Hardy and Animicule, You guys are really on a roll! Well, do you think we covered Bees well enough!

absolutely excellent, Pat! Neat and well coloured

Thank you Dinasset.

Hello,
I promise - no more bees !

Regards Hardy111

Hardy, you select beautiful photos and your technique is so good! What texture are you using?

Hi,
i use Transparent Pattern / 256 C

Regards Hardy111

I think I see one everywhere now, including in the flower box of the upstairs front window in your House Scenes.

For this one, I ran it 3 times, 256 colors, 128 colors and 64 colors. Then saved the 256 color run as xcf and re-opened it so that nothing would be lost if edits were performed. The texure layers from the 128 and 64 color runs were copied and pasted as new layers into the 256 color run, for more to play with. A single texture pattern of neutral color was used. The texure layer were moved into positions below the 256 texture layer,
and as remembered, were both set to grain merge while watching the screen to see the slight changes.

Here with 552rgb set and a little layer play. 256 colors.

Wow! That is about all I can say.

Hardy, you create beautiful outcomes; why not to try also animicule's colors?
Animicule, last one is superb.

a little contribution
source image from Deviant Art
animicule's colours texturized (a "surface" pattern)
checked: colored pencils and metallic look silver

(dedicated to Pat...)

Very impressive house cat and 'surface' texture Dinasset!!!

Presenting the Guard Goose

Thank you, Dinasset. You know I love cats! That is a very pretty one.

Animicule: Your "Guard Goose" is also very nice and clear.

thanks animicule, but I can't compete with you, you're on another planet !
Pat, I was lucky with the result, it came out nice, so I decided to dedicate it to you, for your (digital) cats collection

Thanks again, Dinasset for the image of Lucy, the rescue cat. She has a story. I don't know if you have heard about Oscar, the hospice nursing home cat. He also has a story.Oscar News

I like your Oscar, Pat, very well done

Thank you, Dinasset.

Hello,
here are a few tests with macro photos of insects .
Transparent Pattern / 256

Regards Hardy111

Very nice OSCAR (and what a story) Pat!
Dinasset, last time I checked it was the same planet, different time zone.
Most of my scarce spare time recently spent on learning python 2.7.

Recently with your filter, I have been masking the formost part of the subject
with quickmask, then invert selection and use Gaussian blur 30 to 50 to
really blur the background so that the foreground stands out.
Squiggly pencil as gmic selection on this one.

hardy111, very nice macro photos of insects!

This one, I used 'Insane Bump' on the subject and it crashed, but left a black and white image
in the subject directory on which was used texture by area by color area with a neutral
pattern. Then took the subject jpg and pasted it into the Black & White image outcome layer
stack (at the top, using OVERLAY) and received nice subdued color result.