How to Make a Poser Character's Skin Glow Using GIMP

Many 3D artists use a 2D art program such as GIMP to soften the lighting of a Poser character to provide a glowing look. Now, you can also use this technique on your digital photos as well! How do you change the lighting in your Poser portrait to give your character a softer glowing look? It’s not as hard as you might think. Read more to find out how.

Things You'll Need

• A computer
• GIMP software
• A Poser render with a character that you want to give a healthy glow

Instructions

1. Render the picture. If your figure has blonde or light colored hair, render it onto a black background. If your figure has black or dark colored hair, render him onto a white background. Save the file as a jpeg document.

2. Go to the File drop down menu, and open the Poser picture in GIMP.

3. Go to the tools window and select the "Wand". Then towards the bottom you will notice a set of Modes, select the third red square from the left. This is the subtract option.

4. Hold the Shift key down and use your mouse to select the black background. You should then see a white moving line around the character. Don’t be alarmed this is what you want.

5. Go to the Edit drop down menu and select "Copy", and then "Paste As New". This will paste the background minus your character into a new document.

6. Go to the "Edit" drop down menu and select "Cut". This will take out the background all together. This will leave you with a bright white background which is what you want. Hence, if you are using a white background it will appear that nothing has changed.

7. Go to the "Layer" drop down menu and select "Duplicate Layer".

8. In order to see the Layers window, go to the "Dialogs" drop down menu and select "Layers".

9. Double click on the duplicate layer name and change it to "soften", "glow" or something other than the default name.

10. Go to the "Filters" drop down menu and select "Blur" and then "Gaussian Blur".

11. Change the Blur Radius to 20, and make sure that the Blur Method is IIR.

12. Make sure you have the new layer selected and then change the mode from "Normal" to "Screen". Leave the opacity at 100.

13. Making sure you have the layer you just changed and then duplicate the layer.

14. Select the new layer, click and change it’s name as well.

15. Change the Mode to Overlay, and the Opacity to 60.

16. Now, you have two options, you can go to the "Image" drop down menu and select "Flatten", and then save the image as a jpeg. While you can cut and paste the old black background if you used a black background onto your new image, I personally prefer the white background.

Tips & Warnings

• Always use a contrasting background color so that the wand can easily distinguish the difference between your background and your 3D human figure.

• If you choose to use a black background and your character has black or dark hair, or black or dark clothing, the wand will have a difficult time telling the difference between your background and your 3D human figure.