How To Make Clone Pictures with Gimp

Clone pictures are very creative and fun pictures you can make with your kids, friends and even yourself. Clone pictures are essentially pictures where there aretwo or more image of any one character in a scene. There is an entire Flickr group dedicated to the art of making clone pictures. The process to make a clone is very simple and this tutorial will show you how easy it is! In this tutorial, we are going to make the following image:

The Big Push

Here are the requirements for this tutorial:

The GIMP

The GIMP is a free and open source image editing program that is great for performing image editing tasks like the ones required in this tutorial. Why did I choose the GIMP for this tutorial? Well first and foremost it is free software. I believe that an amateur photographer should not have to pay a thousand dollars to do basic image editing or have fun with their digital camera. If you already own an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop, you will still be able to follow this tutorial, but some of the screenshots may look a little different.

There are a couple of different versions of the GIMP. The version I will be using in this tutorial is called GIMPShop. It is cross-platform meaning it will run on Windows, OSX and Linux. GIMPShop is also nice as it mimics PhotoShop fairly closely, so if you decide to upgrade to Photoshop in the future, most of the menu locations an dialog boxes will feel the same.

So your first step in this tutorial is to download and install GimpShop. Navigate to the GIMPShop page, scroll halfway down where you will find download links to the current version for your operating system.

Some quick notes if you are running Mac OSX. You will need to install X11 first. X11 is super easy to install and comes with your OSX install disk. Here are some great instructions for installing X11. Also, when running GIMPShop, you will use your <ctrl> key instead of the <command> key for all keyboard shortcut operations.

Taking the Pictures

Taking the pictures are really the key to making clone images. You could simply take random pictures of your kid running around a park or you could purposefully create a scene that tells a story like the some of the images below:

Star Wars

Portrait

For other creative ideas, be sure to check out the Flickr Clone Pool.

When you take your pictures it is very important that you use a tripod. We need the background of our image to remain in the exact same position for every image. As you're taking the pictures, be sure that you don't unneccesarily move or shake the tripod. Another tip is to use a manual white balance setting on your camera. By default, your camera is probably set to automatically white balance which in most cases is fine. But you will notice that with auto white balance, there may be small color shifts from image to image - and although this won't cause huge problems when we try to composite our images together, you will get better results with a manual white balance. To set your camera to a manual white balance, check your digital camera's manual (oh and don't forget to set it back to auto once you're done).

Once you have taken your images, import them into your computer and we'll get started working in GIMPShop!

Making the Clones

Here are the three images I am going to be working with (download them if you would like to follow along)...

 

Quiet
Picture A - Quiet

Pushing
Picture B - Pushing

Crouching
Picture C - Crouching

Once we have our three pictures open, we need to choose which picture will become our base picture. In most cases we can choose any of the pictures, but if you look closely at my pictures, the last two images have part of a person sticking out of the left hand side (actually it is Owen's mom). So for our base picture, I am going to use the first one titled Picture A - Quiet. I will refer to this picture as our base picture for the rest of the tutorial. So in GIMPShop, go to your File menu and choose Open then select and open the picture you want to be your base picture.

Now let open the other images that you will be compositing onto the base image. In my case, I would open Picture B - Pushing and Picture C - Crouching.

We'll start by compositing Picture B onto our base picture. We will start by selecting the whole image of Picture B, then pasting it into a new layer on our base image. Here are the steps...

  1. Click anywhere on Picture B then click on the Select menu and choose All (or you can press ctrl-a on your keyboard).
  2. Copy the selection to your clipboard by clicking on the Edit menu and choosing Copy (or you can press ctrl-c)
  3. Now let's move to the base image by clicking anywhere on the base image's window.
  4. Next we want to create a new layer, so click on the Layer menu and choose New Layer...
  5. When asked for a name, type in anything that describes the content we are going to be pasting in. I am going to call my layer Crouching, then click OK.
  6. Next we will paste our copied image into this new layer by pressing ctrl-v on your keyboard. You should now see that your base image has been replaced by the pasted image.
  7. Finally, we need to anchor that pasted image into the layer, so click on the Layer menu and choose Anchor Layer. This step is imporant as it allow us to edit the pasted image.
  8. To avoid any confusion, let's close our Picture B image window as we don't need it anymore.

Next we need to remove everything except the crouching boy from the pasted image. Here are the instructions.

  1. While in our base image, click on the Lasso tool from the toolbox.

    Lasso

  2. After you select the Lasso tool, you need to change one setting. In the toolbox, after selecting the Lasso tool, you will notice some tool setting near the bottom of the toolbox. You want to put a check mark next to Feather Edges, and select a Radius of 10. The feather option makes sure our selection has a nice soft edge around it which will make it blend in better with our base image.
  3. Now draw around the crouching boy with the lasso tool. You don't have to be too perfect here so just roughly draw around the boy. Once you get around to where you started drawing with the lasso tool, let you mouse button go, and the whole boy will be selected.
  4. Next we need to select everything except the boy - remember we want to leave the boy in place. Click on the Select menu and choose Inverse. Now our selection will be inverted.
  5. Finally we will delete our inverted selection. Click on the Edit menu and choose Clear (or press ctrl-k)

Now you should have two boys in the same image! Here is a quick screencast that summarizes the steps:

Well that's all there is to it! If you have other images to composite, just repeat the above steps until all your clones have been placed on the base image. Once you are done, be sure to save your base image (the one with all the clones) by clicking on the File menu, and choosing Save As... then saving the file as a JPG.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, and if you have I would appreciate a Digg!

If you like tutorials like this one and are interested in digital media topics, be sure to visit my blog at http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/.