Want to add a vintage effect to your photos? digiKam has all the tools you need to turn your digital snapshots into vintage masterpieces. Open the photo you want for editing, adjust exposure, white balance, and tweak other settings as you would usually do. The first step in the “aging” process is to add film grain to the photo. To do this, choose Effects → Add Film Grain. There are a lot of parameters you can configure, but you don’t have to enable and tweak them all. You can start with adjusting the Grain Size parameter as well as trying different values for parameters in the Luminance Noise section. You can preview the result at any time using the Try button. Next step is to tweak the color balance to make the photo look aged. One way to do this is to tweak the color balance settings, so the photo looks washed out with a slightly yellow cast imitating aged photo paper. Choose Color → Color Balance and adjust the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow parameters to achieve the desired result.
The exact values for each parameter depend on the given photo and your personal taste, but you can start with the following values:
Cyan: 37
Magenta: 25
Yellow: -25
To make the vintage effect even more realistic, add vignetting to the photo. Choose Enhance → Lens → Vignetting Correction, tick the Add Vignetting check box and adjust the available parameters to your liking. Finally, sharpen the photo using Enhance → Sharpen to make the film grain more pronounced, and you are done.
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I’d really like it if you could work out how to achieve some of the popular Hipstamatic/Instagram effects in Digikam and share it with us…
Now all we need is a sidebar with presets incl examples. Really, that would make it usable for the average too. It’s cool digiKam can do so much but for such things it’s just a geek tool.
I agree with Bart for the presets but Id like to see programs like GIMP, digiKam, KDEnlive and others have a two tiered interface.
Let me take the VLC preferences viewing mode, you have Simple setting and the Show All setting.
The simple setting covers about 90% of what you will ever need and doesnt look as scary with less options to overwhelm.
Effects presets are a must but for the beginner it would be good if DigiKam has an easy mode and an advanced UI option. Have the 10 most used options (resize, redeye, resize, etc) available in easy to understand terms and then when they feel confortable (or they dont have to ever), they can unwrap all the possibilities. Geeks can simply not use the easy interface.
I honestly dont use digiKam for anything else than DL my pictures and arranging them.
I should maybe give it a full look if it can do effects.
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