Fish Eyes Lens Part 1

Fish Eyes Lens Effect Part 1

This is a fun Gimp tutorial for making fish eyes lens effect in digital photos.

You will learn several advanced tricks in this Gimp tutorial. First choose a digital photo with some interesting features, then start up Gimp and click on "File->Open" to open it.

Click on the Ellipse Selection Tool on the Gimp Tool Box shown on the right hand picture below. Next position the cursor on an interesting area of the photo and click. The point where you click on will become the center of the circle.

The next few steps are quite tricky. First press down and hold the Shift and Ctrl Keys on the Windows keyboard with your left hand. Notice the cursor changes to a symbol with a plus sign and a small circle as shown above. Without letting go of the left hand, use the right hand to click and drag the mouse cursor downwards as shown below.

When the circle selection becomes large enough, release the Shift and Ctrl keys, then release the mouse button.

Now for the fish eyes lens effect. With the cursor anywhere inside the image window, right mouse click to bring up the cascading menu and navigate to "Filters->Distorts->Whirl and Pinch.." Click on it to call up the "Whirl and Pinch" dialog box.

In the "Whirl and Pinch" dialog box, type in "0.00" for the "Whirl Angle". Click and drag the "Pinch Amount" slider to the extreme left. Click and drag the "Radius" slider to the extreme right.

When you click "OK" on the dialog box, viola, the fisheyes lens appears inside the circle selection as shown on the right.

We could have stopped here, but since this is an advanced Gimp tutorial, let's go the extra mile.

Double click on the Transform tool in the Gimp Tool Box as shown below. When the "Transform Tool" Dialog pops up, click on "Scaling" and then click "Close" to dismiss the Transform Tool dialog window.

Click once inside the circle selection. Notice the Transform Tool cursor changes to a different shape and a square grid line appears. Ignore the Scaling Information dialog box for now. You will need it at the end.

The next few steps are again very tricky. Press and hold down the Alt and Ctrl Keys with your left hand. Without let going of these keys, use the mouse to click on the bottom right hand corner handle of the square grid lines and drag downwards gently. You will notice the square grid line gets larger.

When the square grid lines are large enough, let go of the Alt and Ctrl Keys first, then release the mouse click. You can adjust the squares a little larger by repeating the same procedure, i.e. hold down Alt and Ctrl with the left hand, click and drag mouse on any of the corner handles with the right hand.

The last step is to call up the Scaling Information window and click on the "Scale" button.

The final image above has a yellow ring added. Notice the cool Fish Eyes Lens effect. Everything in the foreground becomes exaggerated.

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