My first Photoshop

(Bottom - Before, Top - After) I recently found a new program called GIMP  (GNU Image Manipulation Program), it works almost as well as Photoshop but from what I hear it's much easier to use. Most viewers of this post will have already seen this picture on Facebook, but I'll go into more detail on it here.
First thing that needed to happen, I needed to shape us all down without expanding us or making us wider. It's actually a bit harder than it sounds, but after two or three attempts, I finally got a satisfactory result!
Second thing, I needed to cut us out individually, around every nook and cranny. I finished Dave and me and got started on Peter when I realized that the cuts I made on Dave and me had disappeared!! So I had to click, 'Select multiple cuts' and redo us again, which took about an hour in all.
Third, which was most time consuming although my favorite, was the shading around our bodies to encourage the illusion that we were standing in the dark. I had a bit of trouble with Peter's shirt on the far right because when I shaded it in, it actually turned blue instead of getting darker! I tried a few other methods but I couldn't make it work. I also tried to lower the contrast on his shirt, but I couldn't do that without lowering the contrast on Dave and me, which was about perfect! So I left his shirt dazzling white in what was supposed to be nighttime.
Finally, there had to be work done on the sunglasses, I also enjoyed this quite a bit too! I enhanced the darkness on all our glasses and drew little white streaks imitating lightning. It was a bit tricky, because in real life you wouldn't see the exact same bolt unless you were looking directly at them, and we're all at an angle. Thus, I had to do a full bolt in the close lens and do a half bolt in the far lens to make it look as if we were actually staring into a lightning bolt.

I hope to create further creations, hopefully better detailed than this. You can tell it looks a bit like it was copy-pasted at first glance. But again, I hope to become more experienced in this program and create masterpieces to be enjoyed by all!

Any comments or Questions on Blogger or Facebook will be greatly welcomed!