How to Create Wrinkles in People With GIMP

Learning to create wrinkles in people with the free image-manipulation program GIMP lets you make people appear older than they are. You could use this effect to create a custom birthday card whose front shows an aged version of the person celebrating his birthday. You can use GIMP's filters to create the wrinkles. Filters are programs within GIMP that run geometrical calculations on your original image. The result of these calculations is new imagery that simulates natural effects like wrinkles. Note that this project changes the content of your original photo. If you want to safeguard your photo, make a backup copy before beginning the project.

Instructions

1. Click the "File" menu's "Open" command. Navigate to and double-click a photo on your hard drive showing people to whom you want to add wrinkles. For example, load a portrait showing someone's face. Notice that the "Layers" window shows a single highlighted row with a thumbnail image of the photo you loaded. This row represents the virtual transparency, called a "layer," that holds your photo.

2. Right-click the highlighted row in the "Layers" window. Click "Duplicate" to make a new layer with the same content as your original picture. You'll apply the wrinkle effect to this duplicate rather than to the original.

3. Click the "Filter" menu, then click the "Distorts" sub-menu. Click the "Emboss" item to execute a filter that makes it seem like your image is projecting outward from the screen, by varying the light-to-dark value of some pixels in the image.

4. Click the "Bump map" option of the "Emboss" window, then experiment with different settings for the "Azimuth," "Elevation" and "Depth" controls by dragging the sliders for these controls. When the preview window shows a sufficiently wrinkled appearance, click "OK" to close the window.

5. Drag the "Opacity" slider of the "Layers" window until it displays about 47 percent. This action makes the bumpy image you just made translucent, which lets your original, unwrinkled image appear. Mixing the wrinkled and unwrinkled images together produces a more natural-looking effect than that produced by the wrinkled image by itself.

6. Right-click the highlighted item in the "Layers" window, then click "Merge down" to combine the wrinkled and non-wrinkled images. Click the "File" menu's "Save" command to save your image.

References

• "The Gimp User Manual"; Gimp documentation team; 2009