Oilpaint filter alternative(s)

[Herbert123]

On the German side of the forum a question was asked about whether an equivalent to Photoshop's oil-paint filter exists in Photoline.
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... 271#p39271

Unfortunately not, but with a free copy of the open source digital painting software Krita it becomes relatively easy to create your own oil paintings with full 3d brush lighting effects. https://krita.org/item/3-0-pre-alpha-3-is-out/

Basically, you set up Krita as an external program, and send your layer as a PNG. In Krita open the G'MIC filter module (found under Filter-->G'MIC). G'MIC is an awesome collection of filters, with various very original and useful effects.

The one you want is "Dream smoothing" (find it by using the search box). This is an extremely slow filter, and it takes some experimentation for the best effect. And it is resolution dependent, so bring some patience.

When you are happy with the result, send it back to Photoline, and get ready for the next trick: 3d lighting!

Create a virtual copy, and convert to grey. Then apply a layer effect "Create Texture". Play with the settings (especially with various crazy curves) to create interesting 3d brush effects. Then blend with a layer blend mode of your choice.

Lots of freedom for wildly varying versions.

Check out the basic demo file I prepared:

test1.jpg

Original file here: http://www.wallpaperup.com/247284/park_ ... scape.html

http://www.estructor.altervista.org/oilpainting.pld

[photoken]

As usual, there's always FotoSketcher, too. Plenty of different illustration effects and plenty of customization options for the effects.

[brucet]

Herbert123 I fell for trying your Krita filter. Slow???? How slow can slow be? I gave up after about 30 minutes. Is it that slow or is Krita locked up o me?

regards

[photoken]

Yes, that filter is very slow. There is a progress bar at the bottom right corner of the screen which shows it working through the various iterations, so that's how you can tell that the program is not locked up.

Another of those filters is much more valuable, IMO -- the "Cutout" filter:

Nature 01 cutout comparison.jpg

It provides (as a raster image) the simplified conversion we've asked for in PL's vector conversion options.

[brucet]

Ken I watched that little progress bar for 30 minutes. Just cos it's doing its thing doesn't necessarily mean Krita hasn't stopped and gone off for a cup of coffee.
Besides, I only have so much patience!

regards

[Herbert123]

Herbert123 I fell for trying your Krita filter. Slow???? How slow can slow be? I gave up after about 30 minutes. Is it that slow or is Krita locked up o me?

regards

It takes 3 minutes to process a 1920x1080 image on my aging i7 920@3.6Ghz. Be sure to increase the number of threads in the options. Although I am unsure whether that will speed things up or not.

I made a quick video tutorial. It takes some tinkering around for pleasing effects. All in the eye of the beholder, of course.

https://youtu.be/p4IRXQ1KY0A

[brucet]

heh heh heh. I was working with a 6000x4000 image. Maybe a reason huh?

regards

[photoken]

heh heh heh. I was working with a 6000x4000 image. Maybe a reason huh?

Yep. That'll do it....

On my i7 2.9Ghz with 16Gb RAM, I timed a 5600px x 3400px image at 24 min (using a stopwatch utility).

I set Krita x64 to use 8 threads and 50% of the memory, and used 5 iterations (just for the heluvit) in that Dream Smoothing filter.

I kept the Windows Resource Monitor open, and it was fascinating to watch the CPU usage -- at no time did the Total CPU usage exceed 20%. Four CPUs were in active use: one at around 90%, the second at around 50%, the third at about 20%, and the fourth at less than 10%. At times during the calculations, the highest load would shift from one CPU to another. Utterly fascinating....

At no time did the physical memory usage exceed 5.7Gb.

Disk usage (dual SSDs) would periodically spike, but I have no idea if that was because Krita was using its swap file.

[Frank10823]

I use this filter with Gimp in 2.9. I think it works faster. With Krita I give it up.

regards Frank

[Herbert123]

I use this filter with Gimp in 2.9. I think it works faster. With Krita I give it up.

regards Frank

Gimp will work too.

[bkh]

Seems not so easy to find a working version of "dream smoothing" for OS X – neither Krita's version nor installing G'MIC into the officially released GIMP 2.8 worked for me. Seems to be a relatively new filter, since it's not available in the online G'MIC, either.

I ended up downloading an experimental GIMP (McGimp 2.9.3 64-bit Experimental) fromhttp://www.partha.com which comes with G'MIC installed (don't download G'MIC 1.6.50 for McGimp 2.8.14!).

"Dream smoothing" is in the "Artistic" section.

Seems to me that the G'MIC filters "Painting" and "Paint daub" could be used to produce similar effects. "Painting" is also available in older versions of GIMP and online.

Btw., it seems that the G'MIC license allows commercial use, so it might actually be possible to include G'MIC filters in PL. While there is a lot of literature about the mathematics of these structure-simplifying filters (e.g. http://www-artemis.it-sudparis.eu/~roug ... C-1999.pdf, their implementation is a bit tricky.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[Herbert123]

G'MIC in Photoline? Yes, please. That would be awesome. Where can I sign up?

[Herbert123]

Good news! The latest Krita beta cleaned up Windows GMIC, switched to OpenMP, and it is now multi-threaded. Which means the example in my tutorial only takes ~6 seconds to update after making a change. GMIC runs much more stable as well.

Many bug fixes.

Grab it here:
https://krita.org/item/krita-3-0-beta-builds-out/