Many friends see my posts in their daily Facebook stream and wonder what it’s all about. One person pulled me aside and asked me to explain it. I gave a much more detailed explanation in my conversation, but it boiled down to this.
tags: postaday2011, GIMP, GNU, GPL, Open source, lemasney, 365, design, painting, fun
My friend Laraine wrote me recently with a request:
“I need help with the attached photo…it is the Blawenburg Band at the Hopewell gazebo, being directed by clarinetist, former member and my dear departed friend, Rich Hill, who died this past spring at 51…
I want to use the photo as the cover of a thank you card, 5 x 7, to people who contributed to a band scholarship in Rich’s honor. I am choosing and writing the thank you cards; I’m secretary of the band.
But the problem with the photo is that Rich’s clothes looked rumpled… (maybe) shadows from the gazebo cut outs…
I feel the spirit of the photo is just right for the memorial thank you’s. (Do you think so?) But Rich looks rumpled…”
He was a bit rumpled, but that was easy enough to take care of with cloning, burning and dodging tools. I moved on to restoring the gazebo, band members and audience members with the burn dodge tool to bring out the shadows, highlights and midtones after doing some work on the picture overall to improve brightness and contrast. A bit overworked perhaps, but I really enjoyed the challenge. Thanks Laraine!
tags: lemasney, 365, dailypost2011, band, Princeton, Blawenburg, Hopewell, NJ, photo restoration, GIMP, GPL, GNU, Open source, Creative Commons, CC-SA
I recently saw a friend’s very wonderful painting of a rooster, and was inspired to do this as a compliment to it. In GIMP, I used a preexisting silhouette of the bird you see here, which I selected by color and converted to a mask, which I then used to paint into a new transparent layer.
tags: hen, rooster, chicken, egg, 365, dailypost2011, everyday, GNU, GPL, GIMP, photomanipulation, photo, sharing, gift, friend, lemasney, open source, creative commons, cc-sa
So this is the last of the photos from Alma. There was a lot of water damage, and it was an interesting challenge to correct it. The really fun thing about using the GIMP to do photo-manipulation is how many ways that you can solve a problem. In this case, I used some cloning, but mostly I did a marquee selection of a water stained area all of one color, desaturated that selection, and colorized it to match the rest of the photo’s content, like her skin or his suit, etc.. Thanks for all of your help this week, Alma. I’m going to turn to some other requests now.
tags: photo, photo-manipulation, GIMP, GPL, GNU, open source, Creative commons, CC-SA, sharing, lemasney, 365, postaday2011
So this poster is my way of saying that I’m not ready to stop using Inkscape for daily sketches, and that other open source applications might be used to complete an idea. I could have done this in the GIMP, but because of the text heavy and hard-edged content, it made more sense in Inkscape. From time to time, I enjoy a cigar, and when you walk into a cigar shop the first thing you note aside from the aroma is the vocabulary and culture of cigars. I wish I had this poster when I was learning about the different styles, but hopefully others will benefit from this.
tags: cigars, smoke, smoking, culture, illustration, GIMP, GNU, GPL, Open source, creative commons, cc-sa, 365, postaday2011, daily, lemasney
So, today I decided to make a new header for the project to show the difference in the new series. I started off by importing the older blue header with the open location import tool to get just the right size. After making a text layer with my project name and choosing a font and applying kerning, I added a few transparent layers underneath it. On each of those layers I used the paintbrush or eraser and various brushes to make the marks you see here. Using the palette color selector and a built-in fiery palette was especially helpful to create a cohesive color scheme.
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