Tag Archives: burn

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.

Episode 069: Burn and Dodge

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Download the companion file! (…if there is one…. ;-) )

I had talked bad about the Burn and Dodge tool in episode 66. Here I try to use it and show my method in comparison.

[This was added on Oct 30:]

And I still think my method of putting a transparent layer in overlay mode on top and painting on that in white or gray is better than this tool.

My method can even be adapted to work only on shadows, highlights or midtones – just like the Dodge and Burn tool. It’s a bit more complicated….  ;-)

You can see a very good result of this technique from Xavier at Retouche Libre.

The show starts with a call for help. We need more people on this project who can give input, coordinate and organize. And I am really not looking for people that I can push around – I do that all day at school with the kids. ;-)

The TOC

00:20 Hello from Rolf and requesting assistance with Meet The Gimp
06:00 The dodge and burn tool
06:34 – the origin of dodge and burn
08:00 – using an overlay layer instead (Episode 10)
09:49 – the built-in tool
12:50 – it’s destructive
14:23 Dodge and burn using overlay layers
14:49 – make the layers
16:33 – set up the layer masks
22:08 What’s coming in future episodes
23:24 The End
TOC made by paynekj

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Episode 010: Rescuing the chapel from the rescue

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Download the companion file! (…if there is one…. ;-) )

At the last show I made two blunders. I used an untested encoding and killed the sound for a lot of you and I used a layer mask with a lot of gray in it where it didn’t belong. So the sea didn’t look good.

In this episode I correct that mistake and add a bit of burning and dodging to get parts of the image darker or lighter. I don’t use the burn and dodge tool but use again a layer for better control. A bonus tip for the readers of the blog: If you set the foreground colour at start to medium gray and select then “foreground colour” as the layermask, you get around the step of filling the mask.

chapel2.jpg

(I should have done a bit about the halo around the big rock…..)

This was the result of episode 9:

chapel-rolf-500.jpg

While this was encoding I worked again on the schedule. I am not sure to be able to put a show out on thursday. :-(

The TOC

00:25 Episode 9 update
01:16 Previous episode mistake
02:14 Correcting the mistake
03:00 – new layer mask
08:15 Dealing with the halos
08:51 Deliberate mistake with the gradient tool!
10:07 How avoid the mistake
11:33 Adjust the sky
12:15 The origins of dodging and burning
13:29 Dodging and burning Rolf’s way
13:38 – new layer
14:40 – dodging
16:40 – burning
19:19 Thanks
19:52 The End

TOC made by paynekj

The files from this episode.

Contact me!

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Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.