Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies Media Design my name is Michael Davies,
and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you a quick and dirty way to color match
two photos using GIMP. This is GIMP version 2.10.20 which
is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial.
Before we get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always I
have tons of video tutorials on here, my GIMP Book of Layers, and free software help articles
so definitely check that out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to
Pro Photo Editing on Udemy, you can enroll in any my Skillshare classes by visiting GIMPSchool.com,
and you can get more with a Premium Membership to Davies Media Design.
I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video.
So I'll be using two photos for this tutorial, both of course are going to be completely free.
So there's this photo of a hiker on Pixabay, and this photo here of like a little downtown city
block with some neon lights. So the reason I chose both of these photos is that the color is pretty
much completely different. So this will show you how well this technique works as well as how
easy it is. Here's the final image. So we have the image in the front which is going to be the hiker,
and you can see this is color matched pretty nicely here to the photo in the back. But let's
dive in here. I'll start by coming over to the original hiker photo. I do need to get rid of this
background. I'll start by right-clicking on here, and just make sure this has an alpha channel.
If it does, the "Add alpha channel" will be grayed out. If not, just click that button.
Of course we need to erase the background here, and as I usually mention in my tutorials there
are plenty of ways to erase an image background in GIMP. I have a tutorial on how to do that which I
will link to this video. But the way I did it in this case was I came over, grabbed my Paths tool,
and just quickly outlined using the Paths tool around my subject.
I have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to master the Path tool so definitely check that out.
I'm not going to do that for this tutorial because I've already done this ahead of time.
So if I'm in my Paths tab here, on the right side I can show the path around my subject,
and once I have the path drawn I can just come over here and click the "Path to selection" icon,
that will draw a selection around my photo here, around my subject, and I'll come over
to the "Layers" panel, right click on the original photo, and go to "Add layer mask."
Under "Initialize layer mask to:" I'll choose "Selection" and click "Add,"
and that will mask out our background. I'll hit ctrl+shift+a to deselect that. The reason I'm
not going to cover erasing the background is that's not what this tutorial is about. This
tutorial is about color matching multiple photos with different colors. So in order to do that,
the next step is to bring in that photo of the neon background there. So I'll do that by going to
File, and if you know where this photo is on your computer you can go to "Open as layers." In my
case I'll go to "Open recent," and I'll come over here and choose the photo I want to work with. So
here's the original photo. I'm just going to come over to our photo with the background removed,
click and drag that tab over here to our tab with the building, drag it on top of the composition
and release. So here's our guy standing in front of the building. I need to scale this,
so I'll hit+shift+s on my keyboard. Make sure the transform mode is set to "Layer," and i'm just
going to click and drag the transform handle to scale this up, and I'm going to move this in place
so it looks like he's kind of off to the side here looking at the entrance to this building.
That looks pretty good, so I'll hit "Scale." So the issue now is that the colors look totally
different, so this looks really fake, and the other thing is that both of these are totally
in focus which is not common for a camera lens. Usually one item is going to be out of focus.
So let's start by color matching this. So this method for quickly color matching two photos is
going to start with the eyedropper tool, so we can access this tool using the "o" key on the keyboard
or by grabbing it over here inside of this bottom tool group in the toolbox. And you'll notice when
I hover my eyedropper tool over the photo it's not just that tiny eyedropper that you're used
to. It's actually a gigantic eyedropper. So if I come over here to my tool options, you'll
actually see there is something called "Sample average" that's checked. So when I uncheck that
this is what you guys are used to seeing with the eyedropper tool. So I can grab individual
pixel colors here, but it's not super helpful in this case. When I click "Sample average," that's
going to sample the entire area inside this rectangle here - inside the square - and it's
going to take the average color from inside there. So if I come over here to my "buildings" layer,
you guys will definitely notice that the overall color of this is going to be a purplish color.
There's some blues in here as well, but it's pretty much dominantly purple. So if I click
with this eyedropper tool you'll see it's going to grab an average of that rectangle
area - that square area - and over here inside my foreground color you'll see it's now going to be a
sort of dark purplish color. So this just allows a very quick way to get an average. If I turn this
all the way up, you'll see we get an even larger area, and this can provide us with an even better
look at the color that you're going for, the average color. And if you are just trying to
color match one particular area that your subject is in - let's say you're compositing a photo and
the subject is on the left side, like in this case, and the left side has a totally different
color in the image. You can just click around that same area where your subject is standing
and it will grab the average colors of that area, and you can then apply it to your subject once
you have the color you want. So we'll go with this darkish purple. I'll hit shift+b to grab my bucket
fill tool, then I'll come over here, click above the background layer. So, on our subject layer,
come over here, click to create a new layer, and I'm just going to name this "Color,"
fill it with transparency for now, and click ok. So with my bucket fill tool I'm just going to
click inside. You can also just drag and drop the foreground color like so, that'll add this purple
color here. The obvious issue is it's totally covering up our subject. Let's come over here
to the dropped buffer layer and alt+click on my dropped buffer layer. That will create a selection
area around my subject. Before I mask this I do want to grow the selection area very slightly to
avoid having a white outline around my subject. So if I were to mask this right now it would be
too close to the original subject area, so if I hide this you'd be able to basically see a faint
line going around the entire subject. I don't want that, so I'm going to go to Select>Grow,
we'll grow this just by a couple of pixels - so maybe one or two pixels - click ok.
Then we'll right click on the color layer and go to "Add layer mask,"
under "Initialize layer mask to:" I'll choose "Selection" and click "Add."
Then I'll hit ctrl+shift+a to deselect that, and now you'll see we have the color layer
going just over our subject and none of the other portions of the image. This doesn't look great,
so what I'll do is come over here and change the layer mode - right now it's set to "normal." I'm
going to change this to one of the color based layer modes. So you guys can cycle
through these - you have HSV Hue, HSL Color is another good one, LCH Hue, LCH Chroma, LCH Color,
and I believe that's going to be it - yes. So one of those color based modes there. So I'm going to
go to LCH Color, and it's going to look way too purple right now, but you'll see that this is
already helping this to blend a bit better. What I can do is come over here to this layer and adjust
the opacity. I still want some of the original colors from the original photo, I don't want this
to be totally purple. So as you can see this is already doing a great job of color matching this,
and from here we can add more minute corrections or more nuanced corrections to this - that way you
can further blend this with the original photo. So come over here to the photo layer and first
I'll go to Colors>Levels, and i'm just going to very quickly adjust the levels. I'm not going
to spend too much time on the remaining portion. So I'll add some contrast and darken this a bit.
So here's the before, here's an after, and I'll click OK. Next I'm just going to adjust
the shading of our layer here. So come over and grab my Dodge and Burn tool from this layer group.
You guys might see the Smudge tool first. You can also just hit shift+d. So the Burn tool is going
to darken any of the areas we paint, and we can change this to darken the highlights of our layer,
the shadows, or the mid-tones. So, for example, if I scroll down here on my tool options
you'll see right now this is set to "highlights," and the exposure is turned up. If you want less
of an effect you can turn the exposure down, but now let's shift over to mid-tones. So we've
darkened the highlights, now we're darkening the mid-tones here. And then come over to shadows.
And if we wanted to really darken the shadows we could turn the exposure way up
and just paint on the shadows, and as you can see now the photo is looking darker. So
it's starting to match the lighting of the photo, the lighting of the backdrop here,
and if I hold the ctrl key it'll automatically switch to my Dodge tool.
So the dodge tool is just going to brighten any areas we paint on. I'll hit ctrl+z. Let me change
this to the highlights hold the ctrl key. So that will brighten up the highlights there, and if I
release that it'll bring us back to the burn tool there. So that we can darken this a bit more...
And the last thing I'll do to this photo is just blur the background here. So let's come over to
the background layer, we can go to Filters>Blur and if you're using GIMP 2.10.20 or newer
you can come over here to "Lens Blur," and this is going to mimic a realistic blur with the camera.
So we can increase or decrease the radius of this. So let's just blur this a little bit
and click OK. And actually one last thing I'll do is just blur the edges of our subject. So I'll
come over here to the dropped buffer layer, let's come over to the Dodge and Burn tool, and change
this to "Blur/Sharpen." Make sure this is set to Blur. You can turn the rate up or down depending
on how much blur you want. I'll keep that where it's at and just paint along the edges of the
photo, and this is just going to help blend this a bit better - so there we go. Let me click on
the background layer, and there's our final photo. Alright so that's how you very quickly color match
multiple photos using GIMP. Hopefully you like this tutorial, if you did you could check out my
YouTube channel at YouTube.com/DaviesMediaDesign. Don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon
to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to
my resources in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.