Not sure if everyone knows Rosie Hardy (I actually tried to get her to come down to London for LGM this past year, which would have been awesome). She’s a wonderfully successful photographer who happens to also be a GIMP user that conducts workshops and produces tutorial DVD’s as well.
Her most recent image on Flickr is “Low Battery”:
She also just uploaded a nice quick little video no what she did to turn her blue dress white for this image, and I thought it might be a fun share:
I’m familiar with her work and the fact that she uses GIMP. Although she once wrote that it was entirely by accident, as her brother installed Ubuntu on her laptop and she just went with it because it was what was there. I don’t believe she cares one fig about it being Libre.
The way she goes about doing her edits is impressive in that she is obviously entirely self taught. That said, I find watching them maddening. She seems to have little to no sense of how to use layers or layer masks and goes about making her composites in the hardest, most time consuming way possible. Again, this is a testament to her intelligence and ingenuity, but not the best way for others to learn, in my opinion.
@MLC I agree. I like the results but I think this could have been done much more elegantly using masks. There are quite a few artifacts from the HSL hackery. The red/white line looks implausible but making that match the fabric is freakishly hard imo. Putting a marker on the actual dress (painter tape?) would have probably made that a lot easier.
I agree the red/white line looks artificial but that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it? “Low Battery”
This discussion has me thinking about results vs. process. I wonder if anyone is approaching photo editing as performance art – where watching the creation of the piece is integral to the audience’s overall experience? We’re starting to see a little of this with artists posting work-in-progress videos.
Imagine a gallery event with huge screens, live music, and live photo editing. Use a virtual reality, motion capture interface so the artist is “dancing” to create the art. Sell tickets and little glasses of red wine and then, of course, sell the prints. There’s probably people out there already doing this, but I live a sheltered life.
@Acmespaceship I like that idea. And I think that gets at the heart of why I also like video tuts so much.
I want to make it perfectly clear that I am in no way knocking her, her work, or even her process, as it relates to the final images. Because, clearly, it’s working for her. Girl gets paid.
If anything, Rosie’s results stand as a testament to the idea of creativity over technique. You can be flawless in your execution from capturing the image all the way down to editing with every current and “correct” tool at your disposal and still not attain the same essence and appeal that she does. This also demonstrates beautifully just how awesome GIMP really is.
However, I can’t help but feel that if I were new to GIMP and decided to spend the $150.00 on her tutorial DVD, I might be seriously disappointed that it made no mention of how to properly implement layers and masks. And I’m not even going to touch on some of her questionable “color correction” techniques.
Her process may work great for her, but it falls far too short when applying it to a mass audience.
How many times have we heard “gimp sucks because you can’t do x workflow”? To which my reply always is " I can get the results I want with gimp and that’s all that matters to me."
