GiMP Tutorial 3 - Desaturating Color and Adjusting Brightness and ContrastMany people love the nostalgic look and feel of black and white photographs. There are many ways to give digital photos this feel but rarely do the automatic conversions really give people the same type of affect that could be achieved in a true dark room.GiMP gives us full control of many aspects of a digital file and this allows us to modify our photos to be exactly how they should. This guide will help you learn how to desaturate the color of digital photographs and how to adjust your brightness and contrast settings. The program we are discussing is the GNU Image Manipulation Project available for free here. Here is the original image I am going to work with. I took it in southern Japan in 2007. Talk about a big spider!
Once you have chosen the photo you wish to edit open GiMP and then select File>>Open and choose the file. The first step to making an image black and white is called "Desaturate". Desaturating an image converts a color image to greyscale through a series of conversions. Access the Desaturate tool via the Colors menu.
Once you select Desaturate a dialog box will appear. You are given three options for what type of Desaturation you would like to apply to the picture - Lightness, Luminosity and Average. Here are all three versions as applied to my sample image. As you can see it is a very subtle difference between the different versions.
Unfortunately all of these options are a little bland and washed out. One way to adjust this is by using the brightness and contrast settings. Again, access this toolbox via the color menu, this time selecting the "Brightness-Contrast" tool.
Use the slider bars to adjust the relative values for brightness and contrast. Just playing with these two options can give your photograph a radically different feel. Here are three samples I created based off the "Luminosity Desaturation".
Finally I made a few more images. For these I used the same Brightness/Contrast values as above except I started with the original spider image and never desaturated. Brightness and Contrast is as valuable a tool for color images as it is for Black and White images!
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