carol.gimp.org

gimp and photography

Replace A Sky

I have attempted to remove power lines and other undesired background from photographs using the clone tool and a few other tools and methods provided by TheGIMP. This tutorial covers one method of using a mask to remove the sky and replacing it with a similar gradient. Many photographs will need a combination of the techniques I describe in these tutorials.

This giraffe is named Leon and I have more interesting photographs of him in the public art gallery. He was crafted and donated to the city of San Mateo, California by Albert Guibara in 1978. I chose this image because it is a simple mask and the sky gradient can be as complex as you would like to make it.

I made a mask out of it using a thresholded and inverted value layer as described in my another background removeal tutorial.

Using TheGIMPs Gradient Editor, I picked colors from the original sky and added them to a gradient.

Then it was a matter of using the blend tool to draw a nice sky back into the image. Also, a little gratuitous use of TheGIMPs gflare plug-in.

Most all of my software is gnu. thanks!

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