Tutorials2D GraphicsGIMPGIMP Tutorial: Sun breaking through clouds effect

GIMP Tutorial: Sun breaking through clouds effect

Written by Marc Roberge | 27 January 2010

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Gimp Sun Breaking Through Clouds 1

How to create the effect of the sun’s rays breaking through clouds using the Supernova filter in GIMP.

Launch GIMP and open this image : cloudy.jpg.
From the menu, select Filters>Light and Shadow>Supernova.
In the “Supernova” filter window, you will need to make the following adjustments. In the preview pane in the upper left corner, click with your mouse to set the location for the center of your sunburst. As you can see, I picked a spot just slightly above the clouds on the right.

Once you’ve decided where the sun rays will emanate from, we need to decide on the 4 following variables: Color, Radius, Spokes and Hue. By default, the color is set to blue. In this particular case, I want to set the color to white. You do this by clicking on the color button and selecting white from the color selection window.

As for “Radius”, I am using a radius of 30. This will vary from picture to picture. Essentially, this value increases or reduces the size of the center of your burst. Spokes allows you to define how many rays or spokes of light you want emanating from the center of your burst. Too many ruins the effect. I am using 65. Finally, Random hue simply varies the burst shape and which rays are brighter or dimmer. Just adjust this slider until you see the effect you are looking for in the preview pane. When you are satisfied, click “OK”.
This is what we end up with:

We could call it quits here, but let’s tweak a little further and see if we can’t make this image really pop.
From the menu, select “Colors>Brightness-Contrast”:

We’ll set Brightness down to –30 and Contrast up to +30:
We now move to our layers panel on the right.

The 4th button from the left is the “Duplicate Layer” button. This makes a copy of our selected layer. Click this button once.

And we now have a copy of our background image.
From the menu, select “Filters>Edge-Detect>Edge.

When the Edge Detection filter window appears, simply click “OK”.
We get…
From the menu, select “Filters>Blur>Motion Blur”.
. From the “Motion Blur” window, select “Zoom” as Blur type. Type in 630 for the Blur Center X value and 160 for the Blur Center Y value. In the Blur Parameters, set the length to 90 and click “OK”.

p.s. – a note on how to determine the coordinates for your Blur Center. Simply decide where you want your zoom blur to be centered. In our case, we want it centered on our burst. To determine the x and y coordinates for the center of your burst, simply move your mouse pointer to the center of your burst on your image. A quick glance at the bottom left of your GIMP window will show you your X and Y coordinates:
. Again from the layers panel on the right, click on the mode drop down list and select “Overlay”.
. There you have it…