Hey,
I’ve been trying to replicate the effect described here.
The sharpening is fairly easy to replicate by using the Wavelet Decompose filter and duplicating the finest wavelets (1-3 or so).
I get stuck when he uses the Stylize > Diffuse filter. I haven’t been able to find an equivalent in Gimp. I’ve tried using Repair > Upscale (diffusion) in G’MIC (which is the closest I could find), but it’s not really working.
Any suggestions?
Thanks a lot!
Stijn
Try Repair / Smooth [Diffusion] and crank the anisotropy to your liking.
Tried it on an old Photo of myself. It’s a pretty cool effect, thanks for sharing!
GREYCstoration used to do something that looked very similar to Photoshop’s Stylize > Diffuse. As I understand it, GREYCstoration was rewritten and renamed to G’MIC. The website even states:
Note: This plug-in is the logical sequel of our previous GREYCstoration software, dedicated to image denoising and regularization. Actually, G’MIC provides all the GREYCstoration features (through the filter entries Enhancement/Anisotropic smoothing and Patch-based smoothing), but also much much more. As the development of GREYCstoration has been discontinued, we highly encourage former users of GREYCstoration to switch to G’MIC indeed.
But there is no “Enhancements” category
@David_Tschumperle could you comment on what the GREYCstoration filter has been renamed to? The text on the website could use an update too.
I might be wrong, but I think that the “dream smoothing” filter from G’MIC should get close to the “paint-look” that is being asked in this thread.
Yes, it is Repair/Smooth [anisotropic] and Repair/Smooth [patch-based]).
The web page has been updated.
Thanks a lot! I’m trying it out, but I keep getting preview time-outs. Bit of a hassle. Will keep trying!
I’m on gimp-gmic 1.6.8 and gimp 2.9 git master, works fine.
Maybe it’s because I’m on Mac. Using Gimp 2.8.14 from Partha.com and GMIC 1.6.5.0. It may just be that the file I was using was huge, though!
Never thought about that one. Just tried it, the efficiency is plain scary.
Got if from Pat David! 
That’s a nifty technique with the wavelet layers. I had to try it, but duplicating the fine wavelets just amplified the noise on this tight and noisy crop, so I duplicated #4 and #5 instead. A more extreme effect, to be sure, but interesting if you want a more obvious painting effect. Ran G’MIC-Testing-Photocomix Smoothing and cranked up the “Sharpness” setting. Before and after:
Yes, which wavelets to duplicate depends on the size of your image and the number of wavelets you’re using.
Seems to have worked well with your photo!
I do wonder why I keep getting preview time-outs on the Repair > Smooth (Diffusion) filter in G’MIC. I’ve already tried reinstalling G’MIC, but it hasn’t improved. It’s kind of annoying having to apply the filter and wait until it’s fully applied to see the effect. 
I have Gimp 2.8.14 from Partha.com and GMIC 1.6.5.0 on my Mac (running OSX El Capitan 10.11.3.
@David_Tschumperle, would you happen to have any suggestions?
Thank you so much!
There has been a long-time “bug” in G’MIC specifically targeting MacOSX which has been fixed quite recently, and which avoided the use of OpenMP’s directives in the G’MIC plug-in for MacOSX.
This has been fixed quite recently, so I think version 1.6.5.0 of G’MIC is not taking advantage of multi-threading.
At the same time, the filters you are talking about are really demanding and intensively use multi-threaded operations to compute the result in parallel.
That could explain why you get a preview timeout. That could be worth trying to install the latest version of the plug-in for MacOSX (1.6.9 stable currently), and see what happens. At the same time, I know that installing the G’MIC plug-in on MacOSX is often a real pain, so please be careful not to break anything currently working !
Came here to say Dream Smoothing looks like it might be a good candidate, and you all already had a great thread going! Neat results!
On topic, I used the Graphic Novel filter as part of an old hedcut tutorial that seems to make neat results as well (especially in an intermediate step):
http://blog.patdavid.net/2014/09/woodcuthedcutish-effect.html
@David_Tschumperle Thanks a lot! I’ll try that… carefully! 
@patdavid Oh, I remember that tutorial! Never actually tried it, though! Will give it ago. Btw, are you going to transfer the whole “Getting around in Gimp” to Pixls.us?
David Tschumperle, just tried. Problem solved! You’re the acest! Thanks!
Just the things that make sense in the context of photography. I’ve gotten a few migrated already but I want to include new, fresh content as well as migrating old posts. 
