Posts Tagged ‘effects’
Create a Bleach Bypass Effect in digiKam
Using tools available in digiKam, you can simulate a number of effects, including bleach bypass. This effect produces a desaturated high-contrast image. Creating the bleach bypass effect in digiKam is done in two simple steps. Open a photo for editing and choose Color → Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Specify the desired saturation value somewhere between -35 and -59, then press OK to desaturate the photo.
Creating a bleach bypass effect
Choose then Color → Curves Adjust, select Luminosity from the Channel drop-down list, and adjust the curve so it’s shaped as S. Feel free to experiment with the steepness of the curve to achieve the best result. As a starting point, you can download a ready-made S curve and import it into digiKam using the Load button.
Simulate a Faded Effect in digiKam
Sometimes the best way to spice up a photo is to make it look faded, and digiKam makes it supremely easy to achieve this effect.
Open the photo for editing and choose Color → White Balance. Adjust exposure compensation to slightly overexpose the photo and set the color temperature to 12000 to add a strong golden tint to the photo. Press OK to apply the modifications. Choose then Color → Hues/Saturation/Lightness and set Saturation to -50. Press OK, and you are done. The described technique works particularly well with skin tones, so it’s suitable for use with portrait photos.
Simple Toning in digiKam
Adding a dash of color tint to a black and white photo can often produce a dramatic effect, and digiKam does have a handful of toning filters for you to try.
But you are not limited to the built-in filters: using digiKam’s editing tools, you can easily tint photos using whatever color you like. To do this, open a photo for editing, choose Color → Hue/Saturation/Lightness and set Saturation to -100. This effectively turns the image into a black and white photo. Press OK to save the changes, then choose Color → Color Balance. Usen then the sliders to create the toning color you want. Press OK, and you are done.
Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam
Want to add a vintage effect to your photos? digiKam has all the tools you need to turn your digital snapshots into vintage masterpieces. Open the photo you want for editing, adjust exposure, white balance, and tweak other settings as you would usually do. The first step in the “aging” process is to add film grain to the photo. To do this, choose Effects → Add Film Grain. There are a lot of parameters you can configure, but you don’t have to enable and tweak them all. You can start with adjusting the Grain Size parameter as well as trying different values for parameters in the Luminance Noise section. You can preview the result at any time using the Try button. Next step is to tweak the color balance to make the photo look aged. One way to do this is to tweak the color balance settings, so the photo looks washed out with a slightly yellow cast imitating aged photo paper. Choose Color → Color Balance and adjust the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow parameters to achieve the desired result.
The exact values for each parameter depend on the given photo and your personal taste, but you can start with the following values:
Cyan: 37
Magenta: 25
Yellow: -25
To make the vintage effect even more realistic, add vignetting to the photo. Choose Enhance → Lens → Vignetting Correction, tick the Add Vignetting check box and adjust the available parameters to your liking. Finally, sharpen the photo using Enhance → Sharpen to make the film grain more pronounced, and you are done.
Instant Vintage Photo Effects with the FIL Script for GIMP
You can emulate different vintage photo effects in GIMP, but usually this is a rather laborious and time-consuming process that requires some editing chops. Fortunately, the Film Imitation Lab (FIL) script lets you turn plain snaps into eye-popping vintage photos with a minimum of effort.
To install FIL on Linux, download the latest release of the script, unpack the downloaded archive, and move two .scm files from the resulting folder to the ~/.gimp.2.6/scripts directory. Some of the FIL script’s functionality depends on two plugins: Fix-CA and G’MIC. The Fix-CA script is distributed as a C source file, so you have to compile it yourself. To do this, install the required development library. On Debian and Ubuntu, this can be done by executing the following command as root:
apt-get install libgimp2.0-dev
Once the library has been installed, run the gimptool-2.0 –install fix-ca.c command to compile and install the Fix-CA plugin. Next, grab the G’MIC plugin for your platform, unpack the downloaded archive and move the gmic_gimp file from the resulting folder to the ~/.gimp.2.6/plugins directory. Launch GIMP and choose Filters » RSS » FIL check plugins to make sure that all the required plugins are installed properly. FIL is now ready to go. Open the desired photo in GIMP and launch FIL by choosing Filters » RSS » FIL.
The FIL script breaks photo processing into three stages: correcting color, adding grain, and applying vignetting. If specified, the script can also perform exposure correction, which is done prior to applying any effects.
The FIL dialog window lets you specify settings for each stage of the process. To apply color effects, tick the Colorcorrection stage check box and select the desired preset from the Color process drop-down list. To give the photo a distinctive vintage look, FIL lets you add grain to it. Enable the Grane stage option and select a grain type from the Grain process drop-down list. Which color process preset and grain type to choose depends on your taste and the given photo, and the best way to find out which combination works best for the current photo is to try them all.
Vignetting (dark corners at the edges of the photo) is often considered a problem, but it can also be used as a creative effect that draws attention to the main subject on the photo. To add vignetting to the photo using FIL, tick the Enable vignette check box and adjust the available parameters.
To make the vintage effect even more realistic, you can add a lens defect effect to the photo by enabling the Border blur feature which does exactly what its name says: it adds blur typical for defective or low-quality lenses to the borders of the photo.
Enabling the Write options in layer’s name option saves the selected color process preset and grain type as the name of the current layer. Choose, for example, the SOV: normal preset and the Sulfide: grunge grain type, and FIL sets the layer name to -c SOV: normal -g Sulfide: grunge. This feature can come in handy for keeping track of the settings you used for the given photo. If the current photo consists of several layers, make the layer you want to use with FIL visible and tick the Work with visible check box.
Once you’re happy with the settings, press the OK button and the script transforms the original image into a vintage photo based on the specified settings.
While you can use FIL to tweak individual photos, the script also allows you to batch process multiple images in one fell swoop. To process several photos, choose Filters » RSS » FIL Batch, specify the source and target directories, and tweak the settings for each stage. Alternatively, you can tick the Random mode check box. In this case, FIL will use random color process presets and grain types for each photo in the batch. Press OK and the script does the rest.
Cross-processing with digiKam
Although digiKam can’t rival dedicated image manipulation applications like the GIMP, it does have several essential editing tools which can help you to turn plain photos into striking images. For example, using the Curves Adjustment tool, you can apply the cross-processing effect to a photo. This effect is achieved by adjusting curves in three separate channels. In the Red and Green channels, you need to raise the red and green levels in the highlights, and to drop the red and green levels in the shadows. You have to do the exact opposite in the Blue channel.
In digiKam, open the photo you want to edit, and choose Color | Curves Adjustment. Select Red from the Channel drop-down list and use the mouse to adjust the curve. Repeat this procedure for the Green and Blue channels.
Instead of fiddling with curves, you can use a preset file created by yours truly as a starting point. Grab the preset file, press the Load button in the Adjust Curves window, and select the downloaded file. You can then tweak the existing settings to your liking. Once you’re satisfied with the result, save the modified profile by pressing the Save As button. So next time you want to apply the cross-processing effect, you simply load the saved preset file.
Do you have your own favorite presets? Feel free to share them with others.
