In this tutorial you’ll discover how to strengthen colors in your images by using Layers.
You’ll be using the color yellow with one new layer and blue with the second to achieve the result we want. You may use any color you desire, buts it’s a good idea to have a reason for selecting a particular color
For example in the image below the colors are not as I remember them. The purpose is to give me the colors I want, the house should be more of a honey to cream color. This building was made with Cotswold stone, which varies from pale yellow to cream when the sun is on it. It’s the stone of choice for builders in the Cotswold area of England. The sky I remember was clear and very blue, I want it that way in the picture. Here’s our first image that’s not quite right.
1. Go to the ‘Layers Strengthen Colors’ folder and open dial-house.jpg and load it into GIMP.
2. Duplicate the first layer.
3. Right click in the Layers Panel and select ‘New layer’. Name the new layer ‘Yellow’ and under ‘Layer Fill Type’ click on ‘White’. Click OK. A white canvas will appear over your image.
4. Go to the Toolbox and click on the foreground color. Select a yellow color, HTML notation f6ee15. Click OK. The yellow color will appear as the FG color.
5. Click on the ‘Bucket Fill Tool’ and left click on your white canvas. The white will turn yellow.
6. Go to the Layers Dialog and click on the ‘Mode’ menu. From the menu select ‘Overlay’.
Your image will appear but the yellow color may look too strong, don’t be concerned we’ll talk about that later.
7. Click on the yellow layer. Right click in the Layers panel and select ‘Merge down’. The yellow layer will merge with the layer immediately below it.
8. Click on the merged layer and duplicate it.
9. Right click in the Layers Panel and select ‘New layer’. Name the new layer ‘Blue’ and under ‘Layer Fill Type’ click on ‘White’. Click OK. A white canvas will appear over your image.
10. Go to the Toolbox and click on the foreground color. Select a blue color, HTML notation 0e2ad5. Click OK. The blue color will appear as the FG color.
11. Click on the ‘Bucket Fill Tool’ and left click on your white canvas. The white will turn blue.
12. Go to the Layers Dialog and click on the ‘Mode’ menu. From the menu select ‘Overlay’.
Your image will appear but the yellow color has been toned down by the blue.
13. Click on the blue layer at the top. Right click in the Layers panel and select ‘Merge Down’. The blue layer merges with the layer immediately below.
14. Click on the center layer, right click and select ‘Delete Layer’.
15. You now have two layers, click on the ‘eye’ of the top layer. What you can see is the original photograph. Click where the eye should be on the top layer. You can now see the improved layer. Click on and off to compare the images.
16. Right click in the Layers panel and select ‘Merge Down’.
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17. Optional: You may desire that you sky be more blue, if so, go to the Toolbox and click on the ‘Select by Color tool’. Set the ‘Threshold’ to 40. Hold down the shift key and click on the blue sky until you have marching ants surrounding the sky.
18. Go to the ‘Colors’ menu and select ‘Curves’. When the Curves dialog (box) opens, change the ‘Channel’ to Blue. Push the line up to improve your blue sky. Click OK.
19. Go to the “Filters’ menu, hover ‘Enhance’, click on ‘Wavelet Denoise’. When the box opens click ‘All’; set ‘Amount’ to: 950; Detail: 1.00. Click OK. If you don’t have this plugin go to:http://registry.gimp.org/node/4235. Scroll down the page to find the windows version: wavelet-denoise-0.2-win.zip.
19. Sharpen your image if required. Save and/or Export to your preferred file type.
20. As you have seen, by layering colors you often degrade the color you chose. This means that you need to select a darker shade of your preferred color to get close to the color you desire.
21. You may have to experiment with a photo until the color selection you need becomes apparent. It’s all about practice and experience. Have fun!
Job done.
Your improved image
In this tutorial we aim to do the very opposite of the previous tutorial. In the former lesson we strengthened colors, in this session we'll dilute the colors. The image we are using is of Ville-France a little town on the south coast of France. It's old, quaint, the haunt of local artists, and a port-of-call for yachts of all shapes and sizes. At the end of WW2, some admiral choose Ville-France as the base for the American Mediterranian fleet.
The only indication of that is a big iron bouy where a battleship tied up. Here's the photo you'll work with, you can see why the admiral chose this spot.