I've been going back through old photos I've taken of buildings to see how to draw the outlines and shading of buildings for a painting I'm working on. But I got sidetracked having too much fun in Gimp! There are so many things you can do with your photos using Gimp. It's like Photoshop, but free.
Here's a photo taken from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I opened it in Gimp, cropped it and messed around with the hue/saturation/color etc, flipped the image, converted the image to black/white, then used Threshhold to get rid of everything except the black pixels. Then I created a transparency, added a new layer and made a light blue checkerboard and merged the two layers again.
I like all the little windows and lines on the buildings that were retained during the manipulation. That's one of my favorite parts, to be able to see all the little details. I basically created a little piece of digital art from a photo - isn't that cool?
