Episode 178: Lurking in the Shadow

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Download the Video! (29:15 58.0MB)
Download the companion file! (27.4MB)
You are in for a night-time trip to one of the most secret places on the earth – until 23 years ago. The former Stasi headquarter is only 2 subway stations east of my home and I quite like the morbid, spooky atmosphere there. It’s a really huge areal, lots of office space and other buildings. Some of them are used as a museum and as the archive for all the Stasi files. Others are rented out or are simply empty.
My image missed some details in the shadows. I used a modified “burn with a layer in Overlay Mode” technique to get a bit of light into them. Instead of painting on the layer I used the L-part of the LAB colour model. I got the idea for this from the Darktable Blog.

UPDATE Mar 18: There is a nice way to use the histogram with selections. Select the dark region and look at the histogram – it shows only the data from the selection. The histogram tool is “selection-sensitive”.

Thanks to GIMPel for the tip.

The TOC

00:30 The Stasi Headquarter
05:00 Start of the image processing
05:20 Rotate the image – what is vertical?
08:00 Cropping
09:40 Planning where to work on the shadows
10:00 Measure the darkness with curves tool
10:45 A quick try with the curves tool
11:30 A layer in Overlay Mode to brighten shadows up
12:00 Decomposing the image to get the “L” from LAB
14:30 Invert the colours
14:50 Generate a layer mask
15:50 Constructing the “Lighten Only” layer
17:00 Optimizing the effect
17:50 Blurring the overlay layer improves the effect
22:30 Compare to simple burning
24:50 Recap
27:45 http://darktable.org gave the idea to this

Creative Commons License
Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

4 thoughts on “Episode 178: Lurking in the Shadow”

  1. Interesting video.
    I wonder if you’d been able to get more out of it if you started with the rawfile or maybe two different processings from the same rawfile. Especially at such high iso and this difficult light situations this can help. But it also shows that just with Gimp and a bit of work you can still get quite a lot of an image.
    Also I think this is one which should be redone as soon as Gimp 3.0 is out. It’s clearly visible in the histogram and curves that the long line of operations have really battered the image.

    And while I like the scene and the interesting lighting this place gives me the creeps!

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  2. Another enjoyable episode. It is good to have you back.

    Around 21 minutes in, after you’ve filled the layermask with black, you should probably deselect everything *before* performing the Gaussian blur. Blurring with a selection leaves a hard edge, only slightly softened owing to edge effects of the blurring algorithm.

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