How to Airbrush a Photo in GIMP
If you have a digital photo of a person with blemishes or other imperfections on the skin, it is easy to fix. You can use one of many photo editing software programs to do it; one that is easy to use and free to download is GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program; it is open-source and runs on all major operating systems. The process of retouching photos is often called "airbrushing" and while GIMP does have an airbrush tool, some of the other tools in GIMP are actually more effective for retouching photos.
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Instructions
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Run GIMP and click on "Open" in the "File" menu. Navigate to the location of your digital photo on your computer and click on it, then click on the "Open" button in the lower right corner.
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Zoom in using the options in the "Zoom" section of the "View" menu until you can clearly see a section of the photo that needs retouching. Consider resizing the image window by dragging out from the corner of the window if you have enough room on your computer screen to make it bigger.
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Click on the "Heal" tool in the GIMP toolbar, which is toward the bottom of the group of tools and looks like two band-aids positioned across each other to form an "X."
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Hover the mouse cursor over the image and you will see the outline of the shape and size of the brush tip. Choose a round circle brush tip from the brushes in the bottom section of the toolbar, and drag the slider that's labelled "Scale" to change the size of the brush tip. You want a size that's just slightly larger than the size of the blemish you want to cover.
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Hold down the "Control" key and click in an area right next to a blemish or bump. Then move your cursor directly over the blemish and click. If there are several blemishes right in that area, you can continue clicking. If you need to fix blemishes in an area where the skin is a different color, hold down the "Control" key in an area that represents the color of that area and click. Then click on the blemishes near that area.
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Click on the Blur tool. It looks like a drop of water. Make sure the "Convolve Type" is set to "Blur" near the bottom of the options section below the toolbar (the other option is "sharpen" and you don't want that for this purpose).
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Enlarge the size of the brush tip if necessary. It shouldn't be larger than the area of the photo where you'll be working, but you want it two or three times as large as the size you used with the Heal tool. Click and drag to blur any areas filled with a solid color, especially where there are bumps and other texture irregularities. Watch out for areas of shadow or other change in color and make sure not to drag from one color to another or you'll blur the colors into each other.
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Save the retouched photo as a new file by clicking on "Save as" in the "File" menu and typing in a new file name (you might just add "retouched" to the existing name). Click on the "Save" button to save it.
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References
- Photo Credit Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images
