HedgeFlower

Digital Photo Editing
I used the GIMP for my photo editing software. I found the program fairly easy to use, at least for simple operations, and very powerful. Here is the original image that I worked with - it measured 2592 x 1944 pixels, and used 1.28MB of storage. I scaled it to a width of 300 pixels and saved it with a quality setting of 85.


 * __For the sequence of effects and transformations below, I will show the original image on the left, then the new image on the right.__**

For my first experiment, I tried a flare effect. From the Filters menu, I chose FlareFX, then set the x and y coordinates for the flare right at the center of the flower. I was surprised that it took the software nearly a minute to render the effect - there must have been a lot of computations going on! The effect makes it look like light is emanating from the center of the flower - cool!

For the next image, I chose Filters and then Oilify. I used a mask size of 20 to get a slightly more distorted, impressionistic effect. The effect is pretty subtle, but serves to smooth out some of the detail on the petals. You can see that the red lines radiating out from the center of the flower have been dramatically curtailed. It is almost as if the paint used to make the original image was reliquified, then rearranged itself slightly differently.

Speaking of impressionistic effects, I gave the Cubism effect a spin. I accessed it from the Filters - Artistic - Cubism menus. The transform took nearly two minutes - definitely a lot of number crunching going on! It is too bad these images have been scaled to only 300 pixels in width, the subtlety of the effect can be better appreciated with the full-size image.

For this trial, I did a Select Invert on the image. This selected primarily the petals of the flower. I followed this with Edit Fill with Pattern which overlaid the orange ruled pattern on the petals.

For this go-around, I used the Filters - Edge-Detect - Neon sequence. The results were quite impressive. Reminded me of some of the black light effects from the 70's!

This final experimentation used the Script-Fu menu. I selected Decor and then Coffee Stain. This got my computer chugging along for about five minutes, as the GIMP selected different layers of the image, and then applied coffee stain effects to them. Very interesting to combine coffee with floral arrangements!