Can anyone suggest good GIMP courses focused on photography? I’m currently taking Davis’s course on Udemy, which is excellent and very comprehensive in teaching the tools, but it’s quite broad. I’m looking for something more geared toward photography and practical solutions. If anyone can help… I already have some basic knowledge.
If you are in photography, the real tool to master is an application such as Darktable. It has much more potent tools that Gimp, and when the tools are similar they are more geared towards photography.
Gimp is OK for further edits, but at that point it’s no longer photography but general image editing.
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Yes, it’s true — for more serious photography, shooting in RAW is the standard. I’m already learning and using Darktable, but a few things (very few) still require software like GIMP.
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Yes, but as I said, there is little left done in Gimp which is specific to photography? Or what kind of operation are you thinking about?
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Can anyone suggest good GIMP courses focused on photography?
We seem to be misinterpreting “focused on photography”. By it’s very title GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Processor and can work on images produced by means other than just photography.
I would recommend downloading or accessing the GIMP help manual which is quite comprehensive.
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Am I really in the photography game, since I use Darktable only as a Gimp plug-in for demosaicing?
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Each to their own…
In Gimp 2.8, it was a bad idea because everything you do in the demosaicing app is done on high-precision “linear” data and once you are in Gimp you are stuck with 8-bit gamma-corrected data (often processed without going back to linear).
Since Gimp 2.10 things are better since you can also work in high-precision but you are really missing the Darktable tools that are a lot more efficient/powerful when it comes to photography. And not just the color tools: I recently discovered DT’s rotate/perspective tool and it is a lot more usable than Gimp equivalents (rotate+perspective, or the UT) to fix a shot because it knows that you are fixing the camera orientation and nothing else.
Personally, if I have to tweak a raw file, I am going to spend significant time in DT and I don’t see the point of holding a Gimp session while I’m in DT. So I use the DT app and if I need further editing (not that often) I export from DT to a high-precision XCF that I can open in a Gimp session.
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@marciosilvamendonsa I see darktable as akin to Adobe’s LR and GIMP as the equivalent of PS. When editing photos both programs can play an important role in some images. What specific tasks or edits are you trying to achieve in GIMP that can not be achieved in DT? Knowing this might help to provide answers that can be implemented by you. For me GIMP is used a lot for photo restoration, some of the artistic filters, and times when layers and masks become important. However, DT has such great masking options that most of the layer and mask work that I used to do in GIMP is now done in DT.
I mainly use GIMP for restoring faded film images. I think darktable and other sophisticated raw processors presume the “objectivity” of image sensor data. Therefore, they try to control multiple factors, such as hue, saturation, and brightness, separately. When adjusting the image color, it tries to avoid unintentionally changing the other factors by assuming their “objectivity.”
However, we cannot premise the “objectivity” of image data in faded film images. Therefore, when adjusting color or RGB data, it is preferable that hue, saturation, brightness, and other factors change simultaneously. This is why I mainly use GIMP for restoring faded film images.
Often but not always I get good results using auto levels in GIMP to restore faded color. Gimp is an excellent tool for photo restoration including removal of spots and scratches.
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skin treatments, skies replacement, etc…
Sky replacement will not be an easy task without AI unless the sky is well defined. A bright overcast sky can sometimes be replaced with a blue sky shot if the overcast sky is well defined. I use the threshold tool to define the sky and create a mask to remove the sky. It might be worth putting a sample image and sample sky on PlayRaw and asking people to show you what they can do. Removing blemishes and softening skin is easiest enough in GIMP using the healing tool to get rid of blemishes. The user manual should have enough information on that tool.
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