Nellie Lowe Unit 4 : Playing Around With Different Software

Because I do not have access to Photoshop at home, any editing I want to do has to either be done in GIMP 2.8 and/or Paint and Picasa 3. I only ever use paint for light cropping and pasting print screens in. I use Picasa generally to boost the vibrancy in my pictures and tweak them a little bit, all in preparation for when I want to doctor them in GIMP.

Here is a walkthrough on how I make my images more vibrant and aesthetically pleasing to the eye:
Firstly I open up my image in Picasa 3. I often ignore the first tab and go directly onto the second one (the one with the sun half coloured in). Then I tamper with the bars, sliding them up and monitoring the image. I often slide them too far and then go back, I find this is a good way of getting just the right balance. I don't often bother with the colour temperature, as once I've fiddled with the Highlights and Shadows my image doesn't need warming or cooling.

Then, I move on to the next tab along, where I often just use the sharpening tool. For this image I sharpened it until the maximum it could go, as I thought it made the image look far nicer.

As this is quite a simple editing process there's not much else I do in Picasa. I move on to the last tab, where I only tend to use the vignetting tool. I hardly ever go through with it but sometimes I like to see what it would look like with a vignette and I keep it if I like it and it doesn't look too awful.