One-Minute Reads about Film Photography

How I GIMP along in post-processing – A Two Minute Read

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GIMP is an indelible tool I use in all of my post-scan editing work. As a FREE alternative to offerings like Photoshop and Lightroom, GIMP offers a complete suite of tools needed to get the most out of an image. I have learned to be methodical in my process going step by step to make sure I don’t forget an important aspect in creating the final image.

As a starting point in what I will be writing about in future posts on specific tools in GIMP, I am sharing my methodology, and this may be useful to photographers working on other editing platforms.

1. Open raw scan (my workflow from the iQSmart2 scanner is a .tif file)
2. Rotate the image as needed to have a level horizon (see post) or other prominent vertical or horizontal elements.
3. Crop. This is an artistic preference to spend some time on.
4. Sharpen. I turn off hardware/software sharpening on the scanner in preference of GIMP’s sharpening algorithms that I find superior and more controllable.
5. Set white and black points (I use the image curves tool primarily with the graphical representation as the guide.)
6. Adjust contrast and mid-tones using Curves tool. This is the same for monochrome and color images.
7. Color only: Apply initial color correction using the Color Balance tool. I have found it important to adjust the lightness/contrast in step 6 before doing any color correction.
8. Clean up the image using Healing and Clone tools.
9. Save the native GIMP file, then save-as to high-res JPG for viewing/publishing.
10. Close. This is an important step for me in color correction, and that is to “walk away” from the image and come back to it later for final light adjustments, seeing it with fresh eyes for step 11.
11. Final color adjustment using Color Temperature adjustment and individual color channels with the Curves tool (for monochrome images a final tweak is usually needed.)

More to come!

• gregory gammon / www.vinylfye.com