GIMP Tutorial: Top 5 Photo Enhancement Techniques

[Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and today I'm gonna be showing you the top five ways to enhance your photos in this is version two point nine point eight but you can use version two point eight point two two or another version of some things might be a little different I'll point things out if they are but this is the development version of it is the latest version of and it contains pretty much all the features that are gonna be found in the new 2.10 version coming out soon just with some bug fixes they're working on but before we get started I want to direct you guys to my website Davies media designed.com slash tutorials we've got tons of video and text tutorials on here all on so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our course photo editing from beginner to pro photo retoucher i'll include a link to the course as well as links to our social media in the description okay so this is the final version here and this is the photo before I made any enhancements to this but I'm gonna start today by working on the overall colors of the image so I'm going to edit the base colors of this image and then what I'm gonna do is separate the subject from the background and work on those separately and you'll see what I mean in a second so I'll go ahead and start by editing this base image and I'll go to colors color balance and I'm going to reset the range on all of these because I do want to start from scratch and I'm gonna go to the mid-tones and what we're gonna do is adjust settings on the mid-tones and when I drag to the left on this color bar it's increasing the cyan if I drag to the right it'll increase the red and usually you don't want to do anything too drastic when you're just on the base layer here because it'll look too artificial definitely the better the image you come into the program with that the less you'll have to do in the less artificial little look and you can preview here you can toggle this preview you can also do a split view to see before and after and I'll go ahead and click okay next thing I'm gonna do is brighten this up overall and I'm just going to do that by going new colors exposure and this is actually new feature so if you guys are working in one of the older versions of you won't have this option but you can go to brightness and contrast and play around with the settings there to try to get the same effect and I'm just turning this up a tiny bit here I don't want to overdo it so I'll click OK and then I'll go to colors hue/saturation and I'm just going to adjust the saturation of this and you can see it before and after here and this does look a little bit on the green side right now but we're gonna work on that in a second so now I'm going to go to colors curves and I'm going to set the channel to value for now and go ahead and start making some adjustments on here and now I'm going to change the channel to red and go ahead and make my red adjustments and then I'll switch over to green and then I'll go over to blue and do the same thing and you can always come back to the main value and make an adjustment based on now that you have all your other layers adjusted and I am going to go back to read here and there's a before and there's an after alright so once I'm happy with that I'll go ahead and click OK and so now we have the base layer here color adjusted but I'm gonna go to colors saturation and I'm just going to turn the saturation down a little bit not too much and I'll click okay all right so now we have the colors adjusted on our base layer here it's not perfect but we still have a long way to go but what I'm gonna do now is separate the background from the foreground here and I'm gonna do that by using the free select tool which is over here but I'm gonna first grab my zoom tool and zoom in a little bit and that's going to allow me to more accurately draw and I'm going to set the mode here to replace the current selection and I'm going to go ahead with this free select tool and click and drag as I draw with my mouse and this is just allowing me to outline the details here of her arm and the more precise you can get with this the better and I'm using the scroll on my mouse to scroll up while I'm zoomed in here that way I can just travel around the image as I'm drawing on it and I'm not really getting these hairs right here just because they're so fine that it's not going to be noticeable that they're not picking up the same details as are the same colors that we're going to be applying to the background you all right and now I'm going to connect these last two points and hit enter on my keyboard and that's going to create a selection area around my subject but there's some spots in here that we don't want to be within the selection area so we'll go ahead and grab our subtract from current selection mode still using the free select tool and we're going to draw on the inside here and we're just making sure that this gap is not included and I'll hit enter and then we'll do the same thing over here enter you know grab my zoom tool and hold control and go ahead and zoom out and now you'll notice that we have just our subjects selected here and not the background so we're gonna go ahead and duplicate our main layer and we'll change this to background adjustment and now what I'm going to do is right click on this go to add layer mask initialize layer mask to selection and make sure invert mask is checked and then click add and that's going to create a layer mask for the surrounding area or the background of the image here so you can go to select none and make sure your clicked on your main layer and not the layer mask and now what we're gonna do is go ahead and adjust the levels of the background separately so we'll go to colors curves and sorry I said levels before but we're adjusting the curves and now you can just go ahead and adjust the value here and we're making back around a little darker so that our subject can stand out a little more against it but we're also making it a little bit greener just adding a little bit of color to it and I'm just doing the same thing as we did before where I'm changing the channel to each color channel and editing them separately and you could always go back if need be and make further adjustments here and you can do it before laughter and then I'll click okay and so now that background stands out a little bit better it just has better colors and it's also a little bit darker which then helps the main subject here stand out so the next technique I'm going to show you for enhancing your photos is I'm going to work on the complexion of our subject and I'm going to do that by using a quick mask so I'm going to go ahead in the bottom left corner here and click to toggle this quick mask grab my brush tool and make sure the color is set to white if you have different colors here you can click this icon to reset the colors and then go ahead and hit X on your keyboard and that will switch it to white and you can increase your brush size with the brackets on your keyboard and then you can change the brush hardness I have this set to 25 right now I'm going to keep it there and make sure also your opacity is turned all the way up to 100 and go ahead and paint on the complexion of your subject and I'm gonna grab my zoom tool and zoom in here decrease the size of my brush with the bracket on my keyboard and I'm just going to paint out basically the face and then we'll also go down and paint out the arms you and if you paint out too much like I just did right here you can hit X on your keyboard to switch to black and go ahead and paint that back in paint the mask back on and I'll hit X again you all right so once you finish that you can see how well you the quickmask by turning the quickmask toggle off and just kind of check out any parts that didn't get included and so you see part of the neck here part of the face and some of the arms and then right here as well we need to fix so we'll just go in real quick and grab our zoom tool and zoom in on these portions and you may want to just change your brush to a harder brush so I'll change this to hardness 50 and we'll go ahead and toggle that mask off again and see if there's any major areas we can clean up all right four times that's good enough for now I'll grab my zoom tool and go ahead and zoom out and now what I want to do is select I'm gonna go to our main layer again grab our foreground color and grab our dropper tool and I want to select an area of her skin tone that I like and so I'll go ahead and select this color and click OK and now what I'm gonna do is grab my bucket fill tool create a new layer and we'll name this layer skin tone and I'll click OK drag that to the top and go ahead and fill that in and select none and now what I'll do is go ahead and change the mode of this to soft light and now I'll right click on this go to add layer mask uncheck the invert mask checkbox there and change this to black and click add and now I'll grab my brush and again you can hit this icon to reset your colors and then hit X to choose white and I'll decrease the opacity and I'll start with about 60% and then I'll increase my brush size here and what I'm gonna do is click on this layer mask and paint these skin tones in and what this does is it basically evens out some of her skin tone and it also brightens it a little bit and you can hit Z to grab your zoom tool and click the zoom in grab your paint brush again and you can adjust the size while you paint we're avoiding places like the eyes and the eyebrows because those obviously shouldn't be the color of skin tone and you can hide this to see a before and after and if you want you can even increase the opacity for certain parts if you want certain parts to be brighter than others I'll decrease that opacity again and I can zoom out now and I can come over to the arms here with my paintbrush and increase the size and just paint over these and as you can see the skin tone brightens and I'll go ahead and zoom out and here's a before-and-after so there's before and there's after as you could see her skin's a little brighter and it's also a little bit more even and then we can with our main layer selected here go to filters blur Gaussian blur and I'll just set this to like a low number six I have it sets you there and that just kind of helps it blend a little better and again there's a before and after the next technique I'm going to show you for enhancing your photos is whitening teeth and for the ladies making the lips a little bit more red and so we're enhancing the lips I should say I'm gonna grab my zoom tool here I hit 0z on my keyboard and go ahead and zoom in on the mouth here and zoom out a little bit grab my free select tool make sure that this is set to replace the current selection or add to the current selection and then go ahead and draw around the outline of the lips enter and then I'm going to grab subtract from the current selection and go ahead and outline the inner part of the mouth because I don't want that included in here and hit enter and you can also subtract any of this excess and now I'm gonna go back to our original layer here and I'll grab my move tool but you can go to colors levels and just go ahead and adjust these levels here just to brighten them up a little bit click okay and then go to colors saturation and we'll just increase the saturation here until they're a bit more red we don't want to overdo it because we don't want it to look too fake then I'll click OK then go to select none and that just enhanced the lips a little bit but now what we can do is grab the free select tool again change the mode back to replace the current selection and we're just going to draw over the teeth and I'm going to show you guys how to whiten the teeth here and hit enter and then you can do subtract from the current selection and just get rid of any excess that you accidentally selected all right so I'm going to come back to original layer hit ctrl C and then control V and that's going to paint the or that's going to copy the teeth on it with their own floating selection layer and then just create a new layer just click on that layer and click create a new layer and we'll name this teeth-whitening move this to the top and now what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and adjust the levels on here so go to color levels and we just want these a little brighter not too much click OK the colors saturation and you can just turn the saturation down a little bit and even though her teeth are fine just gets rid of some of the slight yellow hue and then click OK and then what I'm going to do is go to right-click alpha to selection create a new layer name this teeth whitening too and grab my bucket fill tool and I'm gonna fill this in with white you can go to select none and then I'm going to change the mode to overlay and then I'm going to decrease the opacity and now you can see the teeth are much wider but we don't want it to look too artificial so we'll just turn down the opacity until we've got this the way we want it grab a zoom tool and zoom out and now you can see a before and after with the teeth whitened a little bit and then brightened as well the fourth technique I'm going to show you for enhancing your photos in is going to be applying the contrast mask and I showed you guys how to do this in the last tutorial for dark photos I'm going to show you how to do it here for a pretty bright photo and what this is going to do is just help our subjects stand out a little more so I'll start by duplicating our main layer here and you can name this contrast mask and I'm going to change the mode to overlay and then I'm going to go to colors desaturate desaturate make sure this is set to luminance and click OK colors invert and then right click on it go to add layer mask and set this to grayscale copy of layer and click add and once you've done that duplicate your main layer twice and name one hue and one saturation and go ahead and change the mode of this first one to hue and then the second one we're gonna change the mode to saturation and go ahead and drag these above the contrast mask layer and make sure that the saturation layer is on top and you can adjust the opacity of the contrast mask layer if you think the effect is a little too intense but what this should do is just help to brighten up your subject so that there aren't as many shadows basically so here's before and here's after now the last technique I'm going to show you for enhancing your photos in is going to be enhancing the eyes and this is pretty easy so what I'm gonna do is grab my zoom tool and zoom in here on the eyes go to your main layer grab your lip select tool and you can draw the ellipse around the iris and make sure that your mode here is set to add to the current selection that way when you draw another ellipse it doesn't erase the old one you just drew and try to align this up so that they match up pretty well with the iris and now what I'm going to do is grab my free select tool and make sure the mode is still set to subtract from the current selection and I'm just going to draw out the eyelids here and press Enter same thing for the top enter and then I'm going to do the same thing for the bottom eyelid and the top eyelid for the other eye hit ctrl C on your keyboard and make sure again you're on your main layer take control V and that will paste the eyes as a floating selection layer and then click to create a new layer and you can name these name this layer eyes and drag it to the top and so now again we're going to adjust the levels of this layer and we don't want to overdo the effect here because we don't want it to look too artificial so click OK and you can also go to colors hue/saturation and you can turn up the saturation if you want okay and we can also apply a little bit of exposure to this to brighten the eyes or if you don't have the newer version of you can just use brightness and contrast I have this set to about 183 here so I'll click OK and here's a before and after so this just brightens up the eyes a little bit and now I'll go ahead and grab my zoom tool and zoom out here and so if we turn all the effects off here you can see what this photo looks like before and then if we turn all the effects on again here's what it looks like after now before we finish up you can always come back to the original layer here after you've made all your other adjustments and just kind of make some tweaks so that you know the final product looks the way you want it to look so I'm just going to adjust the levels the curves here real quick just to make sure that our subject looks the way I'd like her to look and click okay and we can also make some last adjustments here as well to the final background layer depending on how it looks with all the effects so now what you can do is go to file export as and we go ahead and change the name of our file and we can come down here to select file type by extension you've got gifts you've got JPEGs you've got PDFs I'm gonna save this as a JPEG I'll hit export and I can save this at a hundred percent quality and hit export you can also go to file save and save this as the native xcf file format that's found in but that's it for this tutorial so thank you guys for watching hopefully you learned a lot if you like this tutorial please subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also visit us on our website at Davies media design.com / tutorials and of course you can enroll in our udemy online course or find us on social media and I'll include the links to that in the description so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 471,793

Rating: 4.8635616 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp 2.9.8, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, top 5 photo enhancements, top 5 photo editing techniques, best photo editing techniques, best photo enhancements, how to fix a photo, how to enhance a photo, contrast mask, even complexion, enhance eyes, quick mask, whiten teeth, teeth whitening photoshop, teeth whitening gimp, color tools gimp, color correction gimp, gimp 2.10

Id: TiavEWDVQGE

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018