I happen to think Infrared photography is pretty cool though I realise it’s not to everyone’s tastes. Since I work in digital and don’t own an Infrared filter I wanted to create an Infrared-like effect.

So to start open up your photograph in GIMP. This is the file I’ll be working with.

Distorting the colours is really easy. Open up the Hue/Saturation/Lightness menu, Colours>Hue-Saturation… and play around with the hue until you get some colours you like. I chose to shift the hue to 180 and pushed the saturation right up to accentuate the colours. If you wanted something subtler you could keep the saturation closer to the middle of the slider.

I could leave it there but I don’t really like myself with green hair. Purple suited me much better. And looking at the photograph I like the sepia quality to my clothes and camera so I’m going to match my head and hands with my clothing.

More recent versions of GIMP come with the coolest selection tool - Foreground Select.
Here’s how:

Zoom right into the area you’ll be working on; if you try zooming out half way through you’ll lose your selection and will have to start over. Choose the Foreground Select Tool and start roughly marking out the area you want to select using the lasso cursor. You don’t need to be too careful with this but try to avoid crossing into areas you don’t want to select (the foliage in this case). When you’re finished you’ll have a large coloured area. Now use the brush cursor to select any areas you missed with the lasso. It will automatically select areas of similar colour nearby.

Picture shows after lassoeing but before tidying it up with the brush.

Press Enter to view your selection.

If you’ve missed anything you can repeat the process. Just make sure the Add to Selection button has been selected.

I probably could have selected that a bit better but you get the idea. I had to redo this for the tutorial so I got a bit lazy. I’d also recommend not saving it as a jpg until you’re done or you’ll have hideous pixelation like I had.

Anyway, now to make my head match with my clothes I’m going to apply a sepia tone. For this go to Colours>Colourise and slide the Hue slider around until you get something orange-brown in colour. Play around with it and see if you need to reduce the saturation.

And here’s how it looks when you’ve selected and coloured all the parts.

If you want to have a go with this particular photo you can download it.

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