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
*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.
