Most photographers rarely shoot perfect pictures, Timing and light plays a major role in the process. Photo retouching has become a routine process in the making of a good picture.

This article describes some common photo retouching techniques using the GIMP.

How long will it take, hmm... 10 minutes

A messed up lab print

Here is a picture that is the perfect example of a messed up lab print. In most cases it is better to rescan the negative and go for a good print. But for the sake of this tutorial, lets try to fix what we have.

This beautiful beach is spoilt by a dark band from left to a right, a terrible green tint, and bad color saturation.

The Layers window

As a first step, we'll get rid of the ugly dark banding effect.

open the Layers windows (CTRL+L) and make a copy of the background Layer, now right click on the new layer and add an alpha mask to the layer. The alpha mask will control the overall brightness of the picture.

Now make sure that the alpha layer is selected in the layers window and then click the gradient tool. Fill the alpha layer with a gradient starting with white on the left and ending with black on the right. This gradient can be used to make up for the loss of brightness on the left and vice versa.

Now we have even lighting through out, But it still lacks the punch of a beautiful picture. That ugly cyan tint and unoptimized overall brightness needs to go.

To tackle the color situation, fire up the curves tool and tweak the green a little bit to get rid of the tint. Alternatively you can use the levels tool if you feel comfortable with the histograms.

As a final step, what we need is a little bit of brightness adjustment and a touch of sharpness. And viola!

Hope you enjoyed it, let me know if you know a better way to do this..