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Gimp around in 80 minutes

Light, Motion and Texture transformation

These special effects can provide that little extra which can make a good image great.

An Electric Horseman To create the Electric Horseman, I started out with a photo of a rodeo rider. The horse and rider were selected with the bezier select tool, and pasted to a transparent layer in a new image. The horse's halter, mane and tail was cloned away or erased, and the rider was selected separately (using a little feather) and saved as a copy in another layer. The horse and rider layer was duplicated twice, and those copies were desaturated and adjusted with Levels to create highlight/shadow layers. Using a Cow to make a Leopard of a Horse... To create the leopard skin, two more copies were made. In the first copy, the entire horse shape was filled with the Leopard pattern from the Patterns dialog box. Since this pattern isn't entirely seamless, it was adjusted by painting yellow and black spots in the visible joints. The leopard layer was set in Darken Only mode over the second copy, which was filled with a yellow-orange gradient to add color depth to the leopard. To add some extra glow to the leopard horse, one more texture layer was added. This time I used the black and white cow pattern, and set it to Overlay. Note that this does not make the horse look like a cow (!). In Overlay the large dark spots on white background rather gives the illusion of powerful muscles under a shiny coat. Now I turned to the layer with the rider, and changed saturation, brightness and contrast to make it fit the new "horse".

Making things glow

The glow layer was made by filling a feathered horse and rider selection with red, yellow and white, each time with lower feather values, and set the layer to Screen mode.

Adding motion The illusion of movement was more complicated, because just adding some motion blur wouldn't suffice to create the subtle effect I wanted. I had to create two different motion layers - one dark and one light. For the Dark movement layer Blur/Motion blur was applied to a copy of the cow glow layer, then I did the same for a copy of the orange gradient layer, but this time I inverted the selection, and only the blurred parts outside of the horse was used. These layers were merged after adjusting the opacity. The dark movement was still a bit to strong in some parts, so a layer mask was used to tone down or remove motion glow where it wasn't wanted. This layer was set to Darken only. For the Light movement layer I blurred the shadow layer and the leopard layer (as with the orange gradient layer before) merged it and adjusted to darker. To protect the rider figure from too much blur, a layer mask was used here as well. This layer was set to Screen mode. Adding scenery The background was made of a photo of a blue sky, a city panorama by night and a yellow evening sky. The blue sky image was transformed to dark clouds with Image/Hue-Saturation, and the yellow sky was merged to the city panorama. The flash of lightning was a bit harder, because the only lightning image I had was the Lightning pattern in the Pattern dialog, and that was too repetitive or intertwined with lightning to be used directly. The problem was solved by scaling an image with lightning pattern and then use the Map/Fractal Trace plugin. From that image I could feather select a suitable part, and adjust it with Transform/Perspective and Screen mode to look the way I wanted.

The Gimp User Manual
Last modified: 19 May 1998