Using Gimp to whiten snow

[yottie]

I'm a newcomer to Gimp.
I have an old ski picture on which the snow background has lost its
brilliance.
Would welcome a beginners way to whiten this up.
The pic just consists of a close-up of a skier in action, there are no other
objects in the pic, just the skier.

 

[RandomGrinch]

You could have a quick play with colour levels to start with - here's a simple tutorial:

Gimp tutorial: Adjust color Levels (Histogram)

One of the most useful Gimp's tool is Color Levels: in this tutorial we will learn histogram modification and reading, to change the exposure of your photos.

www.mora-foto.it

 

[yottie]

That looks just the job, many thanks.

 

[ericmark]

What you need is tone mapping, I use Photomatrix I got a copy free with a magazine. Seem to remember Raw Therapee did a good job, think designed to work with Gimp.

The problem I found was as people progress they seem to move to using Photoshop, so finding anyone who uses the free software with some expertises is rare.

The collages and schools don't help, most seem to use Photoshop, Hugin does a great job combining photos, and Picturenaut for HDR combinations, Faststone to reduce picture size etc. And to display Picturetoexe is far better than power point. But the camera clubs seem to only have experts who use the expensive packages.

 

[Justin Passing]

A free one which works OK is at https://pixlr.com/
The e version tries to look like photoshop so you'll find things the same places.
Photoshop (+ Lightroom) is complex but it does DO more than most for pixel images and isn't so difficult after the first thousand or two hours.

 

[FullPint]

Try boosting the exposure by a stop or so. Snow fields confuse camera metering systems, they tend to get underexposed.