Vintage photo tutorial with GIMP

Have you heard of GIMP? It's an AMAZING free photo editing software! Yes, I said FREE! No strings attached!
For any of you that already have it here's a simple tutorial to vintage-ize a plain photo.  This will also work with PhotoShop but you will have to do some translating because I don't know PhotoShop lingo.

1. Choose your picture and open it in GIMP.

#2: Under the "Colors" tab, choose "Hue-Saturation". I took the saturation down to -39 to make the photo look faded.

#3: Find a great texture pic, or take a texture picture of your own.  I found this great wood texture pic.

#3: Open a new layer and copy and paste the texture pic (or if it's your own picture, open as a new layer.)

#4: Stretch or shrink your image to cover the entire original picture.

 #5: Choose the "Mode" of your layer to play with the texture effects.

You can find the Mode at the top of your right hand dock window. It's a pull down menu.

Try some of these effects:

If the effect is too dramtic, tone it down by lowering the opacity.

Choose your favorite effect and make something amazing! 

I also added a vignette using Picnik.com (another FABULOUS free service).

So easy, and there is no need to buy expensive programs.

To get GIMP, Click here, or go to http://www.gimp.org/