Saturday, August 29, 2009

Playing With Masks

Not masks you put on your face, but masks you create in a photo editor.

I am a big fan of shareware and just downloaded the most recent version of GIMP (Version 2.6.7 to be exact), a free photo editor that works a lot like Photoshop. I've been using it for years to crop and resize my photos but lately I have been reading tutorials and attempting some simple effects.

I wouldn't do this to photos meant for applying for art projects and what not, but I thought it could be fun to make the images on my blog a little quirkier.


I liked the fringe effect on this one, but I couldn't make it fringe all four sides.I mostly liked the idea of subtly rounding the corners to make the photos look like old snap shots.
This is the most extreme one I made. If you don't recognize it, it's one of Chihuly's sculptures on the glass bridge.

3 comments:

  1. I am hoping to get to spray a few masks this weekend as well. Maybe one of these days I will try my hand at photo shop or GIMP. Do you have any recommendations for the techno challenged?

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  2. Hey, for the fringe effect, could you turn the image 90 degrees and fringe it and turn it back to the correct orientation afterward?

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  3. The fringe only lets you do one or the other. but I liked the rounded corners best.

    As for a photo editor, I would try GIMP as it is free and there are a lot of tutorials on line (not just put out by gimp, you can google them) but it is hard to find hardcopy books about GIMP since it is shareware. It's pretty easy to start messing with photos, cropping etc. I use it everytime before putting any photos online to make the size smaller so that it will load faster (using scale image)

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