Perfect Moment Monday: Picture Magic

Lori over at Weebles Wobblog says that "Perfect Moment Monday is more about noticing a perfect moment than about creating one. Perfect moments can be momentous or ordinary or somewhere in between."

This weekend I learned how to do something I'd been wanting to learn for a while. I know you've seen those gorgeous pictures that are black and white with a splash or two of color. Well, I wanted to know how to do that with my pictures so I went looking. Most of the links I found pointed me towards Adobe Photoshop (way to damned expensive) or Picasa (free but I don't like the way it wants to create its own folders for everything). Then I found a page talking about creating images like this with a program called GIMP. I know, its a really strange name for a program but GIMP actually stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This program is 100% free. It doesn't try to create its own photo storage files when I already have mine in place. And, it will do almost everything Adobe Photoshop does. Yeah, you read that right. All that power and NO out of pocket cost. In short, it is perfect for my purposes. For just a little time an a little effort, I was able to use a picture I took to create this...
The following two links are all you need to be able to create a gorgeous image like this yourself.

Download GIMP 2.6.6 – Installer for Windows 2000 and above
GimpGuru - tutorials for all the GIMP wonders. B&W with selective colorization is under advanced tutorials but is easy to follow.

Getting to do what I want and getting to do it for free definitely qualifies for a perfect moment in my book.

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PS...the only thing the selective colorization tutorial doesn't cover is the saving step and this is what worked for me....

click on layer

• click on merge down

click on file

• click on save as
• select folder to save it in
• click on save

little export file window comes up

• click on export

save as jpeg window comes up

• click on save