For those of you who think that I cannot spell 'Head', a
Hedcut is a style of black-and-white drawing popularized over the years by the
Wall Street Journal. Inspired by the
Stipple/hedcut portraits thread in Photo Enhancements, I set out to make my own hedcut filter, based in part on that discussion, also based in part on my desire that the faux inkwork should trace the geometry of the underlying image, and also based on my whimsy that the style should also be akin, yet distinct from the
WSJ. Close to my thinking are the copper plate etchings that served newspapers and periodicals in the decades before the halftone process became common. The everyday examples which survive are the portraits of people printed on currency, such as the presidents on U.S. Dollars.
Here is a representative reworking of
Patrick David:
This glass plate portrait of
Jean Cocteau served as my initial test image:
The filter works with color; here is Mr. David again:
The filter's effect on cartoon or line material can be quite surprising. I find this re-rendering of my avatar very amusing. I seem to be undergoing electrocution:
The filter came together fairly quickly, much sooner than I thought it would. I put it up into the Stream a couple of hours ago and it seems to be downloading from the G'MIC server nicely now. It lives in Testing ->Gmic Tutorials ->Hedcut (experimental). It should be generally available with a filter refresh.
The logic of the filter is packaged entirely in the G'MIC command -hedcut, which can be invoked in a shell with the gmic command.
Documentation of the filter is currently available at Particular Art:
The Gimp Hedcut FilterThough it did come together fairly quickly, this is still an experimental filter. Comments on its behaviour are always welcome. There are still aspects of it that I am thinking about and some elements of the user interface may yet change. Do play with it when you get a chance, and let me know what you think.
Garry