Messing with a Friend's Selfies

A friend of mine has a tendency of sending me a copious amount of selfies. They're all super cute but one day I got an idea, I had always wanted to learn some GIMP basics and I took their pictures as an opportunity to mess around, and they all came out fantastic. 

For the first I used an offset method while maintaining the original picture as a base, with two layers above the base offset the same amount of pixels to both side (one 6 to the right, the other 6 to the left), and colorized the respective layers with two colors with good contrast (here I used pink and purple). Set the two colorized layers to soft light and then copy the base layer, bring it to the top and set it to overlay. With a few steps left to go I made a new layer and filled it with the horizontal line pattern, set it to overlay and lower the opacity to around 60%. Finally I went to the colors tab and fucked with the contrast levels and the color curves until I liked what I saw, I never know what I want when going into the curves menu but I always feel like I leave with a better picture after messing about for some 10 minutes.

The second I'm assuming is going to be more polarizing, and if I'm being totally honest I have no recollection of how I made it, I just messed about with filters and curves until I got this psychedelic mess which I fell in love with. Oh the thing I do remember is adding RGB noise and turning the red way higher than I should have but salvaging the picture with the curves menu again.

This third I really like, I fucked with the contrast until I had nothing but the harshest lit areas against total darkness, then used a similar technique as the first but instead of having a base and then an overlay on top I just had a center, left, and right. I again colorized each layer with the colors you see on the picture, and messed about with the neon border filter until I had something I was happy with, I finished with another horizontal line overlay and lowered the opacity to about 80% this time.

 

The take away from the whole experience is that if you want to learn how to use something, try just jumping in, you might surprise yourself with what you can do. And just to be clear I checked on my friend before posting, no funky shit going on here.