Improving the Vintage and Damaged with GIMP - pt 1

If you've gone to some free sites and thought the free stuff was too old, dark or unusable for you then I'll tell you a little secret. It is. It probably was saved by someone who works at the library and doesn't know graphic formats or how to save them with the right specs. But, you can fix them if you have a graphic program and are willing to learn. And make them look like this:

I got this one from the public domain, but you can just right click on it and save it to your desktop if you want to follow along. 

This is how it was stored. This is what most of them look like when you download them. So they need a lot of work. It is a little 'fixer upper' alright. Part of it is missing. But I love a good graphic challenge so... the first thing I would do is brighten it up a little. GIMP is free so go get it if you want to follow along. GIMP is the PhotoShop of the Linux world and the program is open source so it's free. It's not just for Linux OS, there are Windows download versions of it too. I haven't used PhotoShop since 2006 but they are very similar in what they can do with graphics. 

***Remember, If you make a mistake in any program and you want to get it back, just hit 'Ctrl + Z' on your keyboard and it will take you back a step each time you hit it. So be careful with that or you could wipe out the good work right along with the mistakes.***

I'm assuming you have basic skills and can download a graphic and find it again. So once you have installed GIMP you need to open the graphic from the 'File' menu so we can jump right in.

Once you have the graphic open, expand the top menu to then select 'Colors  | Levels' and drag the Input Levels window scrubs with your mouse. Drag the far right one toward the center until it looks good (usually close to the high point on the graph chart) and you may have to drag the center scrub a little to the left too. Then if it needs a little contrast just drag the far left scrub toward the center. Play around with it until you get what you want. And when you're done, it should look like this:

So that little bit made such a big difference. It looks a hundred times better now and that may be all you need to do to most of the old graphics you want to use. But... this one is damaged and missing a couple of flags that we need to put back in. It looks like somebody took a bite out of our card.

So, the first thing I do to fix that is go to the far right column in the program and find the layers box where it shows you all the layers. On the bottom of that window it has an icon that looks like 2 little tv screens. click it. 

Now you have two layers that look the same. Select the top layer in the window with your cursor because we'll be working on that layer first. 

Next, set the background color. so we can fill in that missing piece. So first, (1) select the foreground color then (2) select the color picker and then (3) click anywhere on the yellow background of our postcard. Now your paintbrush and bucket are filled with the background yellow color of the card.

The easy way to fill in that missing chunk is to flood the background bottom layer with the paint bucket. So select the bucket on the tool window. 

Then making sure the bottom layer is selected in the layers window, click anywhere on the bottom layer of the card to fill it with yellow. 

You can turn off the view of any layer just by clicking on the eyeball for that layer. So click on the eyeball for the top layer to see the all yellow bottom layer. All yellow? Good. Now select the eyeball again on the top layer to turn it back on. And make sure the top layer is selected in our window.

So most of the free graphics are saved in .jpg format. This is a lossy format and will degrade with each save. The idea graphic to have is a .png, not only because it is 'lossless' and doesn't degrade in quality (meaning more data doesn't get stripped off) with each save but you can have transparent areas. So we will need to give the non-transparent .jpg a transparency layer so we can select and remove just the white part. We can do this with each layer we select. But we just need to do the top layer. So from the menu, go to 'Layer | Transparency | Add Alpha Channel'. 

Then select the magic wand tool and the settings shown here to select the white part of the postcard by just clicking on it. It will show marching ants around the selection. Just hit the delete key on your keyboard to remove it.

Now we have an all yellow background we can work on. But we need to clean up the edges and debris. So go to the paintbrush and paint over any dark edges carefully. You can also remove any spots or discolorations on the postcard too. You can paint over the lettering or any part of the card so be careful. 'Ctrl + Z' is your friend if you make a mistake.

Once you are satisfied with the looks so far, hit 'Ctrl + M' to merge the two layers into one. You can also find this command on the drop down menu under 'Image | merge visible layers'. This is what you should now have. So if you've come this far, congratulations! You just learned a lot of fixes in the GIMP and are well on your way to making your own usable graphics for free.

You just got a taste of what it's like to be a graphic artist and now you know how to fix a lot of mistakes in most photos and cards for your own use. Even though it's perfectly acceptable to use the card in your projects just the way it is, you might be a bit of a perfectionist like me and want to fix it even further but this post has gotten so long I will break it into two. The next post will show you how to add the flags back in for a completed finished card so...

Save this file in an editable format so we can pick up where we left off tomorrow with it and re-open it in GIMP again. I'm saving mine on my desktop where I can find it as bunnymarch.xcf. The .xcf extension is the GIMP format for editable files like the .psd is the editable format for PhotoShop. 

Of course the GIMP also gives you the option of saving it in the PhotoShop format too so you could go either way with 'save as' for your original editable file. It will also save with many other format extensions with the export function. The GIMP will even create a multi page .pdf for you using each layer as a page if you want. And it will also open .pdf files too.

You can get the GIMP from this link here: The GIMP . I've been using it for many, many years until now I'm more familiar with it than I am PhotoShop. You can learn it if you really want to. Or you can buy your graphics from other artists on Etsy or get them already printed if you prefer. And don't forget the free resources. There are sites that show you how to do just about everything for free and even give away good graphics you can use.

So tomorrow's post is part 2 and I will show you how to put those flags in the background and restore that postcard so those bunnies can march off to squeeze those eggs out of all those chickens and so that all the Moms can sweep those rotten eggs out from under all those beds the week after Easter! Well maybe not this year. It might be plastic egg time.