plenty of times where I
decrease the saturation in an image, and when you make an image less saturated
you are taking away the intensity of the colors. And then there are other examples
where I like to increase the intensity of the colors in the image, and so that
is just going to add a bit more color to our image. So, in this case with this
image, I'm actually going to just use my slider here to adjust the scale of this.
So, by turning the scale slider down, you are essentially desaturating your photo.
You can see if I go all the way it'll make this photo black and white, and if I
go all the way up it'll make this a very colorful image - way too colorful in my
opinion. So what you want to do is just subtly add or remove color from an image,
usually more dramatic photos will require taking away some of the
saturation. In this case, I think because she has, you know, very blue eyes and very
blond hair, and all of that is kind of meshing very well, and there's also some
colors going on in the background here, I'm going to actually increase the
saturation a little bit. And you can see here's a before - this is the original
image - here's after. So a lot more colorful here, and it's helping our
colors stand out by making them a little bit more intense. And then I'll just
click OK. For the sixth step we're going to use really the last color tool for
this tutorial, and that is going to be the color temperature tool. I like to use
this tool at this point in the photo editing process because we now have our
colors correct, we have, for the most part, our brightness
and contrast corrected here in our image. So now I like to sort of add a little
bit of tone to this image, maybe warm it up a little bit or cool it off a little
bit based on the colors of the image that are already done. So now I'm gonna come over here and go to Colors>Color Temperature. And so
you have an original temperature and you have intended temperature. I like to just
keep these settings at their default locations here at 6500, and then I'll
just adjust the intended temperature. If I turn this value up - so if I drag the
slider to the right, and this is going to increase this number - it's going to make
my image warmer overall. Versus if I drag this to the left, it is going to decrease
this value and make the image cooler overall. I think that this image looks a
little bit better when it's warmer just because there was a little bit of that
diffused artificial light which had a little bit of a warmer tone to it. Even
though there was a lot of natural light in here I think that the warmer light from
the inside the building, the ambient light as they call it, really helped to
make this image look a little bit warmer and so when we add a little bit to that
it helps to enhance that effect. So here's a before, and here's an after. You
can see I just turned this up a little bit to around 7,000. I didn't go with an
exact number here, but I'll just go ahead and click OK. And that will apply those
changes. Step 7 is going to be using the Curves tool, and this tool as I've said
in many tutorials in the past is going to help, if you use it correctly,
add a little bit of contrast to the image. So I'm going to come over here to
Colors>Curves, and that'll bring up my curves dialog here. And I'm just gonna
click on the middle of this line here, and this is going to be our curve - and
you can see there's a little histogram here. If we go to the left of the curve
that is going to be the shadows of our image, and then the right is going to be
the highlights. So if I come over here and click and create a point on this
curve, and then I drag it down, you can see now why it's called a curve. That is
going to darken our shadows here. And then if I come over here and I click and
create a point on the right side of my curve and drag it up, that will brighten
up our highlights. And that is going to help us create a little bit more
contrast. We have already adjusted the contrast a little bit using the levels
tool. The curves tool just allows us to give the image a little bit more
contrast, help those details stand out just a tiny bit more, and really just
give our photo a little bit more of an edge. So here we're creating an S curve,
and s curves create contrast, but if I adjust the shadows down a little bit and
do the same with the highlights, that is going to tone down our contrast. I don't
want to overdo the contrast because it does look a little bit artificial when
we do that. So there's a before, there's an after. You can see it just looks a
tiny bit better, so I'll click OK. That brings us to step 8 which is using the
Airbrush and Heal tools to improve the complexion of our model. So this is
obviously a step that is only going to be useful when you have a model in your
photo, and in my case for this photo - I'm gonna hold ctrl and use the mouse wheel
to zoom in - I have a pretty close-up shot of the models face here, so I do want to
improve the complexion even though she does have a really good complexion. So
I'm going to come over here and grab my airbrush tool. And you can see my
settings over here - I have the opacity set to around 50%, that's just going to
ensure that this doesn't get painted on too strongly. And then I have the
Hardness set pretty low and I have the Rate set pretty low. The Hardness is
going to make this brush a little bit soft which means the edges of this are
going to be fuzzier, and therefore it's going to be harder to see, you know, where
the lines end where I'm painting. So it just helps it sort of blend in with the
skin around the model's complexion. And the rate is just going to ensure that
the color doesn't come out of the airbrush tool too fast. Again, trying to
avoid making this look a little bit too artificial. If I hold the ctrl key and
click on my image, that's gonna bring up my eyedropper tool. I can click and drag
this around and you'll see my foreground color will change based on where I'm
clicking with the eyedropper tool. I can also just click once and that'll grab
whatever color I clicked on.So this part is useful when you're trying to grab a
skin tone. And what you want to do is grab the skin tone of the area you're
painting on. So I'll grab for starters this skin tone here, which is this sort
of like rouge/blush color, and you'll see that that is now my color over here. And
then I can paint with this brush - and you'll see this isn't being applied on
too thick or, you know, too strong or anything. It's just pretty soft ,and that
is the benefit of using the airbrush tool. It does come out pretty soft.
I'll hold ctrl again and grab a different color here, and just paint a
little bit along her cheek right here. You always want to paint
along the contours of the face because otherwise it'll make her face look too
angular, and therefore too artificial. And then I'm gonna hold ctrl and grab this
color down here. And you can see I'm just painting out -
and right here I did paint a little bit too much, and you can see now there's too
hard of a line between, you know, the two colors of her face here. So let me just
take cntrl+Z and undo that. Now I'll hold cntrl and just paint right here.
And you don't have to paint everywhere on your face. You could just paint the
areas where you want to improve the complexion a little bit. Hold control - and you can also increase or decrease the
size your brush using the brackets on your keyboard ("[" or "]"). So let me actually hit cntrl+Z. I didn't want to paint that part out. And then you can see if there's any
other parts of her skin where you want to paint. I'm gonna increase the size of
my brush again, and just paint a little bit up here. Again, the whole point
of this is just to make her complexion look a little bit smoother.
I'll hold control and I'll just paint a little bit right here. And I'll decrease
my brush size because I don't want to paint - there's a pretty big difference
between these two colors - so I don't want to paint the color I have selected now
up here. It's gonna change the shape of her nose. And for her face in particular
I don't want to paint too much because she does have some natural freckles, and
I don't want to paint over those. So I think that looks pretty good there. You
can also zoom in a little bit and use the Heal tool if you have something like
acne, which in this case we don't really have. But I can grab my Heal tool here
from my tool box, and use the bracket keys on my keyboard. And let's say for
instance I wanted to get rid of this spot right here, which I'm pretty sure is
just like a freckle or something, but now you can see that that's gone ahead and
erased that spot there using the Heal tool. Or maybe I want to get rid of like
this hair here. I can hold ctrl+click to grab a source, and then I can just paint
away this hair that's sort of overlapping some of her face. And now
that hair is gone. So hold ctrl and zoom out a bit. Now that I've finished
adjusting the colors, adjusting the lighting in my image, and touching up the
model a little bit, the next step is I'm going to sharpen this image up a bit.
That is going to help bring out some of the detail, and make this image look a
little bit more high-quality. This was taken on a pretty good camera - a Canon 7d. So the photo should have a pretty decent overall quality, and I do want to really
bring that out in the final image. So what I'll do is I'll come over here to
Filters, and I'll go to Enhance, and then Sharpen (Unsharp Mask). And this feature is going to sharpen up our image. And I don't want to crank the radius too much
because as you could see this is going to make our image look terrible. So, by
default, it comes with 3.0 and .5. If you're not sure - you know you don't have
an eye for sharpening your photo - just go with the 3 and .5 default settings
because those usually look fine. But you can adjust the radius and the amount
here. And I'm just going to make this a little bit more than 3, and then the amount -
you can see if I turn this all the way down it barely does anything - it's
basically not sharpening this at all. And if I turn it up it's sharpening it way
too much. So I do like to keep this around that
.5 default setting there. I probably could have been fine with just
keeping this at the default, but I'll click OK. Step 10 in this photo editing process, which is the final step, is to add a
vignette to the photo. And vignettes are going to help frame what's going on in
your photo. So in this case we want to frame the model - we want to draw the
person's eye, whoever's looking at this to the model, and we also want to kind of
take away, for example, in the top right corner here - this is a little bit
overexposed, and it's kind of upsetting the balance of the photo here. So the
vignette is going to help dim some of these lights down here and just help
frame this photo, and also help draw the eye inward into the subjects face. So
when I create a vignette I like to create a new layer, and I've already got
this named vignette. I'm gonna have the "Fill With" set to "Transparency." And make
sure you also have the "Mode" here set to "Normal," and I'll click OK. Next I'm gonna
go to Filters>Light and Shadow>Vignette. And this is going to draw a vignette for
us pretty much automatically. We do have to make some adjustments here to the
vignette. So in this case I want to adjust the radius, which is going to
adjust really how far out or how far in this vignette goes on our image. So it's
really the radius of this ellipse going on right here inside the vignette or in
the middle of the vignette. So you'll see if I decrease the radius it's going to
decrease the size of this ellipse here. Or if I increase it it's going to
increase the size of it and therefore push that vignette outward. So I like to
have it so that the vignette is just showing up in the corners of our image
here. I don't like having it being too prominent, so I do turn the radius up a
tiny bit. The softness is going to determine how much the vignette spills
towards the middle of our image. So if I turn that softness down, you'll see it's
going to retreat a little bit there. And the Gamma is a pretty similar function
there. You can see that as I increase the Gamma it's going to basically cause the
black that's in the middle of our image to retreat a little bit. So I don't
really like that look too much. I'm going to turn the gamma down a little bit. Then you've also got Proportion, which is going to
determine the shape of our ellipse here relative to the proportion of the image.
So right now this is the exact same proportion of the image, which is what I
want to keep. Squeeze is just going to make this you know either narrower or
less narrow so that is also going to adjust the proportion of the ellipse. And
then the center is just going to be where the center of this ellipse is
inside the vignette. So in this case I do want to make this a little bit
off-center because our model is a little bit to the right in our image. So I'm
going to just drag the center X slider to the right a little bit. And let me
also just reduce the Squeeze here. You can also rotate your vignette if you
want. I'm not going to do that for this image because I don't think it makes
sense. But here's a before here's an after. Obviously this vignette is still
too prominent and we're gonna adjust that in a second. I'll just click OK, and then I'll click on the vignette layer. And I'm just going
to adjust the opacity here, and this is just allowing ths vignette to be a
little bit less prominent. If you think that the vignette lines are too
noticeable, like in this case you could see that there's a vignette right here,
you can go to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur, and then you can adjust the blur here.
And you can see that that is softening up that line created by that vignette,
and I'll click OK. And this is why I like to have vignettes
on their own layers because it gives you a little bit more flexibility with the
vignette. So here's the original photo we started with. So obviously it's a lot
flatter of an image, a lot less colors going on, and here is the final image. So
that's it for my easy 10 step process to editing photos in GIMP. If I left
anything out that you guys often used in your photo editing, feel free to let me
know in the comments. Otherwise, if you like this video please subscribe to my
youtube channel at Youtube.com/DaviesMediaDesign. You can visit my
website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. You can enroll in my best-selling GIMP Photo
Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro Photo Retoucher on Udemy. And you could
support our channel and help us grow by becoming a Patron on Patreon. And I'll
include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in
the description of the video. So thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.
