Retouching with Gimp

Here is an example of how GIMP software can be used for retouching a photograph. That stone wall could make a good texture for 3D graphics, but it is obscured by dry vines. let's get them out of the way.

Unmodified photograph.

I combined painting techniques with clone brush to gradually paint away the vines. The process is slower than simply cloning but I think cloning tool is sometimes too obvious.

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

And here is the final result. I haven't removed all of the vines but it's good enough for the picture to be used as a texture.

Now it's time to create a cool little trick by using unmodified photograph and crossing it over to the retouched image over an animated black and white matte.

Animated matte was created with Blender. Final compositing was achieved in Blender's Video Sequence Editor. Here is the video. It also explains to process and

shows how animated matte looks.