Quick and Easy Color Match Technique in GIMP (Photo Compositing)

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 a quick and dirty way to color match two photos using this is version 2.10.20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before we get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of video tutorials on here my book of layers and free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any my skillshare classes by visiting and you can get more with a premium membership to davey's media design i'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so i'll be using two photos for this tutorial both of course are going to be completely free so there's this photo of a hiker on pixabay and this photo here of like a little downtown city block with some neon lights so the reason i chose both of these photos is that the color is pretty much completely different so this will show you how well this technique works as well as how easy it is here's the final image so we have the image in the front which is going to be the hiker and you can see this is color matched pretty nicely here to the photo in the back but let's dive in here i'll start by coming over to the original hiker photo i do need to get rid of this background i'll start by right clicking on here and just make sure this has an alpha channel if it does the add alpha channel will be grayed out if not just click that button of course we need to erase the background here and as i usually mentioned in my tutorials there are plenty of ways to erase an image background in i have a tutorial on how to do that which i will link to this video but the way i did it in this case was i came over grabbed my pass tool and just quickly outlined using the pass tool around my subject i have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to master the path tool so definitely check that out i'm not going to do that for this tutorial because i've already done this ahead of time so if i'm in my paths tab here on the right side i can show the path around my subject and once i have the path drawn i can just come over here and click the path to selection icon that will draw a selection around my photo here around my subject and i'll come over to the layers panel right click on the original photo and go to add layer mask under initialize layer mask 2 i'll choose selection and click add and that will mask out our background i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that the reason i'm not going to cover erasing the background is that's not what this tutorial is about this tutorial is about color matching multiple photos with different colors so in order to do that the next step is to bring in that photo of the neon background there so i'll do that by going to file and if you know where this photo is on your computer you can go to open as layers in my case i'll go to open recent and i'll come over here and choose the photo i want to work with so here's the original photo i'm just going to come over to our photo with the background removed click and drag that tab over here to our tab with the building drag it on top of the composition and release so here's our guy standing in front of the building i need to scale this so i'll hit shift s on my keyboard make sure the transform mode is set to layer and i'm just going to click and drag the transform handle to scale this up and i'm going to move this in place so it looks like he's kind of off to the side here looking at the entrance to this building that looks pretty good so i'll hit scale so the issue now is that the colors look totally different so this looks really fake and the other thing is that both of these are totally in focus which is not common for a camera lens usually one item is going to be out of focus so let's start by color matching this so this method for quickly color matching two photos is going to start with the eyedropper tool so we can access this tool using the o key on the keyboard or by grabbing it over here inside of this bottom tool group in the toolbox and you'll notice when i hover my eyedropper tool over the photo it's not just that tiny eyedropper that you're used to it's actually a gigantic eyedropper so if i come over here to my tool options you'll actually see there is something called sample average that's checked so when i uncheck that this is what you guys are used to seeing with the eyedropper tool so i can grab individual pixel colors here but it's not super helpful in this case when i click sample average that's going to sample the entire area inside this rectangle here inside the square and it's going to take the average color from inside there so if i come over here to my buildings layer you guys will definitely notice that the overall color of this is going to be a purplish color there's some blues in here as well but it's pretty much dominantly purple so if i click with this eyedropper tool you'll see it's going to grab an average of that rectangle area that square area and over here inside my foreground color you'll see it's now going to be a sort of dark purplish color so this just allows a very quick way to get an average if i turn this all the way up you'll see we get an even larger area and this can provide us with an even better look at the color that you're going for the average color and if you are just trying to color match one particular area that your subject is in let's say you're compositing a photo and the subject on the left side like in this case and the left side has a totally different color in the image you can just click around that same area where your subject is standing and it will grab the average colors of that area and you can then apply it to your subject once you have the color you want so we'll go with this darkish purple i'll hit shift b to grab my bucket fill tool then i'll come over here click above the background layer so on our subject layer come over here click to create a new layer and i'm just going to name this color fill it with transparency for now and click ok so with my bucket fill tool i'm just going to click inside you can also just drag and drop the foreground color like so that'll add this purple color here the obvious issue is it's totally covering up our subject let's come over here to the dropped buffer layer and alt click on my dropped buffer layer that will create a selection area around my subject before i mask this i do want to grow the selection area very slightly to avoid having a white outline around my subject so if i were to mask this right now it would be too close to the original subject area so if i hide this you'd be able to basically see a faint line going around the entire subject i don't want that so i'm going to go to select grow we'll grow this just by a couple of pixels so maybe one or two pixels click ok then we'll right click on the color layer and go to add layer mask under initialize layer mask 2 i'll choose selection and click add then i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and now you'll see we have the color layer going just over our subject and none of the other portions of the image this doesn't look great so what i'll do is come over here and change the layer mode right now it's set to normal i'm going to change this to one of the color based layer modes so you guys can cycle through these you have hsb hue hsl color is another good one lc hue lch chroma lch color and i believe that's going to be it yes so one of those color based modes there so i'm going to go to lch color and it's going to look way too purple right now but you'll see that this is already helping this to blend a bit better what i can do is come over here to this layer and adjust the opacity i still want some of the original colors from the original photo i don't want this to be totally purple so as you can see this is already doing a great job of color matching this and from here we can add more my new corrections or more nuanced corrections to this that way you can further blend this with the original photo so come over here to the photo layer and first i'll go to colors levels and i'm just going to very quickly adjust the levels i'm not going to spend too much time on the remaining portion so i'll add some contrast and darken this a bit so here's the before here's an after and i'll click ok next i'm just going to adjust the shading of our layer here so come over and grab my dodge and burn tool from this layer group you guys might see the smudge tool first you can also just hit shift d so the burn tool is going to darken any of the areas we paint and we can change this to darken the highlights of our layer the shadows or the mid-tones so for example if i scroll down here on my tool options you'll see right now this is set to highlights and the exposure is turned up if you want less of an effect you can turn the exposure down but now let's shift over to mid-tones so we've darkened the highlights now we're darkening the mid-tones here and then come over to shadows and if we wanted to really darken the shadows we could turn the exposure way up and just paint on the shadows and as you can see now the photo is looking darker so it's starting to match the lighting of the photo the lighting of the backdrop here and if i hold the control key it'll automatically switch to my dodge tool so the dodge tool is just going to brighten any areas we paint on i'll hit control z let me change this to the highlights hold the ctrl key so that will brighten up the highlights there and if i release that i'll bring us back to the burn tool there so that we can darken this a bit more and the last thing i'll do to this photo is just blur the background here so let's come over to the background layer we can go to filters blur and if you're using gim 2.10.20 or newer you can come over here to lens blur and this is going to mimic a realistic blur with the camera so we can increase or decrease the radius of this so let's just blur this a little bit and click ok and actually one last thing i'll do is just blur the edges of our subject so i'll come over here to the dropped buffer layer let's come over to the dodge and burn tool and change this to blur sharpen make sure this is set to blur you can turn the right upward down depending on how much blur you want i'll keep that where it's at and just paint along the edges of the photo and this is just going to help blend this a bit better so there we go let me click on the background layer and there's our final photo all right so that's how you very quickly color match multiple photos using hopefully you like this tutorial if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com daviesmediadesign don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 38,759

Rating: 4.9675002 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, GIMP 2.10.20, Color Picker, Average, Average color, Color Picker Average, Color Match, Photo Compositing, Combine Photos

Id: w-6h7cxJEXI

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020