More Facebook Cover Photos - for fun.

See my first set here.

I asked some friends for some quotes to turn into cover photos. Here are the results. Most are just a photo with a quote added, but others required a lot more work. Please enjoy.

(PS If you hold the copyright to any of the original images, please let me know and I will remove the offending image.)

This last one I wanted inspiration for a halloween theme so I asked for random scary things. The words I got back were "Birds, moths, clowns, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and radishes". Why radishes? I don't know, but I decided to have Boris (as Frankenstien's monster) eat the glowing radish of doom. Seemed appropriate.

Facebook cover photos - just for fun.

Like Facebook Cover Photos? There's MORE HERE!

I like playing with The Gimp. If you're not familiar with The Gimp, it's basically an open source, free imaging tool that does many of the same things that Photoshop can do. Here's a small collection of random things I've done with The Gimp.

These are all formatted to fit as a Facebook cover photo. Feel free to download and share. (To get to the "real" photo, click on the image, wait for the full size to load, the right click and choose "save image".)

A few of these might be kind of "out there". I produced them by asking for random words on Facebook, then trying to put them all in one picture.

Dalek

Fake Nature

Coffee

Insomnia

Light Show

Love

Still Life with Vampire

Why?

The Ubiquitous Big Toy Hydrangea

Phylogenous Finnimbrun Yak

See How Much I Love You

Fake Space

Some photo-shooping.

Here's a  picture from Tasha's wedding.  Chris and Dagmar of Hippie Boy Design and  Photography did a great job and we  owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

I wanted to have some fun so I chose this one to play around with:

This is a great picture of the bride and groom. However, the background is a bit distracting. No fault of the photographer, it's just what he had to work with. So I'm going to try and make the subjects pop a little more.

Three things stand out that just need to go. In the corner is a bit of a Christmas wreath, by the brides shoulder is a window frame, and just above the grooms head is a weird reflection that kind of looks like horns.

I use Gimp. It's this fantastic open-source program that does most things that Photoshop does.

Using the clone tool, I simply used elements of the background near the elements I wanted to remove and covered them up.

The next thing I wanted was to turn the background black and white. So I copied the layer, desaturated it, and using a layer mask, trimmed the subject from the color layer.

Then, using the blur filter, I made it the background fuzzy.

Then I cropped it to 8X10.

Here's the end result:

Here's the two side by side:

If you'd like a detailed account of the edits, let me know! I'll write it up.

PS. Here's a third iteration. This one took a little more work. Can you spot the changes?

Waiting for spring.

I'm getting itchy waiting for Spring to ... well.. spring already, so I can get out with the kids and the cameras and have some fun. But until then, I'll just entertain myself making my own pictures. Here's the latest I made with Gimp:

I don't know why I like fake space-scapes, but I do. Everything except the background is fake. The galaxy in the middle was based on a Hubble picture from NASA. The stars in the back are real. Other than that the rest is CGI. The clouds on the blue planet aren't quite realistic, but I'm still practicing.

Another Gimp Creation

Everything is created except the galaxies in the background - that's a photo from NASA. I can't seem to get the cloud cover on the blue planet quite right and the shadow in the lower right corner is a little harsh, but I think it's worth sharing. If you'd like to know how it's done, let me know.

Where V'ger Went

Another fun thing I did with Gimp.

Another GIMP thing

Another thing I put together with Gimp.



It's a little cartoony, I think. But it's drawn, not rendered. I think my Gimp lessons are coming along well...

Becuase you already have a panic button...

Press here, as needed.

Shiny, ain't it? Fun with Gimp. I have yet to find anything that can be done with Photoshop that can't be done with Gimp. Maybe Gimp is a little less elegant and some things may take a little longer, but the end result is just as good.

My new hobby is attempting to make a good picture better. Our camera is really bad. It's great for snapshots, but not photographs. With good lighting and patience, it can take good, not great, photographs, but it's not really designed for that.

I found a pretty good podcast that's teaching me a lot. It's called Meet the Gimp.

The producer lives in Germany and (to the American ear) speaks with a heavy accent, but he is very knowledgeable and I have learned a lot.

Anyway, As I said, I've been working on making my snapshots into photos. Some I have good luck with, others, not so much. Unfortunately, they all live on my desktop computer and I can't access them with my Xubuntu laptop, for some unknown bizarre reason, so I don't have them to show you in this post. But you can see some of them at the family blog at the link to the left.

Are there any other Gimp hobbiests out there? Not pros, but those using Gimp to tweak and fix your home photos? What successes have you had? What failures? Any tricks you've learned? Any filters or scripts you've found that are you favorites?