Learning photo manipulations. Apparently none of the cool kids use the photo right out of the camera any more.
Base photo:
Quickmask tutorial:
Clearing the background:
Select by color only worked so far. All of the other colors – water, railing, buildings – have corresponding bits of color on the main figure. Who knew.
Adjusting the color:
(This is for the Blithe Traveler, who says she likes pictures that make her blink.)
Threshold:
Dunno what it means but it looks neat.
Text:
Result:
I can make simple changes, but get lost when the tutorial assumes a step. Random button pushing yields interesting but non-significant results. Not really seeing the point. Guess I’ll remain uncool a while longer.
Virtual Brush Box 
Did you notice the pole coming out of Spot’s belly? Gotta watch out for backgrounds. I can’t do all the fancy stuff either, i just make sure i get what i want in the camera as much as possible. Kids today are born knowing how to do this stuff.
GIMP has a rather vertical learning curve, could be worse, you could be using imagemagick on the command line.