Gimp

My friends know how I love taking pictures and editing them. I have been using Picasa to edit my pics until recently. We have a subject called "Image processing" in our syllabus this semester. To understand and enjoy tinkering with it,my friend suggested I start using Gimp.

Now,Gimp is an image processing tool. Gimp actually stands for GNU Image Processing program.
It is freely available and runs on all platforms(windows,linux,mac os).

1. I downloaded Gimp from PortableApps.com
http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable

2. After I installed it, I opened it in a new folder and i saw the following folders along with the Gimp app.

3. After double-clicking on the Gimp app,I went into the options file and clicked on open and opened a new image.

The image i used was taken at versova and shows three kids playing on the beach.

3.Gimp has various options. Its got options like filters. We can use various filters to edit an image.

4. Its also got a channel mixer. Basically an image has 3 modes: RGB,Greyscale and indexed.
Assuming you want to work on the RGB mode ie with colours Red,Green,Blue and want to adjust the presence of each colour in an image. You can vary that using the in-built channel mixer.

5. A particular filter that caught my fancy was the edge detection filter. Under edge detection,we can use filters like laplace,robert,sobel etc. Sobel filter was one of the filters i wanted to use on this particular image. So i used it in the vertical direction (yes you can filter it in horizontal as well as vertical)

6. Although,we did get the desired filtered output image,i wasn't happy with it. Another edge detection filter i wanted to try out was Difference of Gaussian.

7. Another filter i wanted to try out (not under edge detection) was the one that said animation. So i tried using the spinning globe effect under the animation filter

Yeah,Gimp is easy to use and fun too!