On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:56:25 -0400, Leon Fisk
wrote:

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:00:30 -0400
Ed Huntress wrote:

snip
I've only used GIMP for a couple of years, and almost strictly for
professional work that involves very mechanical kinds of
hand-retouching. It's all straight photography. I haven't ever used
overal image manipulation, except for the basic corrections --
contrast, color, density, etc. Mostly I clean up backgrounds, correct
mistakes, silhouette, and related things.

You need to have some filters to play with. Try this/that and then
finally decide that none of them will do what you want/need. Then you
can get down to the real job of manually editing the image pixel by
pixel, spot by spot

Much of the time I find loading up GIMP is kinda like calling in the
National Guard when your only traffic light in town fails...

Most of what I do is adjust gamma, contrast, crop, unsharp mask, add
text and I've found a simple filter that will redistribute contrast (ie
boost low areas and reduce the highs). The latter is great for pulling
out detail lost in the shadows. For doing all that I usually run
Irfanview via Wine on Linux. You can do all that with GIMP but it would
take me an half hour as opposed to maybe three minutes with Irfanview.
GIMP's user interface is anything but intuitive...

Of course I also use XnView, XnConvert, Mtpaint, Fotoxx, Mashup, Image
Analyzer, FotoTouch (ancient Win3.xx)... different apps for different
problems.

But you speak the truth, many times it comes down to pixel editing/hand
retouching here and there. I haven't found any "magic bullets" for
getting that kind of work done, well, yet anyway. I keep looking ;-)

I'm always interested in finding the magic pixel-munger that will make
my job easier. g I've not found it yet, and I used Photoshop from
the first few months it was on the market; and PhotoStyler before
that.

Meantime, a program that allows easy selection, paths, and the other
fundamentals -- with speed and accuracy -- is all I need. I have a
fast desktop with 6 GB of RAM, so Gimp works fast enough to satisfy
me.

One thing I could use, though, is conversion back and forth to a
really broad colorspace that has a lightness (black and white)
channel. I used L,a,b with Photoshop. You get superior results with
unsharp masking by working only on the lightness channel (it avoids
color artifacts), and there are other things I like to do with it.

There may be a plug-in for doing it with Gimp, but I haven't looked.
I've gotten away with lesser colorspaces because I've done work mostly
for the Web lately, and it's not very demanding.

If you know of one, I could use it.

--
Ed Huntress