This post is in English cause it concerns a technical topic: picture manipulation and Gimp. I’ve used Gimp since lot of time for a plethora of reasons like the fact that is free, that is as simple as needed, that is more or less lightweight (at least is not heavy as Photoshop) and it has everything I need for the usual thing I do.
I know that photoshop is a must, is the best, but “power is nothing without control“, and I cannot control Photoshop, and I don’t want to loose myself inside the infinite lists of menus, and so why should I change my mind with something that is really expensive? Moreover I am not that kind of professional who needs to have very powerfull tools. Till I can crop, adjust colors, use some filters (blur, enhancement, layer mask…), Gimp will be my best choice as photo retouching software.
Of course Gimp is available for Windows, even an old version like XP (the one that I am still using), and you can find the dedicated website by clicking here.
Maybe you are wondering why I put as first image the one (found here on 123RF) of such a beautiful girl. The idea was to give you information about how to do a better seppia tone with Gimp, following the procedure (dated 2004) found in this webpage and making a comparison with the normal Gimp filter.
I really like the Seppia tone: it is not as sad as a black&white, but it desaturate enough a picture to mask the problem of my war camera (that, after lot of battles, has lots of problem with colours and light).Gimp comes with an “old photo” filter that makes the picture in Sepia tone with a border, as you can see on this side.
I don’t like it, and this is not respecting the laws of the Sepia tones as it could became if you make an expert print your picture with that tone.
The rule of the Sepia tone is that black and white are not affected by the tone, but just the gray gradiations, as much as they are far away from being white or black. Infact the true sepia tone is more visible in grays that are halfway from white and from black. To make this we have to follow the following steps:
1. Desaturate the image
2. Create a layer with the sepia color (a good Sepia tone is, in RGB, 162 128 101 or in HTML notation #a28065)
3. Set the created layer as Color mode
4. Create a layer mask, with a copy of the desaturate image
5. Use the curves tool to change values to the mask: zero in left and right value, and more or less the middle in the center (as for the picture on the side)
6. Now you can flatten your image
As far as I did it one bilion of times, I decided to create a GIMP Script that makes this procedure automatic. Moreover the script adds a border with the same style of the one that I use for my picture albums in Facebook. The script let you choose the color to use as Sepia (to be honest the one that I used in this example is HTML #704214, or 112 66 20, that is stronger), the strongness (that means the height of the central point of the curves: 255 is the top, 0 the bottom) and the percentage of border (taking the shortest side of the picture).
Being difficult to analyze every possibility of the script, I left the result divided into a layer of Sepia tone and one with the border. The result of the script, as you can see, is really similar to the procedure made by hand. You can download the script by clicking here, you have just to copy it in the directory \share\gimp\2.0\scripts in which you installed Gimp and, if the programm is already running, you have also to refresh all the scripts.
Hope you will enjoy. Stay tuned!