FIX PHOTO PROBLEMS WITH G’MIC
1 Correct lighting problems
Photo a bit murky or over-exposed? Navigate to the Lights & Shadows category and look at the Equalize Light and Equalize Shadow plug-ins. The latter has a single control – Amplitude – while the former offers two modes (range or covariance) and can be applied to individual colour channels. Try the Pop Shadows filter if Equalize Shadow doesn’t meet your needs.
2 Sharpen blurred images
G’MIC offers a range of different sharpening tools – most can be found under Details, while the Multiscale, Octave Sharpening and Tones filters can work some magic on more blurry shots. Others worth looking at include Magic Details and Mighty Details, both of which offer effective sharpening without creating too much noise.
3 Remove speckles and noise
Old photos often suffer from physical damage including specks and scratches. You’ll find a wide range of tools for tackling these under Repair. Despeckle works well on spots and other minor blemishes, while Inpaint [Holes] can be used to quickly rectify larger blemishes, using the surrounding area of the image as its reference source.
4 Restore faded colours
Old colour photos lose their vibrancy over time, but G’MIC offers several filters to resolve that. The simplest is Colors>Auto Balance, which does an excellent job with minimal effort. If you want more control over the process, try Basic Adjustments, which offers sliders covering the full range of tweaks, or Zone System, which includes shadows and highlights among its balancing.
5 Correct colour balance
Other photos may suffer from having too much blue, red or green, which overpowers the other colours in the photo. Choose Colors>Color Balance to attempt a quick fix, or Color Temperature should you also wish to make the photo appear colder (more blue) or warm (more red). To manually adjust the colour balance, use one of the Mixer variants, such as Mixer (RGB).
6 Enlarge images
If you have a photo that’s too small for printing or placing in a specific sized frame, simply resizing it using your image editor’s own tools is unlikely to prove workable. G’MIC offers four Upscale filters that attempt to blow up photos without too much loss of detail. The most effective by far is the Upscale [DCCI2x] filter, which doubles your image size while minimising artefacts.