Recently I decided to brush up my graphics exposure. Since long back I have had the opportunity to explore using Adobe Photoshop on Windows, and Gimp or Ink-Scape on Linux, Canva on Android and most recently with AI using leonardo AI and Microsoft Copilot. Will boast about all of these with examples and prompts used.
The recent exploration using Gimp follows.
The original images are as follows though the one used for top layer was taken on Samsung M14 and file type was hief and the size was too large for the upload limits set by me on this blog and is down sized to acceptable file size loosing some quality.
The road picture shown above is snatched from google and tweaked a bit. For mixing up the first picture of my and my car had to be converted to a rotoscopic one with unwanted area having single color or transparency. This was done in gimp by pasting on a second layer and adding alpha channel to the layer. Then using fuzz select “U” and “Selection Editor” menu and “shift” + “click” “Select -> Grow / Shrink / Remove Holes” menu items and “Tools -> Paint tools -> Eraser ” or “Shift + E” visually and manually erased all unwanted elements leaving out only me and my car in the layer. This layer ws further resized after reducing the opacity to see how it matched the road picture, once the proportion was visibly satisfied the opacity was taken back to 100% and to finalize using “Tools -> Paint Tools -> Clone” and own visual decision some shadow from my Shirt was also stamped out to match the sun light angle in the road picture. Hope everything is visually okay.
Further playing with AI
A 90-year-old biker wearing full riding gear, including a leather jacket, helmet with a visor, gloves, and riding boots, sitting confidently on a large cruiser motorcycle. His weathered face shows deep lines of age, but his posture remains strong and determined. The motorcycle is a classic, chrome-laden cruiser, polished and shining under the sunlight. The backdrop features a vast, sprawling farm with rolling green fields, a rustic barn, and distant hills under a clear blue sky. The atmosphere is peaceful, yet the image exudes a sense of timeless adventure and freedom.
From the view of this image, I went to google photos on my device and searched for my images to choose the one included below
Original image taken on Samsung M14 and had 7.3 MB and 4896×5789 resolution so rescaled it to 1096×1296 and 1.1 mb to fit into this blog.
from the image only the face was selected with gimp Tools -> Selection Tools -> Rectangle Select “R”, I always use the hot key “r” and was copied into the other AI rendered image as a new layer. This was scaled to fit the size after erasing unwanted edges and the final image is as follows.
Well there are more to it and that will be another story.