Hobby 19: Image Editing - Selective Coloring

This week’s hobby is Image Editing.

Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known as photo retouching, using tools such as an airbrush to modify photographs, or editing illustrations with any traditional art medium. Graphic software programs, which can be broadly grouped into vector graphics editors, raster graphics editors, and 3d modelers, are the primary tools with which a user may manipulate, enhance, and transform images. Many image editing programs are also used to render or create computer art from scratch.

Photo editing can be as simple or complex as you make it out to be. You do not have to go out and buy Adobe Photoshop or any other expensive photo editing software; you can download a program called gimp for free, or even use MS Paint.

This tutorial shows an easy way to manipulate a photo by gray scaling the background, while keeping the color in some portions. This is in order to bring out the color and put focus on an object. This process is called Selective Coloring (A.K.A Color Spotting)



Pros:
-Intellectually stabilizing
-Free (with gimp)
-Relaxing

Cons:
-Gimp has a large learning curve…but that is why we are here, showing you how easy it can be.

This is an excellent hobby and I highly suggest you pick it up if you have some spare time. Don’t be worried if you think you are not artistic or good with computers, as you practice you will eventually be able to see an improvement in speed and skill. I agree with this fact. It took me some time to finally download a program to record the screen during this tutorial. The first time I created the video with Adobe Captivate 5, it took me about 35-40 minutes to finish editing the picture. Unfortunately, this program did not export the video to a decent format, so I had to search for another. After two more programs and trials at creating the video, it only took 10-15 minutes total to finish editing the photo... As I keep blabbing, all I am really trying to say is that as you practice you become better and you should not shy away from things if you feel you are not good at it the first time.