The G’MIC filters are is now available in a preview of the next 2.5 version. This adds the filter Artistic | ‘Stylisation’, as well as some colour-grading filters.
‘Stylisation’ attempts to style-transfer the style of one picture onto the content of another. The main demo picture that’s been shown of this filter makes it look a bit of a gimmicky tech-demo. However, on looking at the full range of samples, and especially the hatching transfer, it seems to be more powerful than it’s made out to be. It seemed worth a look.
It will come to Krita eventually, but I felt that the safest way to try the new filter was via installing it to a download of GIMP, which also hosts it. The 2.5 preview installer for GIMP is in Index of files/prerelease_windows/ as the gmic_gimp2.10_qt_win64.exe file. Using the .exe means that there’s no messing around with unzipping and copy/pasting and hoping for the best.
1. The first thing I discovered was that G’MIC for GIMP had my Krita-made presets in it. It seems all G’MICs use the same Appdata folder. Nice. No, not so nice. A new install can destroy your carefully crafted custom Favourite presets, if the filter they call has been removed!!
2. The second thing I noticed was that G’MIC for GIMP has presets under ‘Testing’ and there’s a whole set there by PhotoComix. His ‘Pheonix Steam-Pencil’ at first seemed to be the one that had a lot going for it. But while this was quick to run (20 seconds), regrettably it failed to reproduce the look of the preview (seen below) onto the actual image. The problem here seems to be that it’s merging with the original and it seems there’s no way around that merge.
Testing also has Samj | ‘Contour Drawings’. This a curious filter that appears to extract contour lines from their background? Useful for map makers, perhaps.
Also under Testing | Telperion | ‘Mc Pendraw’ was very promising in its Preview, seeming to combine a comic-book filter with stipple. But it also failed to deliver in what it sent to the original.
3. And finally, I got to test the new Artistic | ‘Stylisation’. I got it to run and played with the settings, but just couldn’t get anything satisfactory out of it. Possibly there’s a knack with it, and we’ll eventually get a YouTube video of how to do a clean crisp transfer.
