These photographs came from a very wonderful few days that I spent in Norway with three friends I had made while working with the GIMP developers so long ago.
Monodramatic Landscapes
The Red Component
I read or heard once that one of the ways that Ansel Adams used to make his landscapes look so dramatic was to use a red filter.
The image on the right is the red layer from GIMPs Decompose RGB plug-in. It is by far the more contrasty of the three components of the RGB colorspace.
Filtering with Red
Pictured above is the original image, the Value component from Decompose HSV plug-in and the result of setting the red layer to mode of Multiply.
Here is the red 'filter' set to multiply working on the value layer. The clouds are very dramatic but the rocky sides of the fjord are too dark.
The next step is to lighten the red filter. This can be accomplished using the Levels tool or some of the automatic color adjusting plug-ins.
Pictured above is the original image, the red multiplied layer with levels adjusted, the red multiplied layer equalized and the red multiplied layer white balanced.
I like the levels dialog. I wrote about it in the clarity tutorial
When I used it for this image, I did not look at the numbers or the position on the gui, I looked at the image to see what looked best. Moving the center triangle, which adjusts the gamma is the more interesting triangle of the three of them.
The Equalize and White Balance plug-ins are both accessible through Colors/Auto. I wanted one of the auto scripts to work because my goal is to script this to work on a batch of images.
Pictured above is the original image, the Red Decomposed image, the red multiplied layer with levels adjusted and the original image again.
The multiplied, levels adjusted red layer over the value layer image (the second from the right or inner-right image) is what I was trying to get.
Warm Flesh Tones
The Green Component
From the photograph equipment stores or from the one hour photo processing place I worked at or from the photographers I knew, both astronomy and other avid amateurs or even the books about photography, which were as recursively beautiful as the medium can be - photographs about photographs.... From one of those places I heard that in black and white photography, a green filter placed over the lense will make healthier looking fleshtones.
The image on the right is the green layer from GIMPs Decompose RGB plug-in. It does seem warmer:
If your browser is wide enough, the images are left to right Red, Green and Blue. If your browser is smaller, left to right it is first Red, then Green and last Blue. The second or middle image here, Green is clearly the nicest to all of the fleshtones in this photograph.
Value
The original cropped image, a Value Desaturation made by setting the original to Value Mode and merging it with a white layer and the Value component from HSV Decompose. They seem to be the same.
Green
The original cropped image, a Green channel copy made by selecting the Green channel and using that to fill a black layer with white and the Green component from RGB Decompose. These do not seem to be the same image. In the larger resolutions, the decompose product seems darker and it has less detail. Or I have been looking at things for too long....
The Green channel copy multiplied on white, the Green channel copy multiplied on value, and on the right, the green channel copy multiplied on equalized value.
Sepia Images
Sepia prints are always nice and seem really old fashioned. It used to be an option for senior photographs, maybe it still is. In real life, I think it is as simple as using sepia toned inks instead of gray toned inks when when making monotone prints.
My first instinct with GIMP was to play with Colors/Map/Gradient and Colors/Map/Palette, and I made some palettes and gradients to work with. Then I scanned Sepia Toning with GIMP and followed much if not all of that tutorial and made the image on the right.
On the left is the original image, in the center is red multiplied value overlayed on white and the image on the right is the same image in the center but all on sepia.
The layers dialog shows better how this image was made. Red layer with mode Multiply, value layer with mode Overlay and a Sepia toned layer mode normal (#a2825b or 162,130,91).