Some help with a picture of bricks (Gimp)

I'm in charge of making a CD cover for our band, and found a cool picture of bricks to use.
Unfortunately, said cool picture costs $50 or something stupid to use, so I took my own picture and would like to use it, but need to know how to do the cool effects on it

Can anyone help me turn the second picture into the first picture? (shadow, brighter middle)

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try to use Photoscape...it's free...you can recreate that in a few clicks.. add like Vignetting, darken, contrast... ....im no expert on this but i think you'd find photoscape useful on this...

i don't know how to turn it to something like the first brickwall. it will be quite easy with photoshop if your brickwall have more details. anyway, i've got you better (for me) photos of a brickwall you can use.

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs23/f/2007/ ... Larson.jpg
http://www.layoutsparks.com/1/148650/li ... 31000.html
http://breatheimagination.deviantart.co ... wall&qo=26
http://iselin92.deviantart.com/art/Bric ... wall&qo=50

PICT0986.jpg

whatever, i have fun for 5:30 in the AM (and yea, I used GIMP, contrast, then lighting effects, then a gradient)

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Thanks heaps for those pics Jenz, and Jao - thats awesome! You legend!