Category — Project: GIMP

This is a quick snapshot of the exhibit of the Sturtevant ledger, opened to the page showing the ship drawing “John Adams;” it is an example of Maine folk art now on display at the Maine State Museum.  A Seth Sturtevant, who ended up in Sumner, Maine, near the end of the 1700s penned this “Book of Accompis.” The actual drawing is in ink and watercolor and there are no other drawings in his ledger.

This is considered more art than scholarship because this is a drawing of no known ship; the frigate “John Adams” did not exist during the American Revolution, the time period referred to in the drawing. It has been suggested that his actual inspiration came from the U.S. Navy ship, “Warren.”

Above is my extraction and manipulation of the ship image from the original file image shown at the beginning of this post; after cropping, adjusting for perspective, and applying image “shearing,” a rectangular presentation of the drawing is created almost as if the image was captured straight on. Some lighting contrast and coloring completes the recreation, although clarity and focus are lost.

I am planning to post this and additional photos in a new “museum” blog.

A birthday present consisting of a book recommended on slashdot has helped advance my understanding of the power of my image manipulation software: GIMP 2 for photographers: Image editing with open source software. Klaus Goelker. 2007.

Today’s lesson involved the use of layers and resulted in the enhancing of the following image (not my photo):

Into this image (above) which was constructed from a elaborate set of steps involving typical digital camera image enhancement tools (exposure adjustments, color and saturation tweaking) and the use of pixel selection tools and a process of separating of the original single two-dimensional image into two additional layers. Layer 1 is the sky; layer 2 is the sun.

The sun is “painted” in using a circular virtual paintbrush. The original sky was erased using a color selection tool that essentially erased all the light blue (and the associated colors). This was relatively easy for this particular kind of image because of the clearly defined separation of light sky and darker landscape. The mountain received a color “burn in” tool application.

The enhanced image now looks more like a painting than a photographic image.

The sky will be further enhanced in a later step in this tutorial by applying a color gradient that will make it look more realistic. With more experience, I should be able to alter images substantially and have them appear as unaltered images: nothing can be trusted as real anymore.

We were mindlessly scrolling blogs on a Saturday evening; at slashdot.org we saw this book review reference, “GIMP 2 for Photographers,” and worked the search button to get to the home page for GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, at www.gimp.org. After downloading the program, I recognized the features of a comprehensive graphic tool in the fashion of Paintshop X2 (which I own) and Photoshop (which is the state of the art and expensive).

The summary of this program:

It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

It is interesting that I have done some previous searching for just this kind of program without much success. My Paintshop program from Corel is quite capable but it does not have a license that allows it to be placed in multiple locations (such as my laptop or at work).

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