Last December I took a series of photos at a beach near my home town. I wanted to frame some to hang in my hallway but to space the frames nicely I needed 6 photos… I only had 5 good shots. Time for some GIMP trickery!

After picking my favourites I was left with a few other shots that weren’t up to scratch. I liked the foreground in this first photo but the detail in the sky did not print well and it just wouldn’t have looked right with the others. On the second photo the sky was nicely exposed but this left the foreground dark. If only I could have the foreground from the first photo and the sky from the second.

With a nice defined horizon this should be really easy - except for the sea spray. It would ruin the picture to try to remove it so I’ll have to work around it.

I was standing on slippery rocks on a very windy day when I took these which explains the wonky horizons. To remedy this go to Tools>Transform Tools>Rotate (or Shift+R) and rotate until the horizons are level. For this example I had to rotate around -1°. You may find showing grids and guidelines, View>Show Grid, helps you get it level when performing this kind of task.

Rotating creates blank areas on your canvas where you’ve straightened up. The blank area plus some of the photograph will have to be cropped to square the image.

Use the Crop Tool to draw a rectangle inside your photograph avoiding any blank areas. Press Enter to complete the crop when you’re happy with the selection.

Now the images are straight we’ll begin combining them. On one of your cropped photos go to Image>Image Properties to get the size of your image. Make a new file in GIMP with those dimensions.

Using the Rectangle Select select the foreground in your first picture from the horizon down. Press Ctrl+C to copy it. In your new document create a new layer. Go to Layer>New Layer… and then Ctrl+V to paste in the bottom portion of your new image. Repeat by selecting the sky from your second image and paste it as a new layer below.
Each layer should look something like this:

You’ll notice there’s a little something missing from the foreground above the horizon.
So why not use one of the other selection tools and cut out the sea spray as well? At first I tried this and I realised pretty quickly why it looked so wrong - the sky showing through the spray belongs to a much lighter sky giving it an ugly superimposed look. Here’s how wrong it looks:

To do that I used Select by Colour to pick out the sky and remove it, leaving the spray colour behind. It’s obviously really fake. The water has been lit by a much brighter sky and it’s given it a very obvious line on the horizon.

Instead I’m going to use the Clone Tool to copy some of the spray above the horizon.

Select the Clone Tool and choose a suitable brush. I’m using a speckled brush to imitate the pattern of the spray.
First move your mouse over the area you want to clone from. I’ve placed it on the white area of the wave. Hold Control and click on the area. Now move your cursor again to the area where you want to colour and paint as normal. You’ll notice two cursors which are in tandem. The first shows the area you’re cloning from, so be sure not to go outside of that area or you’ll end up painting rocks in the sky.
If you need to readjust where you’re cloning from just Ctrl+click on a new area and begin painting again.

You can remove some of your cloning with the Eraser Tool to thin the spray so that more of the sky shows through.
To finish use the Crop Tool again to remove any areas of blank canvas.

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