Week 11: Portraits!

I actually like shooting portraits. Self portraits are a different matter, though. Boy is it hard to get decent shots with a timer! I took a few today and will be working on a few more this week, hopefully. I created the fake depth of field using a gaussian blur, a layer mask, and the gradient tool. The new hair color is not from Gimp... it's from a bottle. :)


This one is done in a more traditional pose. He was a really good sport about it.


I took these at the playground. I was having fun using the equipment as a way to frame the shots.

Week 10: Watermark

Hey guys... this photo uses a combo of anisotropic smoothing, unsharp mask (only on the feet), and dodging and burning to get the effects I wanted. In the future, I'll make the "dodged" background for the text smaller and closer to the actual words. It's a little too obvious for my tastes.

Week 10: Clone Tool and Heal Tool

Hey guys... I've been feeling under the weather lately, otherwise I'd have posted earlier in the week. This is a photo I took of my son playing ball with his buddy. The original had a shed directly behind the ball, which made the ball kind of blend in with it.

I lassoed and copied the ball to a new layer, then I cloned the bushes from the far right and put them over the shed area. Then I merged the layers and the ball dropped in over the bushes. I think it shows up much better now.

The original:


Edited:


Gimp's Heal tool is the closest I found to PS Patch tool. In this photo, I smoothed out my gnarly hand a bit. My hands have looked like this for a long time-- I was a reflexologist for years and they just ended up this way.

Original:


Edited: