So, a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away), I ran into a tutorial by German artist Calvin Hollywood for using an inverted/surface blurred layer set to vivid light mode over the base image to greatly enhance details (local contrast).

The problem was, that at the time I couldn't get it to work in GIMP (due to a lack of Vivid Light blending mode, and no Surface Blur equivalent from photoshop).

Well, after talking with David the other day, he added a Vivid Light blend mode to G'MIC for me (there was already a Bilateral blur, which is pretty much exactly how PS does it's "Surface Blur").

So I was finally able to replicate the results from the tutorial, and have written a blog post tutorial detailing how to do it in GIMP:

Getting Around in GIMP - Calvin Hollywood Freaky Details in GIMP

Then David went and actually added the effect as a filter into G'MIC directly... So the tutorial is instantly redundant! Still, if you're interested in seeing a neat effect, check it out!

thanks for the tutorial !

Hey Pat; this is the error that I'm getting when I visit your site. I do have the latest flash player so not sure why it keeps popping up making your site unuseable to me since it also locks your site out.

Hi Lyle,

I think the problem is that your IE is blocking a cross domain iframe (which was how I had to load that swf file from scott kelby's site.

If you hit "Yes" on that dialog, does the site still die? (I'll check this in a moment from IE myself - may be safer just to link to the video rather than lock people out!)

It just keeps on refreshing popping back up Pat. Oh well.

Well, crap.

I don't want to lock out IE users if I can avoid it. Let me investigate a bit more.

patdavid
Congratulations on the Blog! Since I met and added to my favorites, I'm always checking the news there!

Hi lyle,

This is weird
Both with Chrome as with IE, I can access without problems.

Edited: I can acess, but a pop up appears

The problem is actually related to the security settings on Lyle's IE instance. There is a cross domain request happening in the IFRAME where I am loading the video from Scott Kelby's site inside an IFRAME (if I didn't, it would hose up all the formatting on the page for some reason).

I may just change that first video to a link instead. I'm working on it!

Ok, Lyle. I've updated the page and removed the video that was causing problems.

Can you try again and tell me if you can access it ok? (It appears to work ok now on my end in IE8)

That works OK after you removed the iframe, I was getting an IE freeze before as well. It was fine in Firefox.

Oh good. I'm pretty sure it's a security feature to not allow access to cross domain sources on iframes in IE (though annoying).

Site works now Pat; the video there plays too.

Good, thanks for bringing that up to me guys (would have sucked to have people not be able to access it and not even realize it).

It's a nice tutorial, but I couldn't resist seeing if I could get the same effect in Photivo. It looks suspiciously like the Texture Contrast adjustment:

I wouldn't be surprised if the results seem similar, as they are both geared towards detail/local contrast enhancement. In some cases, some of the tone mapping operators would probably produce results that might also be visually similar...

I'm looking for the way that PS Surface blur works and I found that works with two parameters: radius and threshold.
GEGL bilateral filter works, also, with two parameters: blur radius and edge preservation.

I've done the the following comparison with the same values ​​for these parameters: