Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig, Germany

What an amazing trip!

Leipzig Market Little Planet Panorama

I was half joking when I mentioned to schumaml on irc a few months ago that I should come out to LGM2014 and do a photography workshop using GIMP. Half joking turned into half-serious, and half-serious turned into “holy crap, I better buy my plane tickets!”…

The LGM team accepted a workshop proposal by Tobias Ellinghaus and myself to talk about darktable and FL/OSS photography workflows. I was also presenting alongside David Tschumperlé and Jérome Boulanger on a retrospective look at G’MIC over the last couple of years! (The title of the presentation was “A 2012-2013 retrospective of the G’MIC project : New features from artists/developers collaborations”).

To say that I was excited is an understatement! I was finally going to get a chance to meet the GIMP team face to face (I idle in the GIMP channel on irc quite a bit)! I was also going to be able to hang out with David, who I collaborate quite often with. Also, none other than Rolf Steinort was also going to be there!

An Open Source Headshot (Ronni) (Postprocessing)

In my previous post I had to do a bit of fiddling to bring my relative exposures back into line with each other (while retaining hair details from being blown out). Now that the image has been corrected, I’m ready to begin my normal workflow for retouching.

The rest of my GIMP tutorials can be found here:
Getting Around in GIMP

To give us an idea of what we’re working towards, here’s my final result for this image:

The results I will be working towards.

After my corrections in the previous post, here’s the image I’ll be starting with:

My base starting image.

There’s a few different ways to approach retouching this image, and it’s really dependent on the personal preferences of the retoucher. Some may like to fiddle with colors and tones first to set a mood, or possibly look more at general cropping/layouts to taste for instance. There’s quite a few ways to begin, so I can only speak to what I personally like to do.

An Open Source Headshot (Ronni)

I recently had an opportunity to shoot some headshots of a model, Ronni on ModelMayhem. She was kind enough to brave some nasty weather to help get to the shoot. It was my first time shooting with her, and she was super nice (if you're in the Mobile, AL area give her a shout!).

My personal favorite of the set.

The image we'll be working on in this tutorial.

This post is going to focus on what I had to do to get the final result you see above. I had a couple of small problems that I ran into, but they led to some neat solutions!