carol.gimp.org

Easy Effect

I was trying different methods to remove backgrounds with TheGIMP when the image is already has a dark background for a gallery of dark images and eventually for another gimp background removal tutorial. It all involves the seemingly magical decompose filter.

The original photograph is not that good of a photograph, yet the simple act of decompostion made two interesting images; one that looked like a charcoal rendition of the original without too much fuss.

Turning the seam away from the front of the view and being more mindful of the lighting would have improved the photograph much more than the energy spent doing those few tasks.

This is a screenshot of the Decompose Filter Dialog it can be found by right clicking on the image and following the menus through Filters ->Colors ->Decompose. When I was trying to find ways to mask off the noisey backgrounds for my dark images gallery I usually ran this HSV (Hue Saturation Value) decomposition as well as RGB (Red Green Blue) since most of the images I chose seemed to have one of these colors in abundance.



This filter will spit out an image made of three layers, one layer for each color composition, see the Layers Dialog for further details. The Saturation layer was the only magic in this cool image. I use the Value Decomposition for converting photos to black and white also. Decomposition is really cool. The web size version of the Decomposes image that TheGIMP made of this photo is available from this directory