Previous video tutorials have covered:

1. Layers
2. The Clone Tool
3. Colour Select
4. How to Photograph a Ghost

The topic for this latest video (5)  is “tinting”, a technique for adding or changing colour tones for discrete areas within an image. The screencast video itself was a little too long to upload to youTube in one piece, so I’ve spit it into two parts, part 1 and part 2.

The picture used to illustrate the selective tinting technique is available for practice and has a creative commons license which means that it can be reproduced should you wish to do so, with proper linked attribution.

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Seashore Image Editing Tutorial 5 – Tinting

How to Photograph a Ghost using free image editing software

As it’s halloween night tonight, and I have been requested to publish more image editing video tutorials using the Seashore free image editor for Mac, here’s the latest lesson in the series, which should be a lot of fun. It’s called “How to Photograph a Ghost” and will enable you to produce a well executed picture of a ghostly transparent human body against a real background without any noticable edges and even with the perfect shadow effects. As this is tutorial number 4 in a series, following on from :-

1. Image Editing – Layers
2. Image Editing – the clone tool
3. Image Editing – Colour Select

… we do use some slightly more advanced techniques then in the first three image editing with Seashore for Mac videos, but nothing that the beginner cannot master with just a short amount of practice. You can’t use an existing photograph, you’ll either have to go out and take a picture specially in one place, twice, or else you can download and use the two creative commons licensed photographs used as an example in the video.

So first watch the video all the way through, then decide on your subject matter:

After watching the video once, you can wind back to the beginning and try copying the same technique yourself using the seashore software. The best thing would be to go out and shoot a similar pair of your own photographs, being careful to hold the same camera position for both.

If you do decide to use the example pictures to practice on, you can download them by cmd+clicking the following two thumbnail pictures then selecting “save target as” or else clicking through to the larger pictures then dragging them off to your desktop.

Background Picture

Man against Background

You are welcome to these or any of my photographs for online publication provided you abide by the create commons license which require you to attribute the photographer as “Andy Roberts” and link back to this blog.

If you found this free video tutorial useful, it would be nice if you would please rate and favourite the image editing tutorial 4 on youtube and blog,  retweet stumble etc this post,

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/10/31/how-to-photograph-a-ghost

cheers.

Andy Roberts

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How to Photograph a Ghost

One simple use of the clone toolis to extend some background over part of an image that doesn’t fit in, effectively making some obtrusive feature vanish. The limitations to this are that the background has to be something relatively uniform. If you want to try your hand at editing the photograph used as an example in this tutorial then you will find it here on Flickr with a creative commons license that allows derivatives to be made and published, with attribution.

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Image Editing lesson 2 : The Clone Tool

Seashore image editing Video

On request I’ve made some Image editing tutorial videos and this is the first in a series of at least five. Lesson one is an introduction to using Layers. Layers are essential to the construction of drawings and can be used in a similar way when building up effects onto photographs. They make it much easier to come back and change or redo image effects later by leaving each stage intact – a process called non-destructive editing. Anyway, here’s the video from youtube, I hope you will bear with me and keep watching, it gets much more useful after a bit of a slow start I know that – and your comments and reviews are very welcome both here and on the youTube page.

The software I’m using is called Seashore and it’s an open source image editor for Mac using the native Cocoa interface, so it feels like a proper Mac application, not a migrated one.

You can download this free software from Seashore at Sourceforge. If you find that iPhoto doesn’t do all that you want and photoshop is just too big and cumbersome then Seashore could be the image editing application to get you started on acquiring some really useful skills.

The next four tutorials will cover:

• Using the clone tool effectively
• Selecting colours and applying changes
• How to photograph a ghost
• Subtle use of tinting

If you’d like to receive notice when these are published then you need to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and join the newsletter (see sidebar)

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Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers

Seashore is a native OS X application which does image editing on a Mac. Free and Open Source, it’s much smaller and lighter than Photoshop and easier to use than The Gimp, and being an installed application is much more responsive than an online image editor such as Picnic. So Seashore fits in nicely for anything a bit more than than basic iPhoto tweaking, and a bit less than full blown Photoshop pro tools.

Seashore loads very quickly indeed on my underpowered Mac mini, and immediately presents a simple and recognisable tools palette.

So you can get up and running doing simple stuff with images really quickly, but when it comes to more advanced operations, and inevitably the need arises sooner rather than later, then the shortcomings of Seashore in its present state become apparent.

Update: May 2009

I’ve spent a bit more time getting to grips with the concepts behind the seashore image editor for mac and recorded a series of five screencast tutorials on the subject. They start off fairly basic and should serve as a good introduction to the fundamental ideas and techniques, maybe applicable to any picture editing software, not just seashore for mac. The only thing is I haven’t decided exactly where to publish them yet, maybe here or perhaps better on the ICT tutor blog

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Seashore Image Editor for Mac – Better than The Gimp