Thursday, September 17, 2015

How To Tint a Photo In Gimp 2.8

The Final Product


This is my new Twitter banner.  If you read last week's post you will recognize that this is a much improved version of the original picture I was using.  Also in last week's post I lamented my inability to get the even blue color that you see in the picture above.  Now that I have learned how, I'm going to share the steps here.

Step One: The Original Photo

The first thing you will do is open Gimp and go to File>Open. Open the photo that you want to color. In my case it was this one:

 
 
Step Two: Choose Your Color

Next you want to go to File>New and open a new project. It should already be set to the same dimensions as your original photo. If not, just type in the appropriate number of pixels for height and width.  Now you want to click on the Fill Bucket tool and make sure that FG Color Fill is selected. Set your foreground color to whatever color you will be using to tint your picture. In my case, blue:

 
 
Step Three: Add Your Color To Your Photo

Then click Edit>Copy.  Then select the window containing your photo and click Edit>Paste. It will look like this:


As you can see, the blue has completely hidden the original image, but that's okay.  We're going to get it back.

Step Four: Tint the Photo

Over in the layers window you will see that the blue color is in a Floating Layer. Right-click that and select To New Layer. Then go to the top of the Layers window and find where it says Mode. Click on the drop-down arrow and scroll all the way down to the bottom.  You will see the word Color.  Click on that, and this will be your result:


There are a lot of different selections in the Mode menu, and each one will give a different effect.  Feel free to play with them and see what you like.

I hope that this tutorial was helpful.  If you have any advice or insights for Gimp users please feel free to leave a comment.


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