Trying to fix my Pictures with GIMP

Since I can't afford (read: too cheap) to pay for an expensive piece of software like Photoshop, I'll be doing my photo editing with its free brother: GIMP. I've done some basic picture editing in the past, so kind of I know my way around the basic functions... but to do anything like colour correction, I had to go to the interwebs for help. You may recognize these pictures from an earlier post.  Here's my first crack at colour correction and photo manipulation.

Canon SD870 IS - original

And after:

Colour corrected using GIMP

Another:

Canon SD870 IS - original

And after:

Colour corrected with GIMP

Obviously nothing will match real light from a strobe, but I think these came out pretty good. I'm a bit unsure about the purple splotches in both pictures, but looking at the original (tiny fish picture), it's hard to say whether the purple colour can be anything else.  All the other colours seem to be pretty accurate. This technique is definitely a decent fallback for all my washed out pictures.

All the credit goes to tankedup-imaging.com for the tutorial on how to make this happen.

The tutorial is pretty easy to follow but seems to be a bit out of date (reference to GIMP 2.4 being the latest), so a few UI screenshots are a bit different than the latest version I just downloaded (2.8). I'll be writing up an updated tutorial using GIMP 2.8 and post it in a Photo Tips section. The goal is that as I (hopefully) become more proficient in GIMP, I'll have a running list of tips and techniques that I can share and also refer back to.