I was recently reminded that I should have a “more professional” photograph for work. For those who don’t know, my employer requests that all employee upload a “head shot” to the corporate directory. This photo appears not only in the corporate internet directory but also on in thee “electronic” business card and is often downloaded when new teams are assembled. For a few years, my photo has been a characticture done by a professionally artist.

I decided to get all dressed up (starched shirt and tie) and take my own phot. The only backdrop I had was a blank wall painted in off white.

I loaded the resulting photo into GIMP and did the following …

• make a duplicate layer of my head shot
• add a transparency layer to the duplicate
• hide the original layer
• zoom way in and using a soft edged circle brush and the erase mode, remove everything but my head shot (aka the ‘bust’)
• duplicate this new layer (for safety)
• tune the saturation, brightness, contrast, and sharpness (with the unsharpen mask) until I was happy with the results
• create a blank white layer and move it to the bottom of the stack
• color the background mast to my satisfaction
• duplicate this background layer
• add a weave pattern (or other stylization)
• turn on the background, the weave, and the tuned crop of my head shot
• SAVE
• flatten the image
• scale to a bit bigger than I needed
• crop to the final size

This gave me a head shot that looked professional and one that I could update with different backgrounds as I felt were warranted. I can change the back drop, change the sharpness, scale to different sizes, and change hte color or patter of the background. If  I really needed, I could change the background completely.

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Posted in Arts, Graphics, Photography | Print

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