These are foundational principles held deeply in my personal brand of photo-editing that I felt compelled to share with others who wish to learn how to edit a photo using gimp. I hope you guys enjoy.

http://www.squidoo.com/principles-of-photo-editing

Cool tips! I just recently realized the importance of layers and masking. They saved me from pulling out all my hair more than once, LOL!

And I've just got to get me one of those Wacom Tablets. I'm a colored pencil artist originally and control like this is something I definitely need.

Lol!! Talk about a pun! I'm glad you liked the list.

awesome tips! thanks.

any advise about brightening, high pass sharping, and high pass contrast? those are my biggest problems i never know how much is too much or to little

The trick about filters, especially sharpen is that it is difficult to give too much eas of use. I usually duplicate the layer, make my filters on the duplicated layer. After I make the changes, I duplicate the original layer again, and make a different set of edits. I repeat this process until I figure out which combination looks best foer the image I'm editing.

Since you are keeping each set of edits, you can hide each layer and quickly compare to see which result came up the best.

Make sense?

For many filters, I find it useful to duplicate the layer and apply the filter on the duplicate in such a way that the effect is noticeably more than I really want. I then adjust the opacity of the filtered layer to get amount desired.

This approach doesn't work for some filters. For example, for the oil painting plug-in you really need to control the filter itself; but it does work for most of the blurring and sharpening filters, as well as the color adjustment filters/tools.

The "Edit->Fade" menu command offers similar tweaking ability, but it only works immediately after running the filter and I prefer a bit more freedom (particularly being able to toggle layers off and on to compare the effects).

@ Stanford
about crossposting see my reply here
http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/ ... 7795634478

I saw you offered yourself as a meal for the Lions, that is a cool gimp group, usually quite friendly but at 90% there are all photographers, meaning that not only they use a camera but they also think and feel as photographer you smashed into the most commune photographer's aestetical dogma

@Stanford & Saulgoode

i totally agree on saulgoode tip
i am even more radical in the case described by Saulgoode i would have also created a new layer from the visible of the combined effect...and if was needed furter edit duplicate the layer again and edited that...a new layer for each change

This has a price much bigger file size BUT i do for a reason:
Undo history vanish at soon the image is closed, that is my way to preserve a surrogate of the History, and help me to keep trace of what i did and how...i will much prefer to be able to save all history ...mine is a poor surrogate but helps

PS Help a LOT with GMIC, because if you set GMIC output to "New Layer" in the layer Name you will found the name of the gmicfilter used and...miracle ...the setting used !

Thanks for the comments PC, they're much appreciated.

I can back up those 5 tips. Especially: Never delete or alter your source image(which should be your background alpha channel-less layer) and learn to use layermasks the best you can.

Thanks for the backup, haha.