Usually you see examples of Chinglish as bad translations of Chinese into English. But you can also have the opposite. Here is a word for word translation of English phrases into Chinese. This is probably how I sound like to Chinese speakers, especially as I have not practised for months now...

Woman taking a selfie in the traditional Zhu's Family Garden in the centre of JianShui. The modern buildings of the city can be seen in the background.

I'm still not done playing with gimp and my flower picture. I went back to the pictures I created in the last post and decided to make a popart inspired series using the hue/chroma tool. The hue part of the tool basically takes the colours in a picture and moves them an equal distance along the colour wheel. I played around with it until I found 3 colours I liked additional to the original.

In black:


And white:

When I was in JianShui, I took a picture of a red flower in the rain in front of a traditional building:


Even though I liked the composition, the picture felt a bit pedestrian. I tried converting it to black and white, using the channel mixer to get the red flower almost white, which I liked much more immediately:


Then I got the bright idea to open both pictures as layers and go wild with layer modes. The lighten / darken modes (lighten only, screen / darken only, burn) didn't really do anything interesting, but HSL colour (colour picture upper layer) ended up with a much nicer colour picture than the original (I like how you can see the rain drops clearly). This makes sense, HSL colour takes the colour and saturation from the top layer and applies it to the lightness of the bottom layer. I had previously used the channel mixer to lighten up the red from the flower. That is a really interesting option, I will keep in mind for future pictures.


Now for really experimental: Difference mode calculates the RGB values from the top layers minus the ones from the bottom layer. In case there is a negative number in converts it to positive. For example most of the red flower has values around (180 red, 5 green, 0 blue) and (180 red, 180 green, 180 blue) in the black and white image. The outcome image then had a teal flower with (0 red, 175 green and 180 blue). Any similar colour on both pictures (such as the white sky) would turn to black (0,0,0). It's a cool effect:


Now divide has even more complicated calculations it takes the RGB values from the upper layer * 256 and divides it with the RGB value of the lower layer + 1. The result is that similar colours go white and thanks to the channel mixing I did with the black and white picture only the red flowers and green leaves were left. I really like this one:

"Fu" means prosperity.