Photo Retouching

I've been going through my pictures trying to pick out the best one for organizing some kind of album...one that I could print out or post on the web...or both. I kept looking at some pictures and thinking that their compositions were great, but they lack some pop.

So I did a little digging around for GIMP tutorials and saw a couple useful ones on Gimparoo: basic photo retouching and contrast masking.

The results are pretty good. The techniques don't work with all pictures...for some, the original looks better than the modified one. For others though, the originals look flat in comparison. Overall, the tutorials were very useful and really improved the look of some pictures. Here are a couple of examples:

Original:



Retouched:




Original:




Retouched:




In both cases, the retouching has a vast improvement on the picture. The colours pop more in both and they seem a little more interesting. Some of the background detail sticks out a little more.

I don't want to go through and retouch 3500 pictures, but I will retouch the ones I pick for the albums.