GIMP Photo Manip -- Advice?

[jjhunter]

Hey all--

First time posting here, and I'm a novice GIMP-user to boot! For the image under the cut, I used clone stamp (to remove shoes), lighting effects (changed intensity to darken central image), reduced opacity paintbrush (to 'paint' in ghost), and merge layers (to add ghost layer to central image). I really struggled with how best to create the ghost, however, and was wondering if anyone had any advice re: favorite tools/techniques, etc. for meshing your own art with photo manipulation.

Comments

[ratcreature]

The only way I've mixed is by being really obvious, like cartoon character in a photo background, so that it doesn't look like a failed attempt but an intentional combo (like Roger Rabbit and such). But then my style doesn't lend itself to photorealism in the first place. Though I think even with a very realistic style painting within a photo is hard to be seamless. I think if cohesion into one style is the goal, and one element is painted, it often might be easier to paint the whole thing based on the photo reference and have it all look like a painting.

[jjhunter]

Thanks--that makes a lot of sense to me. I assume there are resources linked somewhere on this comm to digital painting tutorials?

[ratcreature]

Well, there is the tutorial tag here, but my favorite places for digital painting tutorials are deviantArt, conceptart.org (though often too advanced for my level of skill), and the imaginefx.com site offers many of its magazine's tutorials for free on their website. Mostly these aren't for GIMP but you can adapt the techttp://conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=42hniques.

ETA: To be more specific, here is a link to conceptart.org's tutorial forum:
http://conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=42
here to imaginefx's tutorial's (called "workshops"):
http://www.imaginefx.com/-2287754330326480692/Workshops.html
and for dA just search for the topic in the tutorial section.

[jjhunter]

Thank you very, very much! I can't wait for the holiday weekend & a chance to play around with some of these.

[rydra_wong]

Just a couple of ideas off the top of my head:

With the ghost in a separate layer, you can play with its opacity relative to the other layers. It might also be worth tinkering around with the various layer options in "Mode" -- I have no idea what most of them do, but you can get interesting effects that way.

You can use the "Blur" or "Smudge" tools to soften the ghost's edges relative to the background. Sometimes it's just the sharpness of edges that gives something a cut-out look.

[jjhunter]

Thank you--this is all useful advice.

[jana]

Layer masks are also pretty useful; I recommended a beginner tutorial here some time ago.

You could also try to find some good tutorials via this community's link collection over at delicious: delicious.com/gimpgate/tutorials

[jjhunter]

Thank you!