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.

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:

Red	Dark Red/Blue	Blue Green
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.

No saturation adjustment	+50 saturation
-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!