Temporary Hiatus

I've been 7 posts and I'm already feeling  little swamped when it comes to keeping up with a schedule. The video has been the last straw with how much stress and pressure it put me under. I haven't had the flow that I had hoped I would when I started this blog, and I haven't had the inspiration I was wishing for. I'm hoping once I start class and have to come up with ideas for projects I'll be getting a better inspiration flow. I may be able to get a few bursts of inspiration in to get a ost here and there, but until I can get a set schedule and inspiration I am afraid I won't be doing a set amount of posts. I apologize for the timing, but I hope that I can pick this up when I start projects.

Lots of luck and inspiration to anyone who stumbles upon this blog.

How to make a sticker look

Wow, it's incredible how much can go wrong with something as simple as trying to make a video. Everything that could go wrong has. The video got corrupted several times over and I had to retake it and piece it together, but I've given up on it being up until Friday at the earliest. The audio is at varying levels to the point that the first half you can't hear it and the second half it goes up about 20 notches. I spent three days trying to edit it and make it work, but that's not happening. I'm going to have to retake with a new audio set up, but that's going to take time to figure out so here's hoping for Friday.

And here's today's filler post:

Sorry about this

Well, due to unforseen issues with the video and audio of the tutorial I am unable to put it up today. It will hopefully be ready by tomorrow. I worked really hard and I was up until almost three in the morning trying to get it working, but unfortunately the video didn't capture and the audio wouldn't sync up right plus it was pretty poor quality with the background noise. I'm going to hopefully be able to fix all of these issues by tomorrow and get the video up. Again I'm really sorry about this!

Changing eye appearance

So I dropped the ball again on Friday, but there was a lack of internet where I was at over the half of the weekend so here I am to post what I was hoping to on Friday.

This is a pretty easy one especially if you read last week's about changing eye color. It's the same steps for the most part so it should go pretty quickly.

Changing eye color

Today's post is a pretty quick one that can come in handy in several ways. It can create some pretty cool effects like superimposing a picture into someone's eye (I'll show that one on Friday). Changing eye color can come in handy to adjust for lighting or just for fun. 

Original: 

Color changed: 

DIY Splatter Paint Background and Text Extraction

Wow, a week in and I already missed two planned tutorials. At least I've got a decent excuse. My cord was misplaced and I was away from home for a week. But here's something to make up for it: a lovely tutorial! A couple years back I kept searching for how to make a paint splatter effect in Gimp. No dice. Instead I wound up finding a lot of blood splatter effect tutorials. Kind of a weird thing to find in abundance, but not paint splatter. Okay then. Well, I used the same concept to create a paint splatter effect and I'm finally getting around to sharing that knowledge. 

So it doesn't look that insanely impressive, I know. But what we're going to do with it is a lot more fun. 

At first I started this post with the idea of just showing how to make the paint splatter background, but then I decided to just mess around with putting it as a text form. And I love the effect more than I originally liked it. So now I'm going to pass the information on! It's pretty easy and once you get the hang of it you should be pretty quick at it. And by learning how to extract a background as text you can apply it to all kinds of images. In case you don't quite get what I mean (I'm a visual person, too don't worry.) here's a picture of the final effect: 

Actions and Overlays: A DIY

Yesterday I discovered something I had never heard of. I don't own Photoshop at this point, but I will be required to buy it in college for class. Because of the fact that I don't own it I don't know about a lot of the random things you can buy for Photoshop. But today I found some tutorials on Pinterest that I was interested in doing and translating from PS to Gimp. One happened to be on a photographer's site (which I won't list because I'm about to throw-down on the majority of modern day photographers and dumb things people now buy and that'd be kind of mean to just single out one that I happened to find.) and I started to look at her tutorials. This actually happened to be the inspiration behind making this blog. Do you know what I discovered there? Most of the tutorials told the people that for the photos she had bought a bundle at some site to create the effects and all you did was hit play. I thought it was kind of weird so I looked at the video she had explaining it. And literally you just hit the one you want and press a play button I had never heard of (but again I don't own PS) and it creates the effect you want. I thought "Wow, you actually pay money for that? I wouldn't blow the probably $30 you spent to create that when I can spend $0 to create something similar in Gimp.

And as I flipped through her before and after shots I remembered something my uncle who was a photography major told me. Something along the lines of "That's the problem with a lot photographers now. They take a mediocre picture and fix it up in Photoshop until it's nothing like they started out with." And as I stared at the photos I had to agree. The pictures to start with were mediocre and ended up nice looking through probably a lot of editing. One was even obviously heavily edited to the point of looking like a woman standing in front of a backdrop. Now, I'm not going to say my photography is perfect. Far from it, and I do edit my photos when I take them to fix lighting and skin, but usually I try not to go too heavy if I'm trying for a natural picture. And I also love the look of the fake retro vintage photos, but it's getting kind of old with that being the only type I seem to be seeing anymore. But I'm not opposed to them so I decided to check out the site she got her bundles from. Yikes! All of the bundles were in the hundreds! You got several overlays, but is it worth dropping $235 on it? Not for me. I'm already cringing at the idea of buying PS let alone any extensions when I can use Gimp and get the extensions free. 

And this brings us to the point of the post. I looked at those overpriced bundles and thought, "Wait. You can do that in five minutes with a free tutorial or plug in for Gimp. Why would you pay?" And my mother proceeded to hear me rant about it for about half an hour at lunch time. So I decided to look at how to do it myself, and low and behold I remembered I had installed G'mic about a month back and never got around to looking at what it actually did. Boy am I glad I did. Seriously if you're looking at getting Gimp or already have it I highly suggest getting G'mic. You can download it here, and I don't think you'll regret it. It boasts 615 filters. For free. Pretty much everything you could ask for is right there in a free easy to use package. It has a vintage filter which is what i was searching for, but it has plenty more that make Gimp a lot easier to use if you don't have time to figure out how to do it yourself. The settings are all adjustable and you can layer it all.
*UPDATE* I also found a script that works pretty marvelously for making a vintage effect. It can be found here. I'm using it in my first video tutorial which will be coming hopefully soon. -6/13/14

But now for the tutorial part! This one took some playing around with color layers. Feel free to do the same to get a different style. I went for something between the cool and warm vintage colors, but once I hit it I fell in love. If you want to get a general idea of the vintage look sans a plug-in here's how:

*Note this tutorial was done in Gimp 2.8.10 using the new single window mode under Windows 

Step 1: Open your image. I'm using one I took a few years ago of a friend with a very friendly butterfly we named Sandy. 

Step 2: Open your new layer. As a general rule I don't work on my main image. Ever. If I need to work specifically on the image I duplicate it. 

Welcome to my misadventure prone world

This is about my third attempt at keeping up with a blog. The last one? Well, that required me to have a greater attention span than a five year old. It required constantly keeping up with taking pictures of random stuff I did while I experimented with things on Pinterest.

So why is this different? Because I do this stuff without thinking on a pretty much daily basis. What is it that I'm talking about? I'm talking about doing design work. One of my favorite things to do is design things and as that is going to be my major grouped with photography I should have plenty of projects to keep me busy and to share my bits of knowledge with people.

I've been working with Gimp since I was a 12 year old and since then I've been gleening knowledge from the internet in videos and tutorials. So here I am to share what I know with those who want to learn different things all in one place. If you've never heard of Gimp it's an image manipulation program similar to Photoshop, but it's free and therefore available to more people. You can download it here. It's fairly easy to use once you get adjusted to it, and despite popular belief, Gimp can do everything Photoshop can. You might just need to work a little bit harder, but the results will still be beautiful.

My goal here is to show people how to make beautiful images and random things through Gimp, but also to help convert some Photoshop tutorials over to Gimp tutorials. I'll be posting both easy-hard tutorials as I feel inspired and possibly some videos if I remember to actually turn on the camera to do so. And as I become more acquainted with Inkscape, the opensource version of Illustrator, I'll try to give some instructions on that as well. But I've just become more acquainted with it and after doing a coloring page in it I have successfully made myself want to throw anything similar to it out the window.