GIMP Projects

Over the next year, I spent more time editing pictures than taking pictures. I became obsessed with the GIMP. GIMP is the GNU's equivalent of Photo Shop, but unlike Photo Shop it is free to download, so I decided to try it since it was free. The first thing I learned to do with GIMP was how to use the cloning tool. I looked through my photos and came across a church I had photographed in Pennsylvania. It was a lovely church, the only problem was that an ugly stop light stood right in front of the church, so even though I had done my best to frame it out of the picture, there on the bottom right side stood the ugly stop light.

I cloned the bricks from other parts of the building to cover the part of the stop light on the church and later cloned the sky to cover the rest of the stop light. I was so happy with the results, now I could look at the church without any distractions. It was like the stop light wasn't even there :).


As the year went on, I used GIMP to create new photos out of the photos I had already taken. I sometimes spent a lot of time trying to get things just right. I even spent up to forty five minutes one morning trying to outline a lightning bolt, so it could be copied from one photo and pasted into the background of a city. When I had finished adding the lightning bolt, I also added the moon to the picture and I was pleased with the result.

My projects grew more and more elaborate, and I was always looking for pictures to combine. My biggest project took over 6 hours to complete. I started with two pictures I had taken in Pennsylvania, a tunnel and a train. The plan was to put the train in the tunnel, little did I know I would spend 6 hours, using the cloning tool, trying to take out all of the distraction from each picture and get everything looking right. Here are the two photos I started with and the finished product.


In the end it was a fun project, but this was to be one of my last creations, using the copying and paste method.