Re: [Gimp-user] LED white christmas lights effect

[Akkana Peck <akkana shallowsky com>]

dboland9 via gimp-user-list writes:
> I plan to take some pictures of some Christmas poinsettias with pine branches around the pot and think the 
> picture would be better if there were white (warm) LED lights in the picture. The problem is that the 
> string needs to be fairly short, and stores have sold out all Christmas lights. So, my next option is to 
> create them in GIMP. Anyone done this and can you offer a genera procedure?

I'm sure there are people better at this than I am, but I had a
similar problem when I was making
https://shallowsky.com/images/cards/squirrelcard.jpg
and it was quite a few years ago, but as I recall, the steps were:

- Get a photo of a single light. Erase the background so the image
  has just the light.
- Add a fuzzy circle in a color that matches the light
  (new layer, ellipse select, feather edges, fill, then fiddle
  with the layer transparency)
- Add a white speck in the middle where the light filament should
  be if the light in the photo wasn't on
- Flatten this light image and make several copies of it at the
  right size to paste into your image
- Use the Hue slider in Colors->Hue-Saturation to change the
  copies to other colors.
- Paste copies of lights of different colors around the base image,
  and rotate each one semi-randomly.

Then you need the wire connecting them. I don't know how to draw a
realistic looking multi-stranded electrical wire, but you can make a
strangely realistic looking string by playing with settings in the
Smudge tool: try starting with a smudge rate of 100% and a
hard-edged brush. It doesn't look like a real electrical cord, but
at least it looks like a three-dimensional string instead of a line
someone drew in a graphics app.

Good luck, have fun!

        ...Akkana