GIMP To Give Your Photos A Professional Look
It’s not easy to choose a free, powerful, and perfect photo editor among the tons of editing Software available on the devices like smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets, and many. This article will help you out suggesting an image editor called “GIMP”. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a cross platform open source image editing software available for Linux, Windows, OS X, and many other Operating Systems.
GIMP might be unusual for those using Photoshop. Once you get practiced to work with the powerful tools of GIMP photo editor, you will know the ease to make your photo amazing. Now, let’s know the basic uses of the GIMP software.
1. Install GIMP:
Download and install the GIMP photo editor from the Google Play Store from your device. Check your Internet connection while downloading.
2. Adjust the layout:
Accept all of the default options and zip through the installation. Then click “Finish” and launch the program. The initial launch may take a longer time than you expect as the program spends a little while analyzing your PC and searching your hard drive.
While running GIMP, you can see that it is different from other software. This is all because it was first initiated on Linux Operating System. The interface is made up of multiple windows, and you can rearranged however you should suit the way you work. You can click Windows > Single-window Mode.
3. Fine tune colors:
GIMP can be used to create digital painting from scratches. GIMP has a wide and versatile set of tools for creating original artwork. But mostly we wish to use it as an image editor to touch up and to optimize photos.
Open an image, then explore the range of editing using the tools in the Colors menu. There are no automated optimization tools. GIMP has a powerful set of options such as color adjustment, saturation and contrast balancing. Also, these options include more advanced curve adjustment.
4. Remove the flaws by painting:
GIMP’s healing tool is of most use for photographers. It looks like a sticky plaster in the left-hand toolbox. It can be used to remove all types of useless elements from images, such as spots and blemishes on faces, rogue pieces of foliage. In this photo, it has been used to remove branches from the corner of the image. Zoom in is helpful here while using this tool.
Select the Healing tool, hold Ctrl and click an area of the image that could be used to mask an unwanted area. You can then draw over the element you wish to remove by holding on the left mouse button. As a result, this will be erased out.
5. Apply filters:
There are many filters built into GIMP which can be used to improve the appearance of any image. Under the Filters menu you’ll find everything from the option to add a lens flare effect to your images, to make it look even if your image has been printed on canvas. The undo option will save you in case of any mistakes. There is a special feature that you can apply an effect to a particular section instead of the complete image. You just have to make a selection of the part of the image on which you wish to apply filters and then click on “Apply filters”.
6. Set memory allowance:
To help overcome this problem of the undo levels, you can tweak program settings so that more memory is allotted for the undo actions. Click the Edit menu and select Properties, and in the Environment section you can choose either the number of levels of undo, or the amount of undo memory. Check out if there are any other customization you want to make.
7. Apply transformations:
Transformation tool is one of the powerful tools found in the Tools menu. Some of them can be accessed from the left-hand toolbar. If you would like to adjust the perspective to straighten things in the image, the perspective tool is needed. Select the tool selected to drag and twist your image from the corners and preview the photo to see how things look on the Perspective Grid. Once you are done with the image, click Transform.
Finally, click on to export the resultant photo instead of saving it. You can save the photo when you intend to come back to GIMP to edit it. The images are saved in the proprietary format of GIMP. Thus will keep all its layers intact and cannot be opened in other programs. Click File > Export, you can select more common formats such as JPG and PNG.
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