Mike Bedford provides guidance on how to use the GIMP photo-editing package to make dramatic improvements to your photos
Photo editing is commonly thought of as a means of correcting common errors such as under or overexposure, or lack of sharpness in a photograph. Right at the outset, therefore, we need to put the record straight by stating our view on the main purpose of photo editing to the photographer. Although we’ll give some brief guidance on error-correction techniques, this is by no means our main emphasis. Instead we’re going to be investigating how photo editing can make a good photo even better.
If you’ve never really bothered with photo editing, you might be of the view that enhancing an image in this way is going to result in only a slight improvement and is barely worth the effort. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Many professional and serious amateur photographers have suggested that post-processing is every bit as important as taking the original photograph, and we wouldn’t disagree. And if you’re unconvinced, try it out yourself – you might be surprised.
The software we’re featuring is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), specifically version 2.10.14. Although it’s not quite in the same league as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP is a reasonably well-featured photo editor, and unlike the Adobe offering, it’s free. If you have a different package, it might be able to do most of what we describe here, but we make no guarantees, and entry-level packages will almost certainly have some serious drop-offs.
Before getting down to business, we need to remind you to only ever edit copies of your photos. This way, as your photo-editing skills improve, as they almost certainly will, if you subsequently decide you could do better, you can try again from square one. And as a final preliminary remark, remember that this is not an exact science but an artistic endeavour. This means that there are no right and wrong ways of doing things, and while we hope and expect that most people will recognise the end result of your efforts as a substantial improvement, someone else could easily choose a different way of enhancing a particular photo. Just experiment.
Setting levels
We’re going to be looking at several processes, and in most cases they can be carried out in any order. However, you really ought to look at levels first, partly because it will reveal whether or not you’re likely to get a really good result, or whether the best you can hope for is damage limitation. Select Colors > Levels to display the Levels dialogue box.
You’ll notic
