Photography: Before and After for Basic Editing in GIMP and Pisacca

After talking to my wife, I learned that she really liked the color settings on here friends new Canon DSLR.  We weren't sure if our Canon SD1000 would be able to produce colors like this, but I figured it was worth looking into.

I have messed around with Picassa a few times to do some basic editing, and I have also used some of the functions in GIMP to get a little fancy with my editing. Some example of what I found we could do are shown below.


Set 1:
The first image looks o.k., but a little dull.  By playing around with some settings in GIMP (mainly color saturation and contrast), I was able to create bit more appealing version in the second photo.  In the new photo, the water looks bluer, the plants look greener, and everything just pops a little bit more.










 
















Set 2:
Again, the first image is quite nice, but the colors just look a lot nicer when saturation is boosted.

Set 3:

The angles looked nice when I took this picture, but the horizon is uneven and the colors just clash a bit too much.  Using the softglow filter in GIMP and messing with hue, I was able to make something a bit more interesting.

GIMP is certainly capable of much more than I have done here, but it's still neat that with just a few minutes of messing around you can turn decent photos into really nice photos.