My image this week is an adapted version of the week 1 image.  I really like the charcoal look of this one.

I also have a colored version…

How-To

A few months back I downloaded some extra brushes for GIMP*… the gps-gimp-paint-studio.

For this week’s image I tried out one of the brushes called, “Speed Blending”.  It is the smudge tool with some presets and a ‘crackled’ brush…

It made blending soooo much faster and a little irregular so that it gave a more hand sketched feel.

Starting with my May week 1 image…

I used this smudge preset brush to remove the distracting background.   I had to blend on several layers (desaturated layer, multiply, burn, hard light, and color overlay).

Once the background was blended I tinkered with the opacity values of each of the layers.

For the greyscale image, my opacity values for the layers are as follows:

• hard light  100%
• burn  52%
• multiply  12%

For the color image, I changed the opacities a bit for the color to shine through, they are as follows:

• color overlay  100%
• hard light  44%
• burn  42%
• multiply  12%

This was a quick how-to this week, but I did the majority of the work on the week 1 image.  Really this week’s image was just about removing the background in a way that still felt like a sketch.

Kind thoughts and comments are welcome.

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Until next time…
~nic

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* GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.

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I have joined a month-long photo post-processing challenge called One Four Challenge, hosted by Robyn at Captivate Me. “This challenge is about processing １ image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.” Every Monday Robyn posts a new version of her photo and challenges us to do the same each week.

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