Hi !

I recreated another cover from an old 2000 Emotif Record.
You can nowadays buy a lot of Drum & Bass records in digital format (when they came out, they were vinyl only), but the original coverart ist most of the time not included.
So you have a few options:
Go to discogs.com and search for the record, if you´re lucky there is a scan or a photo of the cover.
Try the same, but with google.
If both options fail or the discogs pic is of a bad quality: make the coverart yourself with GIMP

And thats what i did.
On top of the pic you can see the photo i googled and worked with.
In the middle you can see two pics of the original coverart, found on discogs, but unfortunately in pretty bad quality and way too small.
Last picture is what i made with GIMP.

So i used the original spacewalk picture, rotated the astronaut after i rendered the pic with a layermask, added the text and after a few hours of hard work i was happy with the result.

I try to add my own touch, because often its impossible to find the right font or in this case, i liked the colours of the original pic and thus decided not to change them into this redish color you have on the original art.

You did a good job there. I like the font you chose except that Ill looks like three ones.

Thanks Erisian. You are right about the ILL word
I searched pages of fonts on dafont.cont to find a similar one and in the end i liked this one best, because it looks futuristic but not so "cheap" as the pixel-style one from the original.



Anybody has an idea how to color the picture into the reddish brown ?
I didnt put much thought into that question because i liked the original color, but after i posted my work here, i tried a few things, and they all didnt work.
I tried color to alpha with black but that doesnt work with the blue of earth obviously.
Somehow i think they used a different technique on the original art.....hmmm......

Nice job on the rendering. That's one thing I barely have the patience to do. As to your question, you can desaturate the image, create a new layer, fill it with the desired color, and use Color for the blend mode. You can play around with the different ways to desaturate, different blend modes, and opacity of the fill layer to get the desired results. The easiest way is just go to Color>Desaturate. If Desaturate doesn't cut it and you don't know about the other ways, you can just come back to ask or look it up. Also, you may know this but you might want to keep the font on top of the color layer so it doesn't get affected by the changes and you keep the crisp white. My third edit. Sorry, I just got up.

As Bug said, but you might want to lighten the image a bit first so that the black can be colorized as well. Colors/colorize is another way, but again, lighten the image first. Change the hue to an orange and reduce saturation.

I just shouldn't comment before coffee. Good point about the black, and yeah, as usual there's different ways to go about coloring the image. Although the source image does look a little washed out, I'm not sure how you would lighten the black without losing too much contrast. You could make two copies of the image layer, desaturate both, on the top layer do Gradient Map using reddish/white as your colors, then try different blend modes. I found Hard Light to work the best, moving the opacity down to the 70s/60s.

Nice replication.

The only thing i rendered was the shoe which overlaps with the atmosphere of earth. Made a path around it, so i could color it black.
The rest of the rendering is a layermask.
The picture is already nearly black and white, so that worked for me.


I tried that, didnt work.

The idea about the reddish colored image is: everything thats not white is red. Maybe there is a filter for this....if so, i dont know about it.

Heres what i did: desaturate the picture (luminosity), then used levels to make the contrast of the blue atmosphere a bit stronger (= i made the whole picture darker) and then changed color to alpha with black.
Which means, i ended up with a transparent picture, except for the white parts.

This layer over a reddish brown colored layer, and bobs your uncle

Nice work. You could have used a layer mask to separate the white from everything else. (right click the layer then "add layer mask") choose greyscale copy of layer and invert. All you have to do then is add a red background layer.

Thanks Erisian, i had something on my mind with a layermask as well, but for some reason i couldnt get it to work, its way too hot in germany right now and im very tired.

Thanks everybody for the comments and helpful advice !

i emailed a friend of mine, who is a media designer about this problem
he said the kind of thing with the reddish-brown color is called duotone or duplex picture
an aeffect which is pretty easy with photoshop

he googled two links for me, how to do the same thing with GIMP - unfortunately both are in german language

http://meinebilderkiste.wordpress.com/2 ... -mit-gimp/

what they do here is use the channelmixer to desaturate the picture with the monochrome option and tweak it a bit more with the rgb-sliders
next is a layer with the desired color and you change the layermode to grain merge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQsfMjbCs6w

this video does basically what Erisian suggested
copies of the layer are colorized in the desired color and then a grayscale layermask is added
depending on what kind of effect you want to achieve, you can use the invert layermask option

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing the information. I take it this helped you achieve the desired result?

i didnt try it yet, because im happy with the result i did on my own yesterday, after Erisian gave me a few hints

I get some things right from time to time.