My favorite tutorial ever!

I was browsing through the tutorials I have given you all and I realized one very important one is MISSING! I think this is my favorite because of a particular photo I used that I actually framed and gave to my husband.

Here is the photo I will use for the tutorial:




What I am going to do is highlight the colorful tulips in the photo and make the rest of the photo black and white. It really makes for a stunning effect when done with the right photo.

Step 1: Open the photo you want to work with.
Step 2: Make a copy of the photo. You should now have two images.
Step 3: Convert the copy to black and white. (Image-->Mode-->Grayscale)
Step 4: Convert the copy to RGB. (Image-->Mode-->RGB) This gives a richer depth of field for the grayscale.
Step 5: Copy the grayscale image to the original image. This will give your original image a floating selection. Choose "add layer" in your layers dialog box and it will anchor your layer in place. Now your original should look black and white, but that's only because the b/w layer is on top! You can now minimize your b/w image, or close it without saving.
Step 6: Now the FUN part begins! Reduce the opacity of your b/w layer to about 1/2 (this is optional). You image should look a little bit muted, but the colors will show enough.
Step 7: Zoom in to the part of your photo you want to have colored.
Step 8: Choose the eraser tool in the toolbox and decide the size you want to work with (In 4.4 you can adjust the size of your brush/eraser.)
Step 9: Start gently erasing the b/w layer where you want the color to show through. You might have to adjust the size of your brush a few times in order to fine tune your erasing. + will make a straight line from your last erase mark, too, which helps in this tutorial.
Step 10: Now, if you haven't saved your file already, choose "save as" and save it as a GIMP file. Then choose "save as" and save it as a .jpg file so you can print it, or whatever you want to do!

You're done, now here's my results:



Have fun with this, and please post a link to your results in the comments!

Happy Scrapping! ~Jen

PS. Can you tell the boys were THRILLED to have their picture taken? ;)
PPS. I almost forgot! Before you save your file as a .jpg, increase the opacity on your b/w layer to 100% (to regain the b/w once you're done erasing) then save your GIMP file again.

PPPS. I just noticed I missed something in step 10. By pressing the shift key then clicking the eraser, you can make a straight line of erase mark. Sorry that didn't come out right when I posted it. Blogger read it as html by accident.

More GIMP stuff for your surfing pleasure!

Have you ever heard of www.digiscrapinfo.com? It is a search engine just for digital scrapbooking sites! And you can add your own site to the list, too, if you want. Go check it out!

I've also run across some new tutorial sites for the GIMP. This page, in particular, looked interesting, but I have yet to peruse the whole website.

This page and this page are translations which don't come across very well, but I'm going to play with them anyway, and see if I can re-translate it better.

Anyway, things have been busy here and I haven't had much time to scrap, but I'm getting ready to do a photo challenge over at www.scrapbooksgonedigital.com so I'm excited to look at these photo editing tutorials.

I hope you all are doing well and have some soothing scrap-time. ~Jen

the GIMP for Macs

Here's a website I just found which has the GIMP for Mac. I know there are some Mac users out there who would like some free software for digital scrapbooking... :)

http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/download.html