Anyone here good with Gimp and could help me oput?

I've been trying to add an image to a pic of my back to see what it would look like as a tattoo. I am extremely frustratedwith this layering thing, and I was hoping someone on here could help me out. If you could give me some tips, or I could just send you the pics. it doesnt need to be great, I just want to get an idea on how it would look. Thanks alot

 

well, you need to make the layers you want to add transparent.

I would look at gimptalk.com they have a ton of tutorials and such.

 

I could do it for you, just give me the images. I'll tell you what i did so you know what to do in the future. I made my own avatar by hand by combining and resizing two images, it wasn't a big deal.

 

Arkit, Arkit, Arkit, Arkit!!!

 

just try setting the layer mode to either darken or overlay and adjust the opacity.

You need to cut out the extra stuff around the image that will be th tattoo in order for your back to show through.
However if the background of the tattoo image is white or light colored then just playing with the layer mode and opacity could make it look like you want.

 

heres the base pic

 

Ok, i need both the base pic and tattoo.

 

And heres the image I want as a tattoo centered on my back w/ the wings level w/ the shoulders.

 

Thanks alot man. I really appreciate it. That thing is hard to figure out. lol

 

Took me about a minute. I opened up both images and i used the magic wand selection tool to select the background of the image and i added an aplha channel to it and then i used cut to get rid of the background only leaving the alpha channel which is transparency.

Then i selected all and cut the image and pasted it into the other window, your back. Then i used the move tool to move it to your shoulders and then i just saved it. The image has some empty patches because the image relied on the white background which i find to be horrible practice but i think it's impossible to fix, although it may just require a higher skill level. Click the image to get the full one.

 

Calvin I usually use the Scissor Select tool. It does a better job because it won't get confused and leave out chunks in the image. It takes 30 seconds longer, but works like a miracle. Try it out

 

:confused2: Can you show me an example of how to use it? Try using it on the two images he provided and tell me what you did so i can get this down.

 

Sure I can't do it this moment, running other stuff and computer is bogging down. I can do it in an hour or so if you are interested.

It is a cool tool because it is basically a multipoint magic want. You click the edge of the image you want to select and it will follow the line. When it messes up and clips off some, you can redirect the line by adding extra points in between and it will readjust the whole selection.

It is good for images like that one where the border of the statue is screwy.

I'll edit this post later on and attach the image. Once I have some processing power available

EDIT: Ok I added the image. Don't judge the full capability of this tool by this, as I rushed it to keep to my promise of only 30 seconds. To do a good job it really would take 5 minutes or so. As you can see I messed up in the upper right corner & left a few white borders because I was rushing . However, it fixed the problem of leaving out big chunks (with exception of the chunk I referred to in the corner. That chuck is missing because I got sloppy.)

If you are good with graphics then I'm sure you can do the job better with the tool then I am representing here. Try it out.

 

That looks nice! I'll try and learn how to use this tool. Thanks.

 

i also spent a short time on this( less than 5 minutes), did do that with photoshop though, not gimp
one picture is with 100 % visibility and no layer blending:



the other one is with 80 % opacity and overlay as a layer blending mode.




// edit , i have just replaced the pictures, since they were a little too big. scaled them down.

 

How did you do that?!

 

What tool did you use to get that effect around the edges?

 

well, i did use photoshop for this one, gimp is only installed on my laptop.

basicly it´s just a color selection of the st micheal picture, 2 little manual corrections of the color selection and after that growing the selection by 5 %, feathering the selection and thats all.

all in all it´s been about 2 min of work to do that. and i even did not try to make it good.....

 

Photoshop? Cheater Just kidding good job. Sound like a lot of work to a newbie like me though .

 

no, it aint that much work at all.

i am studying architecture and doing architectural viz to finance my studies, and i set free a lot of trees, people .... already, it´s become an easy task once you did that 10 times, and see what the possibilities, advantages or disadvantages of the tools are.

 

Cool.

A lot of trees, eh?

 

yeah, trees are very demanding to set free, since you can actually look through the leaves. you can not just outline them, you need to use a lot of tricks to set them free right.

when you "photoshop" or "gimp" a tree into an image or map the tree for rendering with the scene you need to have them perfect, and i can guarantee you , you will see every little mistake.

i had to learn that the hard way.

 

@ gregory

here is one of my early trials. the building and it´s structure i did do myself and i don´t want to just give it away, hence i did "watermark" the structure of the building.

if you look at the tree , these are simple constructs with a stem and some mapped planes for the leaves. i know that the trees look way to regular in this image, i would not do that again, but you can see that these trees are free from any "dirt", no white borders or any other problems. i know that the trees are not beautiful, but as mentioned before, it´s an old one.

and i basicly did use the same method as i mentioned above.

 

Wow Schoko that's really cool.

 

thanks mate.

there are also some tutorials on advanced selection floating around the web. most of them are for photoshop, but you will find that a lot of the methods do apply to gimp also ( not exactly, but you will get the picture) .

 

2 quick ones, did them in 10 minutes total, with photoshop, pen tool.

 

@ csinth

the outline looks clean, but did you mean you used the lasso / magnetic lasso?

drawing an outline can be really painful...

 

Cool I'll hunt for some if I ever feel like learning how to do it right!

You did that with the pen tool in 10 minutes? Wow you are fast! I used the pen tool in photoshop once or twice and it took me an hour to do anything with this many corners. But as I said I'm a newbie.

 

Heres my quick work. I used the fuzzy select tool with the threshold set to 1 so it didn't cut off all that extra stuff. That still left a hole in his head so then I added the original image as a layer and erased all of it but that part of the head I needed. Then set the layer properties to multiply because that looked the best to me.

 

Image isn't loading for me Chipmoney... Is it a bad link or is it my bad browser?

 

I don't see the image either.

 

when you quote chipmoneys post you can see he has added the picture correctly. i tried to directly open the adress, but it seems the problem is at imageshack.

here is the direct link to his picture, but it even does not load directly.

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7409/exampleqx8.th.jpg

maybe imageshack will work later, seems like they have problems.

edit...

@ chipmoney

can it be that the problem is the image name ? exampleqx8.th.jpg

the problem could be the . at 8.th would be better if you named it exampleqx8_th.jpg

 

Imageshack is being slow again. Upload your image to xs.to

 

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i47/chipmoney/random%20stuffs/example.jpg

here it is, why must imageshack be down

while I'm at it http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i47/chipmoney/galaxy.png theres a picture I made in the last 20 minutes

 

Wow,that is some amazing artwork,I'll have to get into Gimp myself

 

Very nice Chipmoney

 

No, I used the pen tool to draw a path then selected the patch. It's the most accurate way to get stuff out of pictures IMO.

 

Here's what I came up with, although I think I messed with contrast and color curves too much.

Some pointers:

I didn't crop the picture out, just set the tattoo layer mode to multiply and the white will rid itself. No cropping necessary.

Duplicate the original image of your back and desaturate the colors to black and white. Then play with the color levels to get the shadows on your back to become more prominent. Move this layer to the top and set it to multiply. That will cast the shadows on top of the tattoo which will give it more dimension than just playing with transparency.

Duplicate the tattoo layer and adjust transparencies of the now two tattoo layers. Gaussian blur the bottom tattoo layer by 10pts to create a more realistic tattoo application.

Play with color curves, iWarp in Filter > Distort, shear (since your back isn't completely straight), and perspective tool.

When you're done and flattened, increase the contrast level of the overall picture until it looks nice (about 10 pts.). From here, take color samples of nearby skin tones and airbrush it over the tattoo to give it more dimension.

Good luck and have fun.

 

Wow Arkit3kt that came out awesome. I guess there is no limit of ways to do this in photoshop and the gimp.

 

Mine's better.

Time: almost none to speak of.

Open both pictures into the same image, on the tattoo layer selected Layer > Multiply mode.

Clicked save. That's it. (I did resize it to, but, whatever)
Only works if the second image really stands out from it's background.

 

Haha dangit, Arkit3kt beat me to it.

But really, it's much simpler and quicker, especially for something like this where the outcome doesn't need to be very exact. I'm sure the OP isn't worried about a couple jagged pixels.

 

For the jaggies just use the eraser with 10% opacity to smooth the edges.

 

@ gregory

here is a page that explains the basic selection tools in gimp:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/gi/dy...ocus.org/English/January2001/article119.shtml


in in these two chapters of this web-book you will find advanced selection and masking techniques :

chapter 3 : selection
http://www.oamp.fr/people/arnouts/GIMP/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/node35.html#c3.selections

chapter 4 : masks:
http://www.oamp.fr/people/arnouts/GIMP/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/node42.html#c4.masks

 

Thanks schoko those are some nice guides. I'll review them and play around with the GIMP and see if I can learn something!

In high school I did two years of graphic design, but everything I learned was a bit antiquated.

The first year was exclusively desktop publishing, using printing machines from the 60's & 70's that my school never upgraded. So that knowledge will only be helpful to me if I want to... wait no not helpful ever!

The second year was mostly hands-on art, focusing less on computer manipulation of images, and more about the principles of colors and typography and all that base stuff. The computer stuff we did do was all on very antiquated software.

Maybe if I learn to use these tools I can put that base knowledge to good use.