Curves in the GIMP
One of the best ways to give your dull photos life is to make a few simple tweaks to the contrast levels, saturation, and the color curves. I use the GIMP for all my digital editing/processing on my photos. It’s completely free to use and will run on any platform (Windows/Mac/linux/etc).
White balance: This is important to making a good image. The auto-white balance function in the GIMP usually works pretty good. Go to “Colors->Auto->White Balance” to use that or if you want to tweek the levels on your own, go to “Colors->Levels” and move the sliders under the “Input Levels” and “Output Levels” as needed to brighten or darken your photo.
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| Original | White Balanced |
Color Curves: This is my favorite piece to mess with. Your photos will suddenly come to life when you find the right combination of colors to use. You can make your photos look and feel like they were from the 70′s, you can make them look and feel “cold”, you can make them look and feel bright and dreamy. Go to “Colors->Curves” and you can make points on the graph and move them around to change the lightness/darkness of the colors. Keep in mind there are four different channels to adjust: Main channel, Red, Green, and Blue. More info on curves here. Here are some preset curves that I’ve made. Install to “~/.gimp-2.6/curves” or wherever your GIMP curves directory is (I use linux so that could be different from yours). Click on the picture to download the GIMP curves preset file:
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| Red | Dark Red/Blue | Blue Green |
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| Dark Blue Green | Green | Light Blue |
Saturation: After you have gotten the colors about where you want them, you can adjust “how much” color you want. Sometimes a photo looks better with higher saturation, sometimes with lower saturation. It’s about what your eye finds pleasing. Go to “Colors->Saturation” to adjust this. Use the “Saturation” slider at the bottom to adjust the amount of color. You can also select different colors to adjust the amount of that specific color in your photo. Also, don’t forget about black and white! You can either move the saturation slider all the way to the left or instead, go to “Colors->Desaturate” to get a few options of using different techniques for desaturating the photo. Sometimes, black and white is all you need.
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| No saturation adjustment | +50 saturation |
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| -50 saturation | -100 saturation (no color) |
Other things to do:
- Adjust the contrast.
- Create a duplicate layer, change it to “Overlay” mode and adjust the opacity of that layer down quite a bit.
- Add a vignette.
- Add graininess to your photo.
- Experiment!
This would be an awesome way for me to start learning The GIMP, but alas, I am a lazy bastard today. Although your flickr photos are pretty damn MAN-tastic. Whatever that means. They really do rock, so I guess I should learn this program.
After reading this article, I just feel that I need more information on the topic. Could you suggest some more resources please?
I haven’t found much information on the web about doing this in the GIMP, that’s why I wrote the blog about it.
I’d start with the GIMP docs site: http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-curves.html
Other than that, google will turn up some stuff, probably not specific to the GIMP, but more aimed at Photoshop users. You can try to transpose the instructions over to the GIMP but there is no guarantee that will work. Good luck, let me know if you find anything good!
Perfect! this is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for. thanks so much for sharing! for some reason though I can seem to figure out how to download these. I must be missing something but when I go to the links all I see are links back the site and not the presets?
Glad it was useful! The links should work now, they broke when I did some upgrades recently. Thanks for letting me know.
Thanks for this valuable post. I love gimp.