GIMP

Fancy getting more creative in your photography? Mike Bedford offers some inspiration by introducing a few special effects for you to explore.

Credit: www.gimp.org 

OUR EXPERT

Mike Bedford loves all things related to technology, but as this introduction to special effects reveals, he’s also a fan of traditional photographic methods.

 OUICK UP

For generalpurpose fluorescence photography you need a moderately high-powered UV torch. You should buy a so-called near longwave UV light source because these are fairly cheap, and because medium- and shortwave UV (as required, for example, to get some minerals to fluoresce) is more harmful.

T he phrase “special effects” in photography can mean different things to different people. For some it means using an app on a phone to distort your selfie or, perhaps, to add a dog’s nose and tongue to your face. Others use PC software or smartphone apps to generate a range of pre-determined effects with a press of a button.

However, there’s plenty of scope for applying effects using photo-editing software such as GIMP. This is our theme here but with one key caveat. Our emphasis is on effects that’ll exercise your grey matter rather more than, for example, just adjusting the Hue in an image’s HLS colour definition to introduce some bizarre colours. We don’t say that from a patronising or disapproving viewpoint but, quite simply, because if anything is so simple to achieve then it’s likely to be an overused effect. Indeed, the word “Photoshopped” has almost taken on a derogatory meaning in some quarters.

So, having spelled out some of the effects we’re not going to cover, we ought to say just what we are covering, but that’s not easy to sum up because we’re using the scattergun approach. All our techniques can be effective, and by introducing such a diverse range of effects, we trust that your creative juices will start flowing. This tutorial won’t show you “how to do special effects photography”. However, we do provide you with sufficient guidance to reproduce our selected methods to provide a practical introduction to special effects, which you can explore in your own photo projects.

Tricolour images

We struggled to come up with a descriptive name for our first effect, but it offers the interesting combination of a photo that mostly looks normal, but with moving objects “jazzed up”. This can be as subtle or as extreme as you like, depending mostly on the scene. In common with some of our other effects, this can’t be done just by post-processing, so you need to consider it when you take your photos.

First, you need to take three identical photos of the same scene, so that means using a tripod. In our example, it didn’t matter how long we left between those three exposures, so we took them as rapidly as possible, so the lighting wouldn’t change between them. Depending on your subject, though, and in particular how quickly things are moving, you might need to leave a longer gap.