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I am temporarily putting the contest on hold due to health issues
Finally the first tutorial. When I first started doing any type of photography in Second Life this was one of the first and easiest tricks to make your pictures 'pop'. I have been told that this can also be done quite easily in other editors like GIMP if one can figure out the terminology. While I know what GIMP is I've never used it so the only terms I will use in this tutorial are for photoshop. If you know how it works with other editors and want to supply the steps with the right terms let me know! I will get them published here.
This is the image I chose for this example. I took this picture in Firestorm using a standard windlight setting.
First make a duplicate layer of your image. In Photoshop I did this by right clicking and choosing "Duplicate Layer".
Highlight the duplicated layer and then click on the "Filter" menu item. Pull down to "Blur" and then select "Guassian Blur" from the pop out menu.
You will be asked how much blur you would like to add. Using the slider I normally use a value between 1.5 and 2.0. You don't need a lot to make this little trick work well.
Next in Photo Shop you can change the blending mode by choosing this drop down menu in the layer viewer. Select "Soft Light". And there! Your image should now have some 'pop' to it! Some folks have asked me "well, isn't this a lot like changing the contract?" Well... Yes and no. Try it on different types of images and you will see. Below is the before and after so you can see the difference.
before
after
before
after
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