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 Post subject: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 9:10 am  (#1) 
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SURREAL PAINTING using GIMP-GMIC

Do you like paintings which look surreal?
I mean "surreal" in a more generic (and less "philosophical") way that the one which has been defined in Surrealist Manifesto.
For me "sur-real" is just whatever has aspects which go beyond the "real" world, not only "unexpected juxtapositions" of objects, such as: sur-real colours, sur-real shapes, etc.

If you like them -or at least like to see something about it- Gimp+G'MIC can provide many tools, you can use directly or combined into a "personal" configuration (or "filter").

Today I want to limit my horizon to one G'MIC filter we find under Colors : ABSTRACTION, plus ancillary filters.
I guess it's being almost ignored when "scanning" all the many G'MIC filters, but it's really (or sur-really!) interesting.

We take a photo

(original)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_original.png
DSCF0987_original.png [ 1.69 MiB | Viewed 4023 times ]


we go to G'MIC/ Colors/ Abstraction
the filter shows the default values of the parameters (1.00, 10, 0.20) and so the default preview.

we change output mode to New active layer (which is always the best thing to do with G'MIC filters) and OK

(first transformation)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_1transf.png
DSCF0987_1transf.png [ 433.9 KiB | Viewed 4023 times ]


a new layer is created with the default transformation, which is already nice per se
but...you may also play with layer mode and see more surreal transformations
we set the mode to Grain Extract, for instance ...

(second transformation)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_2transf.png
DSCF0987_2transf.png [ 1.43 MiB | Viewed 4023 times ]


even nicer, isn'it?


(more...)

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 9:18 am  (#2) 
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(continued)

we may now make use of an additional tool (still G'MIC), for instance:
Pattern/ Plasma
by default the mode remains Grain extract, which is good also for the additional layer created

(third transformation)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_3transf.png
DSCF0987_3transf.png [ 1.8 MiB | Viewed 4018 times ]


we are still in search of more "sur-reality"?
we select the Abstraction layer as active and go to
Pattern/ Crystal

(fourth transformation)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_4transf.png
DSCF0987_4transf.png [ 1.61 MiB | Viewed 4018 times ]


So far, we used almost all default parameter settings.
But we may change on the main filter used (Abstraction) the Levels number and get quite different but almost always interesting outcomes.
If we use levels=75 and Layer Mode=Difference we get this outcome:

(fifth transformation)
Attachment:
DSCF0987_5transf.png
DSCF0987_5transf.png [ 2.67 MiB | Viewed 4018 times ]


this filter has almost infinite possibilities of transforming the image.

It could be interesting for all curious users to understand how it works.
This filter makes use of two basic G'MIC commands I understand:
-quantize
-pow

The first one is similar to the equivalent Gimp filter written by SaulGoode:
simplifies the image by reducing the number of colours.
The second one "stretches" the values of each channel by applying the "power" indicated by the parameter contrast (default=0.2)
Between these 2 commands another command (-area) is applied, but I don't know what it performs; the documentation says: "Compute area of connected components in selected images", which is Arabic for me.
But I've seen practically that it's very important, because removing the -area command, results differ dramatically.
Maybe someone could integrate my comments.

Enjoy -if you like- this G'MIC filter!

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 10:37 am  (#3) 
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Dinasset, thank you for your explanation about how to get so beautiful interesting methods to transform photos. It's really surprising your outcomes.
Thank you for sharing it. :clap
I'm going to practise what you have applied as it's fantastic. :coolthup

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 10:56 am  (#4) 
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Hi dinasset, I liked your last one best but they are all good!


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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 11:30 am  (#5) 
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I did two tries, Dinasset. And I like the outcomes a lot. Thank you for sharing your methods. :bump
Plasma; opened the picture, G'MIC - Colour - Abstraction 1, 16, 0.2, 0 and put layer mode multiply, and opacity 75%. Then G'MIC again Patterns - Plasma:
0.5, 0, 8, opacity 75% and layer mode Divide.
Yag; G'MIC - Colour - Abstraction - 1, 19, 0.2, 0 Layer mode Colour, Then G'MIC Details -Yag effect 90, 90, 0 opacity 75% and layer mode Grain Extract.


Attachments:
260534_.jpg
260534_.jpg [ 154.2 KiB | Viewed 3939 times ]
260534_Abstraction-Plasma.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Plasma.jpg [ 323.61 KiB | Viewed 3939 times ]
260534_Abstraction-Yag.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Yag.jpg [ 334.88 KiB | Viewed 3939 times ]

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 1:16 pm  (#6) 
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I did a few more. I always set GMIC outcome to a new layer.

Deform: G'MIC-Colour-Abstraction 1,19, 0.2,0 Layer mode Multiply and opacity 75%, then G'MIC- Deformation Random amplitude 10 and layer mode Divide.

Squiggly: G'MIC - Colour - Abstraction 1, 40, 0.2, 0 Layer mode Multiply, opacity 75%, then G'MIC - Artistic - Make Squiggly 2, 12, 0.8, 0, 0.5, 1, 0, 0, 3, 0.2, 0.4, 0, 1, 1, 0 Layer mode Divide and opacity 75%. Also it's nice layer mode Dodge.

Lava: G'MIC _ Colour - Abstraction - 1, 41, 0.2, 0 Layer mode Overlay and opacity 75%. Then G'MIC - Patterns - Lava 8, 5, 3, 0, 0 Layer mode Multiply and opacity 75%.

I'm enjoying applying these combination of filters. :) :bump


Attachments:
260534_Abstraction-Lava 100.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Lava 100.jpg [ 504.79 KiB | Viewed 3914 times ]
Walking in Paris-Abstraction-Squiggly.JPG
Walking in Paris-Abstraction-Squiggly.JPG [ 1.5 MiB | Viewed 3914 times ]
260534_Abstraction-Deform 100.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Deform 100.jpg [ 514.45 KiB | Viewed 3914 times ]

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 1:44 pm  (#7) 
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thanks, Issabella! nice outcomes!
this G'MIC filter is really interesting and offers many possibilities, especially when combined afterwards with companion filters.
I hope other Gimp-chatters will enter the game...

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 1:49 pm  (#8) 
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Like the 60/70s motif dinasset. I want some of what you are smoking. ;)

:)

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 2:21 pm  (#9) 
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Hello dinasset,

They have me on the arabic desk today. I just picked up your ticket.

I have an image to help me out. Sorry. It is not as pretty as any of the ,
others here, but it will help me explain the concept of 'connectivity', one of the
argument flags that the G'MIC -area command takes. It is also a
concept necessary for tabulating area and has broad applicability in
the field of computer vision. You'd probably like knowing about it.

Image

The concept of 'area' means pretty much what it says: the command
determines the area of of contiguous, or 'connected' regions. Here,
regions are established by pixels which have common properties. In
this image, I'll use only one property: color. The image has two
colors: black and white. We can intuit that there seems to be one
black region and perhaps three white regions, Maybe a total of four.
The total has been thrown into doubt because one might argue that the
two regions just touching at a corner are, in fact, just one
region. That's a conundrum I'll defer.

Computers have no intuition. Instead an algorithm must unambiguously
establish regions. This is where the concept of 'connectivity' comes
into play.

Two pixels sharing common properties, 'like pixels', are deemed
'connected' if and only if at least one path can run from one to the
other without traversing unlike pixels. Regions consist of mutually
connected pixels. Put informally, the command attempts a flood-fill
and sees how far the flood goes. A flood-fill tests connectivity at
each pixel it attempts to engulf with the nearest pixel already
engulfed.

There is still an ambiguity. What of the (one? two?) regions just
touching at a corner? Resolving that ambiguity is what the
connectivity flag argument to the -area command is for. When it is set
to zero, low connectivity, two regions just touching at corners, are
deemed unconnected; you are not allowed to run a path through that
narrow defile. Set it to one, high connectivity, and you are; the two
erstwhile regions are considered as one.

In many images, what might be considered a region has fuzzy borders.
That is where the tolerance argument comes into play. When it is zero,
two pixels must have exactly the same value in order for them to be
'like' pixels. Set it to a positive value, then you permit pixels,
unequal but with differences less than the tolerance, to be considered
as like pixels.

With an unambiguous means to establish regions, -area can then tabulate
areas. It reports these using gray scales; the intensity value of all
pixels in a particular region are set to the pixel count (in effect, 'area')
of that region.

Here's what the -area command reports about this test image, using low
connectivity (flag=0) on the top and high connectivity (flag=1) on the
bottom. The numbers are not part of the image, but report the values
assigned to pixels in each region.

Image
Image

Now let me see if I can find an image and play in this game.

Take care
Garry


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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 3:01 pm  (#10) 
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thanks so far, Garry!
I wait upon the image example because what I need to understand is:
- what does it change in the image in terms of sequence of pixels
before and after the -area command?
In the particolar case of this filter:
- before the image is a sequence of pixels R,G,B with a limited (to 10 by default) range of values as determined by the -quantize command
- after?
because the practical effect I see after applying the -pow command is that:
- without the -area command the picture still shows a limited (even if modified) number of colours/areas
- with the -area command preceeding the -pow command the picture shows a great number of almost small coloured "speckles"
...and I do not understand how this transformation occurs...
thanks for your support (it will help all the readers, I suppose)

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2015 7:23 pm  (#11) 
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Hello dinasett,

This is the heart of Colors->Abstraction, the sequence of six G'MIC
commands which operate on one image.

One obtains the implementation of Gimp-G'MIC filters by opening the
.updateXXXX.gmic file, obtained by pressing the refresh button on the
plugin, or, alternately, running the gmic -update command from a
shell. It may be reviewed in any text editing tool such as Notepad or
Wordpad.

-blur 1
-split c
-quantize 10,1,0
-area 0
-pow 0.2
-append c

I wrote about -area in detail in the last post. Consider a consequence
of that discussion. As a final step, -area assigns to each and every
pixel the size of the region it inhabits. If a pixel is in a large
region, it will obtain a large number and appear light. If it is in a
tiny region, it will obtain a small number and be dark. Broadly, then,
-area makes tiny areas dark and big areas light. That is the essential
step. The others perform important, but auxiliary chores.

Image

For my contribution to this game, I've obtained an image of a rocky
outcrop near Pwll March, Newgale, Wales. It is from Wikimedia Commons
and the photographer is Andy F.. I find its texture enchanting. We will walk through the abstraction
of this fine old rock.

Image

-blur 1

Since the key effect is area-based, blurring smears together pixels
that might otherwise group into very tiny regions. The "Smoothness"
parameter in the GUI directly sets -blur's argument. This is a key
simplification step before quantizing the image. Without some sort of
blurring, quantize will run riot and establish thousands of very tiny
regions. Larger values of blurring give rise to greater pixel smearing
and fewer regions.

Image

-split c
This G'MIC command splits multichannel images into a series of single
channel grayscales, because that is the format that area requires. As
an aside, -split will segment an image along any cardinal axis; 'c'
chooses a 'channel' split, 'z' a split along depth, 'y' a split along
height and 'x' along width. An RGB image will leave three gray scales
on the image list.

Image

-quantize 10,1,0
Quantize forces pixels into a series of step values; the first
argument establishes the number of steps and corresponds to the
"Levels" parameter in the GUI. Here, it is the default value of ten
steps. The second and third arguments are boolean flags and are fixed
in the script. The second flag, keep_levels, requests that regions,
once quantized, be set close to the average gray of the
region. Otherwise it may drift. The third flag requests that however
many levels their are, these should be equally spaced values. That
will not obtain here as the flag is unset. The settings of these flags
are moot in the overall scheme of things, for the next command, -area,
will assign new gray levels to all pixels.

Image

-area 0
-area computes areas of connected regions; see the opening remark of
this post and the previous post. Here, it suffices to remark that tiny areas
such as rock cracks, will be dark, and vast areas, such as the sky will be
light. In my opinion, the surreal aspect comes from this reassignment of
intensity which is not especially governed by the original light source
in the image.

Image

-pow 0.2
A consequence of the -area command assigning pixel count values that
scale with areas is an immense range of values. Pixels in large areas
will have values on the order of 100,000, others in single
digits. -pow compresses this dynamic range. It's argument maps to the
"Contrast" parameter. The higher that parameter, the greater is the
value given to -pow, compressing the dynamic range to a lesser extent.

Image

-append c
-append undoes -split, repacking the once-separated channels into a single
three channel, RGB image.

Omitted, cleanup. In particular, a renormalization of the image into
the range 0 - 255.

For my interpretation of this fine old rock, I took a different tack.
First, I blurred the rock using the Testing ->GmicTutor->Blur by color
filter, whose care and feeding is in a G'MIC Tutorial Blur By Color.
where I followed the 6th Basic example (image based) to obtain
a kind of a waterfall effect of liquid flowing down the rockface.
That was then Abstracted, using the steps covered. Finally, I
cleared the sky, replacing it with a light, unsaturated grey-green,
and with a pristine copy of the original in a layer immediately
above, merged it with the abstracted layer, using the layer Color
compositing operator. This replaced the faux color scheme
of the Abstraction with the original, because I very much like
the original rocky color scheme.

Image

Thank you for starting this thread; hope the technical details help.

Garry


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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 2:48 am  (#12) 
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Playing more and finding out new filters. It's thrilling, Dinasset ;)
How I got the outcomes:
Fractalize: G'MIC-Colours- Abstraction 1, 10, 0.2, 0 opacity 75% and layer mode Grain Extract, after that G'MIC - Artistic - Fractalize 0.2 layer mode Burn and opacity 75%
Energy: G'MIC - colours - Abstraction 1, 44, 0.2, 0 Layer mode Screen opacity 75%, then G'MIC - Artistic - Polygonize Energy 300, 10, 10, 10, 10, 0, 0, 0, 255, 0 Layer mode Overlay opacity 75%. Difference or Grain merge are very nice too.
Metallic: G'MIC _ Colours - Abstraction 1, 40, 0.2, 0 Layer mode Grain merge opacity 75%, after that G'MIC - Colours - Metallic 1, 0 Layer mode overlay and opacity 75%.


Attachments:
260534_Abstraction-Fractalize.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Fractalize.jpg [ 381.43 KiB | Viewed 1628 times ]
beautiful-eyes-Abstraction-Energy.jpg
beautiful-eyes-Abstraction-Energy.jpg [ 823.75 KiB | Viewed 1628 times ]
260534_Abstraction-Metallic.jpg
260534_Abstraction-Metallic.jpg [ 391.56 KiB | Viewed 1628 times ]

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 2:54 am  (#13) 
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Garry, Thank you so much for your help to understand better colours on pictures. I am only an user enjoying the filters a lot. :tyspin :clap

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 3:25 am  (#14) 
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Garry, thanks a lot for your exhaustive explanation.
The keywords for my understanding are "As a final step, -area assigns to each and every pixel the size of the region it inhabits. If a pixel is in a large
region, it will obtain a large number and appear light. If it is in a
tiny region, it will obtain a small number and be dark."
Now it's perfectly clear to me also (and hopefuly to other gimp-chatters) how the image is transformed.
The additional info you gave us related to your personal "variant" is also very interesting, particularly replacing the standard -blur command with the new -blur_by_color; it could become a command of many other filters in replacement of the standard one, thanks a lot!

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 3:27 am  (#15) 
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thanks, Issabella, for your additional experiments: interesting and nice, indeed!
I hope someone else will take the challenge to experiment with this G'MIC filter!

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 10:14 am  (#16) 
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I continue playing G'MIC and its wonderful filters on my photos. Getting nice results. :bigthup
Thank you Dinasset for your introduction and tips to play with G'MIC. :tyspin :bump


Attachments:
Beautiful-Birds-Abstraction-Delaunay.jpg
Beautiful-Birds-Abstraction-Delaunay.jpg [ 1.02 MiB | Viewed 1425 times ]
260534_Abstraction-GrainExtract.jpg
260534_Abstraction-GrainExtract.jpg [ 375.36 KiB | Viewed 1425 times ]

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 Post subject: Re: SURREAL using GMIC
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 11:31 am  (#17) 
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wonderful birds ... and wonderful outcomes!
the roses are your "pièce de résistance" ....

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