Hello,
I use gimp for many years, but only basic functionality. I’m a hobby photographer and edit my pictures actually exclusively with the great raw converter ‘Darktable’. But now I want to achieve something that goes beyond that.
I would like to
save different areas of a photo as selection (channels, paths, …,)
reactivate and edit each of the saved selections as needed
adjust the brightness or apply gradients to individual selections, for example
…
Ultimately, I would like to achieve the same thing that is achieved in this video with PS:
Can anyone point me to a way of doing this?
Haven’t been able to get it to work despite a lot of trying.
I know layers and have already used them for blending photos.
But what I want to achieve is to create arbitrarily shaped selections of a photo, to reactivate them when needed and to perform any operation only within the active selection.
The goal is to apply gradients or exposure changes only to the respective selection, as you can see in the video.
found the same site and also tried to store the selections as paths or channels. This was not the problem and is only the half of the solution.
What I couldn’t manage is to reactivate one of these saved selections in such a way that I could subsequently apply, for example, exposure changes or gradients to it.
EDIT: just test - made 3 selections and saved each as a channel. I can then go back and reload the selection i want by choosing the corresponding mask clicking the button - “replace the selection with this channel”
I’m all but sure that 2.10.12 will work. The article posted by David is from 2011, so this technique has been around for a while now (that was in the gimp 2.9 era).
Just to be complete: My screenshot and video are from GIMP 2.10.22
@Claes : In this case GIMP does not throw any obviouis errors. It does show a extra not permitted/allowed icon as part of the cursor. This can be easily overlooked, though.
@kofa : Depending on what you want to do you can go very far using darktable’s masking facility and a sidestep to GIMP/Krita/PS is probably not needed. There are, however, situations where you do need selections that are present in pixel editing and not RAW editing. The latter is geared more toward flowing into the surrounding area. Very hard transitions are doable but not what they are made to do. I also find naming the selections (masks) more pleasant in a pixel editor, but this might be a personal thing.
Highly stylized images is an example of being better of with a pixel editor. You have a great many selections (dozens isn’t an exception) that can not overlap, must be tightly next to each other (not a pixel in between) and you need to be able to switch easily from one to another without losing sight of things.
I do have to say that GIMP isn’t all that easy to do this with (as partially shown in the video), it is one of the reasons I switched to Krita which makes all this really easy to do.
Thanks for the insight. I never stylise images, so those requirements did not occur to me; in the past 10 years, I have hardly ever used the Gimp for photo manipulation.
