How to add special effects to photographs

The phrase “special effects” in photography can mean different things to different people. For some it means using an app on a phone to distort your selfie or, perhaps, to add a dog’s nose and tongue to your face. Others use PC software or smartphone apps to generate a range of pre-determined effects with a press of a button.

However, there’s plenty of scope for applying effects using photo-editing software such as GIMP. This is our theme here but with one key caveat. Our emphasis is on effects that’ll exercise your grey matter rather more than, for example, just adjusting the Hue in an image’s HLS colour definition to introduce some bizarre colours. We don’t say that from a patronising or disapproving viewpoint but, quite simply, because if anything is so simple to achieve then it’s likely to be an overused effect. Indeed, the word “Photoshopped” has almost taken on a derogatory meaning in some quarters.

So, having spelled out some of the effects we’re not going to cover, we ought to say just what we are covering, but that’s not easy to sum up because we’re using the scattergun approach. All our techniques can be effective, and by introducing such a diverse range of effects, we trust that your creative juices will start flowing. This tutorial won’t show you “how to do special effects photography”. However, we do provide you with sufficient guidance to reproduce our selected methods to provide a practical