Learning Gimp?

[jenn76]

Hey there! Here's the good news... I had a shoot tonight in my new little home studio with a family of four, and except for some minor issues, it went really well!

The minor issues can be solved with an editing program. I have Gimp but not photoshop. I did my sensor cleaning before the shoot, but didn't think about checking it after, cause I've never had a problem with the cleaning not working (just using the sensor cleaning on the camera and a hurricane blower). There is apparently still sensor dust though, because there are dark spots in the same place on ALL the pics. Ugh. I know they can be 'shopped out, but it will take some time, and I better brush up on Gimp (I usually just use iPhoto for little stuff). I just need to figure out how to make the pic big like i could in photoshop (like when it would be almost screen size, but zoomed in on a certain part of the photo, so I could work on detail). Also, I had some white balance issues, where my white backdrop isn't bright white. So does anyone know if you can correct white balance in Gimp if I shot in Jpeg, not RAW? And you don't have to walk me through on how to do this stuff if you know of a good tutorial for Gimp you could point me to... even something on you tube would be great. Thanks in advance!

 

[Turnerea]

There is apparently still sensor dust though, because there are dark spots in the same place on ALL the pics. Ugh. I know they can be 'shopped out, but it will take some time, and I better brush up on Gimp (I usually just use iPhoto for little stuff).

While lightroom isn't the best program to use for this in general, it's actually really easy to sync what you've done to all other photos. I've done this with sensor dust before, and it will work very well if its on your backdrop especially. Just fix it in one picture, then select all the rest of the pictures, and click sync, and choose to sync the clone.

You can download a free trial of Lightroom (will last a month) so you could easily do it that way.

So does anyone know if you can correct white balance in Gimp if I shot in Jpeg, not RAW?

You'll have a bit less wiggle room having shot in JPG vs. RAW, but you can adjust things still. If you take my suggestion above, you can do this in LR pretty easily, but I'm sure you can do it in GIMP too (I use LR and GIMP, but I usually don't touch the WB or exposure in GIMP- just LR... but I'm sure it can be done... just google- lots of good articles)

 

[jenn76]

Thanks for the advice... I didn't think about just downloading a free trial of something. That's a good idea. In LR, when you clone sensor dust out in one, then choose the rest and sync, what if the dust is on a face in another photo? How bad will it look? :er:

 

[Turnerea]

It will look OK if the person hasn't moved at all

I figure it will work well if its on your background... so basically you can get rid of all the ones on your background easily. Then you're left to do the ones on peoples faces individually probably.... hopefully this method would save you a little bit of effort vs. using gimp to do them all manually.

If I were you, I'd probably do all the backdrop ones in LR, then use GIMP on the really good shots to do the "tricky" dustspots... you can mess around with things a little more with GIMP. But it's just as easy... the functionality is basically the same for cloning dustspots out in LR

 

[Bresine]

the stock iphoto imaging software is actually better than you may think...you can increase the size of photos, crop, etc...its got alot of features that take some time to actually find. Ive had my mac for about 3 months now and im still finding new options in iphoto. Good luck.