"Black and White"

This week’s Sunday Postcard Art challenge was “Black and White.” I thought this theme would be easy to do, until I tried to come up with an idea and make it. I get great ideas, but since I can’t draw, I have to find copyright free clip art/images that I can combine together to create the picture I want to paint. That never turns out to be easy with what I imagine in my mind.

My postcard shows an outdoor ball, with the dancers under lantern lighting. I converted the final image to black and white using GIMP’s Colors – Desaturate – Luminosity. I then added two layers and used GIMP’s pattern fill on them, to create a grainy affect, to make it look like an older picture. I used pattern Ice in Mode Multiply, and pattern Slate in Mode Grain merge with the Opacity set to 70.2 percent.

That was my “primary” image, which I exported as a jpeg file. I applied GIMP’s Filters – Artistic – Softglow on it and saved that as another jpeg file. Then I created a new GIMP file, copied each jpeg in as a layer, with the “primary” layer as the topmost. I erased the lanterns on it, to allow the ones on the softglow image’s to appear. They were brighter and more like the original ones before I converted it to black and white. I exported the GIMP file as my final jpeg postcard.

A thank you goes to Shannon, who had an example of doing this erasing technique on her blog, and who told me the link where I could find the tutorial on how to do this. Although the tutorial is for PhotoShop, the same instructions can be applied to any other tool with similar commands. The tutorial is here.

Technical notes to myself: This week I only used GIMP to create my postcard. The reason I had problems with the quality of the image I created in GIMP last week is because PhotoPlus defaulted to a resolution of 96 pixels/inch when I created 4x6 or 6x4 images in it. GIMP has that setting under the Advanced Options, and it defaults to 72 pixels/inch. So besides setting the image size, I also need to set the resolution. TODO: Experiment with the resolution setting in both and see what affect it has.