| 12 October 2009
One of the best kept secrets on the web!
Here's a quick lesson, in 101 format, for all of us trying to get the best out of our pictures in our galleries. Taking a good photograph obviously requires a good camera, a good eye, but most of all, in todays electronic world it takes some skills with graphics manipulation! This article will teach you how to use a very powerful, but cheap, indeed, so cheap, thats its free; piece of software to manipulate, resize and recolor your favorite pictures like never before. Then, they will be perfect additions to our community galleries here at Seven Seas.
Don't worry, I have included full demo pictures of each step of the way. Just follow this guide using your pictures and you'll soon be uploading awesome pictures to our gallery!
Step One
Download and install GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, from here . When you click on the link, open the link to "Show all Downloads" on the page near the top, and select the BINARY distribution for you MAC, PC, or LINUX machine. (I guess most of us use PC's these days, but I'm different, I use all 3!). Download and install the binary packages, do not download the SOURCE as you'll have to compile them before installing, and that is simply something I don't want to tackle for this article! :-)
Once GIMP is installed, you will have a powerful piece of software, comparable in features and power to commercial programs costing thousands of dollars! Oh, I do like open-source software by the way. In fact, everything here on the Seven Seas Website is open source; and it works just fine!
Step Two
Take your photographs of your tank, setup, fish, critters, corals and store them in an appropriate directory on your PC. Now, because you have access to the latest and greatest image manipulation program, you'll not have to worry about compression, sizing, or even image format type when taking your Pics! GIMP can take them all, and produce excellent results, even from mediocre photography. I'll use one of my pictures as the example to prove my point!
Step Three
Open the picture you'd like to edit and later on upload to the Seven Seas Community galleries by right clicking on it and selecting the option to Edit with GIMP, or alternatively, you can open GIMP, then use the traditional, File, Open and browse to the file on your local directory tree to select it for opening/editing.
Opening a file by right clicking on it, and selecting Edit with GIMP
Step Four
Your GIMP editor will open, and the selected picture will be visible in the 'floating' window. Don't worry about the floating aspect of GIMP's user interface. It is designed this way so that you have unubstructred access to your desktop when working with your images. (It's really cool for features like 'drag n drop' etc
Picture is now open and ready for editing
Step Five
If your camera is anything like mine, it produces RAW or JPEG format pictures that are HUGE! Typically 3000 pixels wide, and about 1.5 Meg in diskspace. This is obviously great, but totally unsuited to uploading to the web. Your friends, colleagues, and other web users will not appreciate having to download a 1.5mb file, when a compressed, resized and touched-up picture of less than 150kb can do exactly the same job. So, step 5 is to CUT OUT the piece of the picture that you want. Maybe you want the entire picture, in which case, miss out this Step 5!
Select the "RECTANGLE SELECT TOOL" at the top left hand side of the Toolbox in GIMP. Then simply drag and drop the selection over the desired area of your picture that you wish to capture. Don't deselect this box until I tell you!
Selecting the area of the Picture you want
Now, without removing focus from this highlight select box on your picture, select the EDIT menu, and the option for CUT. (Or CONTROL-X on your keyboard). This will CUT OUT the desired picture area and put it in the computer temporary memory area.
Go ahead and close the existing open picture by hitting the red X on the top right of the window.
Step Six
Click on Edit in the GIMP menu, and select the option to PASTE AS NEW IMAGE (screenshot below)
Pasting the pic from memory into a New Picture
Now you should see something like the following screenshot. If you have any other pictures or anything open on your desktop then you view may look different, and of course, your picture will be different, but you'll get the idea!
Picture now ready for the editing process
Now, let's move onto the next step
Step Seven
Unless you are a Wizard with your camera, and you understand 'bracketing' and 'white-balance' your picture will probably be letting you down! The color may be washed out, or its slightly out of 'punch' or 'focus'. I'm going to show you the MOST VALUABLE trick to bringing out the magic in your camera. GIMP, and all other image manipulation software has the ability to look beyond the raw encoded dump from the CMOS (sensor chip) and gives you the chance to manipulate the raw credentials of the image map, creating spectacular results, without much effort. The big trick here is called "LEVELS", and is accessible in GIMP in the COLORS menu, then select the option for "LEVELS". Clicking on this should open up a dialogue box as shown below;
Color - Levels - Dialogue box is open
Now, this trick is something that the graphics experts around the world will hate me for sharing, because it is the most stunning, and easily accessible way of turning rather drab, colorless and washed out pictures into fantastic artistic, but realistic pictures! Look at my levels bars in the picture above. Don't worry about the technical details, but satisfy yourself that this is a map of color density, saturation and 'load' on each picture cell across the entire picture. If you look under the "input levels' you'll see a gray slider with 3 hot triangles. Have a play with these 3 slider options. Notice the effects! Cool eh? I recommend the following for best results.....On the left side, slide it up to the point where the 'hill' starts to rise, and then on the right side, slide it back towards the center until the darkness induced by removing the empty 'luminosity' has been compensated for. Try finally to shift the central range for the best impact. Here's my Anthia picture in a simple before and after mode. I'm sure you'll appreciate the big difference in these two before and after pictures!
Anthia Before on the Left :: After on the Right
Don't you agree, the fish looks like I've been feeding it on Amino Acids, on a perfectly balanced diet, and is thriving in peace and tranquility in my tank! And all of it with a slight of hand, and 2 sliders in GIMP. Okay, so let's move on to the next step
Step Eight
Let's add some sharpness, to compensate, all be it slightly, to the perceived focus in the picture (which you can see I didn't get quite right!). Select Filters, Enhance, and then the option for Sharpen. In the preview window which opens, move the picture until the zoom area is in an area where you can assess the levels of sharpness you are creating. In my result below, I have oversharpened to illustrate the effect. Please don't oversharpen to this level! If you have taken the photos in low light, some of the other FILTERS may help you, with despeckling etc. Don't hesitate to play with them. If you make a mess, simply undo the changes in the Edit menu!
My sharpened Anthia (oversharpened mind you!)
A very 'over sharpened Anthia'
Step Nine
Okay, we are nearly there! The final things to worry about are the final image rendering, image size, compression and format. This is quite easy to do, so don't worry! Go ahead and make final tweaks to your masterpiece. Let's then resize the picture so it will fit on the Seven Seas Website and Gallery without killing the layout! I actually recommend resizing ANY picture you wish to send via email, upload to a forum, a web gallery. I do it all the time, and I always have the benefit of my RAW original picture if I need it, or want to print it etc
To resize your picture for the web, where I typically recommend no more than a WIDTH of 600 pixcels (Most browsers use 1024 width, so 600 will fit in any forum without stretching screens etc). If you have a portrait picture, then the same applies. Aim at no more than 600 WIDTH (don't worry about the height! All of the web is used to scrolling up and down, they just hate scrolling left and right!
To resize your picture, select the IMAGE menu option, then SCALE IMAGE as per the screenshot below
Scaling your image
Now, you need to set the width to 600 pixels. Don't worry, the software will keep the other dimension scaled accordingly, so it won't go biased or out of perspective! Set Pixcels as the scaling medium, and ensure the CHAINS or locked to keep the height proportional to your new width. When you have entered the scaling factors, then hit the SCALE button to make it so! (Resolution can be left on default, typically 72 pixels per inch for the web)
Step Ten
Okay, final and last stage! Now all we have to do is save the picture in an appropriate format, give it a name, and then upload it to Seven Seas Community galleries! With your final image prepared and ready, select File and SAVE AS. In the options that appear, you'll need to tell the software which directory you want to store the picture in, and you MUST tell it to save the picture in the JPEG mode! By default GIMP saves in its own multi-layered format that retains all factoring. We simply don't need this data for the web, so JPEG is fine, and is readily presented by any web server, and by any web browser! Let's save our Anthia!
The Anthia ready for saving as JPEG type file
You'll notice in my machine I have stored the picture in GIMP101 - a directory I created to keep all the pictures sorted for this article! When you set the JPEG option, and enter the chosen file name you are ready to hit the Save button. When you do, you will be challenged TWICE by the software;
Once, to let you know that JPEG doesn't handle transparency, so it will want to flatten the picture (put all of it on a single layer). This is fine, so tell it EXPORT rather than IGNORE!
The second challenge will now be the JPEG compression level to be applied to the picture. The default web compression is between 80 and 85 % of original. I always go with 80% as this produces a tiny picture rendition but with a TINY file size, and no perceivable loss of "clarity or punch". But, it produces a really TINY file, that is still awesome to look at, with more PUNCH than the original picture!
Final Anthia Picture - Ready for my Gallery
Okay, I admit it, its not brilliant, but hey, its better than the original, fuzzy, and rather flat picture. It's still my Anthia, and now she looks a lot more like I see her in my tank, and not just for those milliseconds that my camera tried its best to capture her color. The secret, which I think I have shared with you all in this article is the magic is in every picture you take, you just have to understand how to extract and present it!
Good luck with your Community Pictures!
Dave Tidwell
(I know I just touched on the very detailed world of GRAPHICS. I'm no expert, but I'll do my best to answer your questions if you have any. Just give me a holler on the Private Messaging system here at Seven Seas. (You need to be a member for that I'm afraid, so if you aren't a member, contact Jim or Chad at the shop and they'll get hold of me!)
