Two Canvases - A Brief Tutorial

DFM SCs,

In response to recent discussions on the darkness of some of the sketches:

Do not fool yourself into thinking the jpg is any less transformable than the paper. The computer does not know what looks good - your eye knows. You are still an artist in the time between when you put down the pencil and when you click "Post It!"

Pixels and LCDs and photons and phosphors are not paper, and only the Pattern Recognition Supercomputer in your head can be trusted to make the digital canvas look like the parchment canvas. The magic wand called "Curves" is the most direct route to this end, so that is what I will be showing you.

Dad is the only one I know of that has Photoshop, but he also has the GIMP. Plus, the GIMP's just better. (In my Pattern Recognition Supercomputer, anyway.) So that's what we'll be using.
www.gimp.org


Open your scan in the GIMP, go right to Curves, don't touch anything else yet.
Colors->Curves

The idea here is that the lower left corner is black, and the upper right corner is white, and the diagonal line is all the grays in between. What you can do with Curves is make the blacks blacker, and the lights lighter. You can do other things too, but this is the only type of curve I know and trust. Plus, it's all we really want to do.

Click on the line down near the lower left, and drag it down. Click on the line again up near the upper right and drag it up. Try to keep the line from touching the edges. Adjust until the image looks like your inner artist wants it to look. Here you can see I needed just a touch of black, but a good deal of white.


I also threw in a Color->Desaturate (Luminosity), which removes all color and makes everything a shade of gray. It may make the image too cold, but I'll leave it for now.

All of this is done to account for the strange little things your scanner or cheap digital camera does to your sketch as it is translating light into pixels.

You are Done! Post!





-mf