At the beginning of the month, the AB Friday Forum becomes a One Photo Focus, which means that we all make edits to the same photo.  This month’s photo is from Stacy Fischer at Visual Venturing.  In celebration of the ABFriday One Year Anniversary AND the One Photo Focus Six-Month Anniversary Stacy is having us all work on her own image, Mork and Mindy’s House.

After

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I made all my edits in GIMP*.

I had a bit of fun with this image, and I had to tell myself to stop making adjustments and just submit it already! Heehee.

Since this is the home of Mork and Mindy, my initial idea was to try to get the look of the 80s.  G’MIC Plug-In for GIMP has film emulators and I thought it would be neat to try out.  I also thought about adding Nanu Nanu and Shazbot.  Well that’s were I started, but that’s not where I ended up… but I really like my end result, and my husband really liked it too.  So that’s what I submitted… keep reading for a more detailed how-to.

 Before

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Kind thoughts and comments are welcome!

I have joined ABFriday (after before Friday), it is a forum hosted by Stacy at Visual Venturing. This week’s forum can be seen here.

Every Friday Stacy showcases after/before photos we’ve submitted. Then, if we choose, we can tell how we did it on our own blogs.

On the first Friday of the month, we are all invited to post-process the same image, which Stacy has dubbed, One Photo Focus.

How-To

1. First I brought the .dng file up in RawTherapee and made some minor changes.

   

   Original

   

   Raw Therapee

   
   
2. Next I used the G’MIC Plug-In Film Emulator.  Originally I was looking for something that would give the look we saw on our TVs back in the 80s where reds are kinda orange-y.  But ultimately I liked the look of the Kodachrome 64 Filter [Filters->G’MIC->Film emulation->Slide [color] ]
   

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3. Next I wanted to get rid of the piles of dirt in the front yard.  So I used the Wavelet Decompose Filter [Filters->Generic->Wavelet Decompose] that I talked about here.  This time I used the clone tool to help make the piles of dirt look like grass on the different levels of frequency (I used the default of 5 levels). Also once I was happy with the result I made copies of the layers 1 & 2 to add some sharpness.
   

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4. Next I did some dodging and burning (like I mentioned here) by painting various shades of grey on a transparent layer, blend mode Overlay, opacity 51%. 
   

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5. I was feeling really good about the image and decided to add Nanu Nanu, I had a different font initially, but realized that the original Mork and Mindy logo was more rounded so I used this font instead.  I used the rotate tool to tilt the text along the fence line.
6. I felt the text needed to stand out a bit more from the photo, so I added a drop shadow [Filters->Light and Shadow->Drop Shadow]. 
7. Then I wanted it to feel more Mork-and-Mindy-like so I added a transparent layer where I painted rainbow colors (like Mork’s suspenders), then I used the text to help me make a mask so that the colors only showed up where there were letters.  And I changed the blend mode to Multiply (although now I don’t know why because it doesn’t appear to look different than Normal ??).
   
8. I felt like the red stairs needed a bump of color so I added a transparent layer, painted a similar red over the steps and changed the blend mode to Hard Light.
   

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   I actually thought I was done here. I really don’t know what came over me, perhaps the realization that even though I did a bit of work it wasn’t really *different* enough that my image wouldn’t just blend in with everyone else’s version. Or maybe I just wanted to try out the Engrave Filter and I was already working on this image so why not? Whatever my motivation, I ended up liking my further edits.

9. I had recently read about a new filter added to G’MIC Plug-In called Engrave [Filters->G’MIC->Black & White->Engrave] and I wanted to try it out (I wrote about this filter here).  I saved my image as a .jpg [File->Export As] then brought up the .jpg image and resized it to 1000px long side so that the conversion wouldn’t take forever.
   

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   You will get two layers, a B&W layer that is set to Darken Only blend mode and a Color layer. The B&W layer acts like a mask of sorts, the color shows thru on the white parts and the black stays black.

   

   Engrave B&W Layer

   

   Engrave Color Layer

   
   
   

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10. I felt the sky was a bit turquoise, so I added a transparent layer and painted some some blue, blend mode Multiply, opacity 40%.
    

    

    Transparent Blue Paint

    

    Updated Color Layer

    
    
    

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11. Lastly, I cleaned up the lettering so that it was more visible by painting white on the B&W layer.

    

    Cleaned up B&W Layer

    

    Final Image

    
    

Wow, when I write it out it seems like a long and arduous process.  I can tell you it didn’t feel like that at all when I was working on it, it was fun and I enjoyed myself.

Hopefully you’ll try out something shown here on this tutorial, I’d love to know if you do. 🙂

Until next time…
~nic

* 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.