Scroll Saw Portraits using GIMP - L5

[Travis]

Welcome to Lesson 5. We're rolling up our sleeves and starting to get into the meat of the class. This time we'll be learning to create a base pattern on which we build our scroll saw pattern. There's a fair amount to cover, so let's get started.

Understanding Layers
OK. Before we get started, one more lesson in fundamentals. This is an important one because it is the very cornerstone of using programs like GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. Below, I've attached a GIMP project file which illustrates the concepts I'll be covering. Go ahead and download it and open the file.

Imagine you're looking down on your desk. What might you see? You'll see the desktop, perhaps a piece of paper, a pencil, your coffee cup, and maybe a used tissue (eww). Consider each item as it's own layer. Each item has it's order. One item is placed upon another (ie, the coffee cup is placed upon the paper, and both are on top of the desk). If you notice on your layer's palette the order of each item. As if you were looking down, the top layer (first) is in front of everything below it. Then the next layer is on top of what's below that and so-on until you reach the desktop. But what if we wanted to reorder the items/layers? Click and drag your layer to whichever layer position you want it to be. You'll notice a dark line appears between two layers. This is where your repositioned layer will reside. So lets take the piece of paper and put it above the coffee cup. Notice now the paper hides the coffee cup and anything else below it. Try bringing the pencil to the top of the cup and paper. You can easily see that we can alter the visibility of layers depending on what layers are above it.

Next to each layer is an icon that looks like an eye. This toggles the visibility of that layer. Try clicking a few of the eyes and toggle each layer off so none of the layers are visible. You'll notice that all you see is a checkerboard pattern. This basically shows you that these sections are transparent. Toggle the paper layer so that it is visible now. You'll notice you can see the paper just fine, and everything around it is transparent. Each of these layers has a section that is transparent, except for the desk layer, which covers the entire surface.

One nice thing about layers is that you can manipulate one layer without affecting the other layers. Choose the used tissue layer and resize it (resizing is covered in Lesson 4). Notice it didn't resize anything else except the tissue layer. You can manipulate this layer to your heart's content with filters, color correction, resizing, drawing, etc. No other part of your design will be affected if it isn't apart of that layer! How cool is that? I'm sure you can see the advantage of keeping elements on their own layer.

layers_tut.xcf

A Tour of the Layer's Palette
Now that we understand the basics of layers, lets take a look at the Layer's Palette. At the top right corner of the layer's dialog box, you'll see a small triangle. This is the flyout menu we discussed in previous lessons. You'll find several options in here that you may or may not need. Read through them and keep these options in mind. They might come in handy later.

Below that, you'll find a pulldown menu next called Mode. These are blending modes that creates various effects. We won't be dealing with blending modes in this class, but they are fun to play around with. Feel free to experiment with them.

Below Mode, we have Opacity. This slider bar goes from 0-100% where you can set the level of transparency of a layer. This is nice if you want to see through one layer to the next for either reference, or to achieve a certain effect.

Below that is Lock. This could be confusing as we think it might lock a layer from being modified. This is not true. This actually locks the alpha channel. An alpha channel is what defines what is transparent and what is opaque. When you lock an alpha channel for a layer, you're only allowed to modify the object on that layer and not the area around that object. Try locking a layer and grabbing your paint brush and paint around your canvas. You'll notice you can only mark up the object itself, and not the transparent areas around the object.

Then we have the layers themselves. We already know how to reorder the layers and toggle the visibility of the layers. Next to the eye is a box. Click it and it will show a little chain. This is how you link one object to another object. Click the tissue layer, click the box next to the eye so it becomes a chain. Then select the coffee layer, then choose that linking chain. Grab your move tool and move that object. You'll notice the tissue layer and the coffee cup move as one object because they are linked.

You can rename a layer by double clicking the layer name and typing in a new name and pressing return. It's a good habit to name your layers so you can see at a glance what you're working on.

Right clicking on the layer brings up a menu of other options that will become useful too.

Bottom left corner, we have an icon that looks like a piece of paper. Click that to create a new layer. It will pop up a dialog box with some options. Click OK when you're satisfied with your options and you'll have a new layer.

The inverse of a new layer is deleting the layer. Bottom right corner, you'll see a trash can icon. Click that button and it will delete your selected layer.

To the left of the trash icon is an icon that looks like an anchor. This anchors floating layers or selections. I have not found a benefit to this tool yet. If you have a floating layer or selection, just click the New Layer icon instead to anchor the floating layer to the new layer.

To the left of that is the Duplicate Layer button. It looks like two boxes on top of each other. We'll be using this tool a lot to create duplicate copies (we'll discuss that in the next section).

And lastly, you have two arrows. One pointing up and one pointing down. This is another way of rearranging your layer order rather than dragging and dropping the layers.

layerspalette.jpg

Using Layers
I'm sure you can see the benefit of having the layers functions. While they're very powerful when illustrating or doing photo work. But we'll be using layers as a way to back up our work. Before we manipulate our image, we'll duplicate that layer and work on the duplicate instead, thereby retaining the original image. For example. We have our original color image. We want to make that black and white, so we'll duplicate the color image and turn the duplicate into black and white. Next we want to change the brightness/contrast of the black and white image. So we duplicate the black and white image and change the brightness/contrast of our duplicate layer. Woops...we messed up! Well, instead of starting completely over, we can delete the layer we goofed up on and take the previous version of the image and duplicate that and try it again!

We'll also be using layers as reference material. After we create our base pattern, we'll take a copy of the color image and put it to the top of our layers palette. We'll toggle the visibility of the color image back and forth and we can see how our pattern compares to the original photograph. This is a great way to check our work and help us with the pattern making process.



Creating Our Base Pattern
OK. Enough of the fundamental stuff. Let's start designing. Open up your project file that we created last time. You should see two layers in your layers palette. We should have a white background layer, and the picture layer. Our guidelines should also be visible. If you don't see any of these, chances are you saved your document as something other than XCF. If that is the case, I'd go back to the previous lesson and create your document again (saving your file is covered in the written instructions, not in the video). Remember that XCF format retains all of our layer and guideline information.

Lets rename our original image layer to "original".

Grayscale
Since we work in black and white anyway, it only makes sense to create our pattern in black and white. Working in black and white will also make seeing the shadows much easier and it will work better with the filters we'll be using in the next sections. So we must remove the color from the image.

Go ahead and duplicate the original layer and rename it to "bw" (for black and white).

In the menu across the top, choose Colors>Desaturate. This will pop up a dialog box that gives you 3 options; Lightness, Luminosity, and Average. Click each on of these options and watch what its doing to the image. Find an option that is the most pleasing to your eye. I chose Luminosity because the shadows and highlights seem to be richer and have more depth.

Levels
The next step, we'll play around with the color balance/brightness & contrast. We want the shadows to be a bit darker, but not black. We also want the highlight to be brighter, but not white. The tones in between we want to ramp up so the transition is quicker, thereby giving a bit more contrast in general. There are several ways to do this in the Color menu on the top (color balance, hue/saturation, colorize, brightness/contrast, levels, and curves). I prefer using Curves.

Duplicate your "bw" layer and rename the new layer to "curves."

Choose Colors>Curves. This will pop up a dialog box that has a grid with a diagonal line. The lower left corner is your true black, and the upper right corner is your true whites. The diagonal line indicates how the black transitions into the white. Across the bottom, you'll see the gray tones in your image graphed out. Click the diagonal line and drag the center up. You'll notice your image got brighter. Drag it the other way and you'll notice it gets darker. Try moving the lines into various positions and watch what it does to your image. This curve allows us to control the brightness and contrast of our image. Bringing the curve up or down doesn't really accomplish what we want. We don't want to lighten it, nor do we want to darken it. What we want is to darken some of the shadows and lighten some of the highlights, and make the transition between the two levels ramp up quicker, thereby increasing the contrast overall. We can accomplish this by creating an 'S' curve. We can add another node to this line to create an 'S' shape. We want one node about 1/3 up from the bottom and just below the diagonal. The next node is about 1/3 from the top right and above the diagonal (see image below). This creates a really nice contrast to the overall image. Play around with the nodes a bit and find something that looks nice to you. Then press OK when you are happy with the way it looks. Remember, we don't want solid black yet, nor solid white. We want to see the details in the shadows still, as well as in the highlights.

curves.jpg

Filters
Now that we have our image looking good, its time to work with some filters. Filters are special effects that can be applied to a layer. There are a lot of filters to play with, so be sure to check them out too. But the filter we're interested in is the Photocopy filter. But before we proceed, lets duplicate our curves layer and rename the new layer to "photocopy."

Choose Filters>Artistic>Photocopy. This will pop up a dialog box. You'll see a preview pane on the top with a bunch of sliders below. One of the annoying things about GIMP is the preview window is at 100%. You can't zoom out to see how you are affecting your entire image. Hopefully this will be changed in the next version, until then we have to work around this minor annoyance. One thing you can do is resize the window by grabbing the corner and dragging it out. Make this dialog box as large as your screen allows. This way you'll be able to see a bit more of your image in the preview window. Drag the image so you can see his eyes.

We have 4 slider options; Mask Radius, Sharpness, Percent Black, and Percent White. Play around with these sliders and watch what it does to your image. Are you starting to see the beginnings of a scroll saw pattern? Pretty cool, huh? The Mask Radius is how it calculates which surrounding pixels should be darkened. A higher level will create a darker, thicker line. I like to move the mask radius all the way to the right. The Sharpness is how much detail it will retain. Low sharpness creates blurred lines, whereas high sharpness creates crisp lines. I like having my sharpness all of the way to the right too. Percent Black will indicate how much black will be added to the image. I like to keep this at about .95 or so. Not quite maxed out, but close. Percent White is where you'll find the most control. This will indicate how much of your image will be converted to white. If you max out the white, sure your image is now in black and white, but you also lost a lot important detail in your image. I prefer having some gray tones so I can retain some of the detail in the image. I like having control over which details I think are important are not. In the next lesson, we'll decide which details remain and which details we can do without. So for my Percent White, I set mine at about .6. Pan around the image and take a look at what your image will look like. If you are happy with the results, press OK and the computer will process your filter.

In the spirit of experimentation, try hiding your newly created photocopy layer and duplicate your curves layer and do this process again with different settings. Do this a few times and choose the one you like best. Whichever ones you don't want, be sure to delete them so we don't get confused later on.

photocopy.jpg

Well, that's pretty much it! We're getting pretty darn close to a pattern now and you can see it taking shape! Be sure to save your work (remember you want the xcf extention so we save all of our layers). Next lesson we'll be cleaning up this pattern so its cuttable. We'll learn to work with brushes. We'll also discuss bridges, peninsulas, islands, and lakes; the cornerstone of what makes scroll saw patterns unique. This should be fun! I know I can't wait!

Assignments:
-Play around with layers and be sure to understand how they work.
-Follow the above steps to create your base pattern.
-Apply the same techniques to any other picture you're working on along side the class.
-Experiment with color adjustments and filters and see what they can do.

[mouchedog]

You are doing a terrific job! It's just like watching something slowly come to life. Thank you!

[Messman]

I really liked the layers part. That is something I have stayed away from, because I really didn't understand it. So I am thinking that I might be messing around with layers in the future and see how I can put it to use even more than I am am now. Great Job.

[Travis]

I really liked the layers part. That is something I have stayed away from, because I really didn't understand it. So I am thinking that I might be messing around with layers in the future and see how I can put it to use even more than I am am now. Great Job.

Once you get the hang of layers, you'll wonder how you gotten so far without them. We're using layers in this class as a way of backing up our work. But one nice thing you can do is if you're not sure if something is going to work or not, create a new layer and paint on that layer instead. Then you can turn on the visibility of that new layer and compare/contrast and see if you like the results. If you like it, merge the two layers together. If you don't, delete it. Pretty cool.

[joscrolls]

Great lessons so far - thanks Travis!
I have two questions on this lesson:
What is the advantage of creating new layers for each process when you could use the undo feature?
And two- is there a way (I'm familiar with doing this in PSP) to select just an area (like the right shoulder that comes out so dark) and apply a filter to that to bring out detail? Or maybe that's in a future lesson.
Thanks!

[Travis]

...What is the advantage of creating new layers for each process when you could use the undo feature...

There's a couple of advantages to using layers in this way. First, your undo list only goes back so far. So you might not be able to go back as far as you'd like. Second, it allows you to experiment without going through the process again. Say for instance you're not sure how you're going to approach the eye. You can duplicate your base pattern a couple of times and try a different approach without affecting the pattern you worked so hard on. And lastly, these layers make an awesome reference point. Often, I'll take a copy of the color picture and put that at the top of the layers. When I want to check to see how it compares to the original picture, I can toggle the color picture on and off and flip between the original and my pattern.

... is there a way (I'm familiar with doing this in PSP) to select just an area (like the right shoulder that comes out so dark) and apply a filter to that to bring out detail? ...

Yup, you can certainly do that. I won't be covering that in this class, though. But you can make a selection of a problem area with your lasso tool or the masktool (lower left corner of your picture window...covered briefly in lesson 2), then use your Curves or Levels to adjust the color/contrast in only that area. This is a great technique for working with difficult pictures. The William Shatner pic we're working on has really nice color balance and contrast, so there isn't much need for it on this pic. But feel free to play around with it.

Maybe a future class, we can cover some of these advanced topics.

[Barry5180]

So far so good Travis. I'm still with you so far. What amazes me is how some things in Gimp are down and dirty version of what you might find in PSP and then other things have much more finesse than in the other software. I like where this is going so far. Can't wait to get through the next lesson.

Barry

[RichB]

Hi Travis. I have gone through all of the videos. Now I am trying to do a portrait of my grandson. In this lesson when I open up my image, on my Layers Palate I have Background which is white and Floating Selection Pasted Layer. I have my picture on my paper but no image on my palate. What am I doing wrong. When I moved my image to my pattern i discovered I had to select Floating Selection Pasted Layer before I clicked Control V to put my image in that layer but no picture. If I didn't select that layer it went in to the background layer with a picture. Thanks Rich

[Travis]

Hi Rich. When you paste in your image, you'll get a layer that says Floating Selection. I'm not sure the purpose of this, but you can turn it into a regular layer by selecting the Floating Selection layer, then clicking the New Layer button. This will make your floating layer into a regular layer that you can manipulate. Let me know if that works for you.

[RichB]

Travis it worked. I have been working for two days to make this work and it was so simple. I am enjoying all of the videos. I plan on making a portrait pattern of all three of my grand kids. Thanks a lot. Rich. PS i notice a donation button at the bottom, I plan on figuring out that one two. Thanks again.