Some of the content is extremely advanced, but there is lots of good info for beginners in the mix too. If you want to do some extra credit reading about color models, there’s an excellently exhaustive collection of color resources available compiled by David Briggs over the span of many years. I know that it’s much more fun to spend your time editing, but a bit of grounding in the theory can really help. The technical aspects of color models and color theory are often overlooked by new image editors, but if you really want to make yourself a better digital artist, you’ll need to at least understand the basics. The greater the adjustment, the more care you need to take in order to keep everything looking realistic! A Final Word on Digital Color
Of course, I’m pushing the adjustments to the extreme in order to make them as clear as possible, but most of the time, you’ll get the best results when you keep your adjustments fairly close to the original. The Red option at the top has shifted to some kind of horrible chartreuse like a neon Kermit the frog, and all the others have shifted just as far. You’ll probably notice that setting the master to -180 results in the same color change as you’ll get from +180 because there are only 360 possible degrees in the color wheel.Īs you adjust your Hue slider, you’ll see the affected colors change in the Hue/Saturation dialog box, as you can see in the screenshot above.
GIMP COLOR PALETTE FROM IMAGE WITHOUT INTERPOLATION FULL
The Hue slider setting ranges from -180 to +180, covering the full 360 degrees of a color wheel. GIMP will open the Hue/Saturation dialog box so you can configure your adjustment.Īdjusting the Master Hue to +90 turns this grey November panorama into an alien world
Open the Colors menu and select Hue/Saturation from the list. It’s a bit tricky, but here’s how it works: You could spend your time with the Select By Color tool and then feather your selection edges to create a softer transition, but it’s easier to use the Hue/Saturation filter to adjust a whole range of similar hues all at once. Sharp lines look great in a logo, but they really stand out in a photo. Subtle variations in color tone can make it very hard to get good results with the Select By Color tool, and it looks more natural to have gradual color transitions in a photo. When you’re editing more complex images like digital photos, it’s a bit more unusual to get large sections of the same color next to each other. There is no Step 3 – you’re already done! Hue Adjustments in Complex Scenes Pushing the Hue slider up to 120 or so gives Wilber a fetching teal paintbrush! So much nicer than the orange/brown from before. They work almost identically, except Fuzzy Select only selects contiguous areas of color while Select by Color can create multiple selection areas at once. There are a couple of different ways you can do this, but they’re both found in the same spot in the toolbox: the Select by Color tool and the Fuzzy Select tool. The first step in the color change process is selecting the pixels that you want to modify. Here’s how you can apply it: Step 1: Create Your Selection Pixel art, logos, and outlined text are great examples that are perfect for this technique, but it won’t work on pictures with too many aliased pixels.
When I say a few colors, I mean from a numerical value perspective: each color should be consistent across the whole image to get the best results. This method works best on a relatively simple image that only has a few colors, such as a GIF or other image that has a limited color palette. This guide is intended for GIMP users who are already fully familiar with the ins and outs of the program, but I’ll explain the steps in more detail down below for those of you who want a bit more detail, along with a technique for creating more gentle color shifts for complex images like photographs.