My cameras, lenses and ancillary equipment are all still in storage in Scotland, pending our move to the new home, sometime in March or April perhaps. Meanwhile, I continue my updates and explorations of editing software, particularly The Gimp, www.gimp.org/, along with the very powerful add-on known as the G'MIC filter suite, gmic.eu/. Taken together, the Gimp and G'MIC provide an enormous image editing resource and all of it free. In this feature, I am going to explore one filter found in G'MIC called Dream Smoothing. If you have the G'MIC add-on installed on the Gimp, Dream Smoothing is found in the Artistic sub category. It is said by the Gimp and G'MIC community to be a popular filter and has been included in the suite since about 2014. As with so many of G'MIC filters detailed information of how to use it is sparse, but in the following examples I have used the filter mainly with its default settings. The one parameter that I have varied is called "iterations" and I have used 3 (the default) or 6, the latter giving more smoothing.

Smoothing filters have been around since the year dot in photo-editing software, originally intended to help remove noise and artefacts, but then establishing themselves as a means of adding artistic flavours to an image. Inevitably, smoothing filters cause a loss of sharpness, but artistically the idea is that neighbouring colours become blended to pleasing effect. Filters that purport to give oil or water painting effects rely on smoothing algorithms. Often, however, such filters give unconvincing images, although dedicated art work software can give very impressive results. Having now worked with Dream Smooth for several days on many images, I would say that it is the best filter within photo-editing software I have come across for adding a painterly look to an image and a filter that adds a surreal quality to the output. I'm not going to try to explain how the filter works, such being beyond my maths level, except to say that it uses an anisotropic approach - so there!

Here are some examples, the first three being presented alongside the original photograph.

                   


                   

                    

With the Drumlanrig Castle shot you may have to look twice to see the effect as Dream Smooth has its most pronounced effect on image features that are of intermediate size, so that skies and clouds where there is little local change in contrast are hardly affected and neither are the gross or global structures such as the building itself. Sharp edges also remain more or less intact. But, those intermediate objects where there is some contrast or sharp colour change are smoothed. Zoom in to look at the stone work to see what has happened. In the Royal Natal image, the same scale effect is seen, the global features remain essentially intact while the more detailed feature have been smoothed. There is also a tonal change overall, the smoothed image looks much lighter. Of course, there is nothing to stop the user adjusting such with the Curves tool.  In addition, to my eye, there is a considerable painterly feel and those trees on the right have a surreal look to them. The Kew Garden photograph is similarly transformed. Overall, much (most?) of the photographic appearance of the image is retained, but the  smoothing that affects the intermediate scaled objects gives a subtle artistic feel.

The following images are presented without the originals.

                      


                      




Whether you "like" such images that have been filtered in this way is a matter of taste, but to my mind the Dream Smooth filter does give a pleasing painterly and surreal effect compared to some more basic smoothing filters in commonly used editing software. The Gimp and the G'MIC suite are a bit daunting at first for anyone not used to exploring filter effects, but the rewards can be great. As always I am happy to help anyone who needs advice on how to access and use these tools.

Cheers

David aka Okavanga

Some of my friends here on DeviantArt know that I have a "thing" about palettes and I thought that in the absence of any new photographs from me I should write a piece about these important and often overlooked aspects of images in art and photography.


The idea of a palette of colours has been around for many hundreds of years, the word palette coming from the board upon which artists would arrange and mix differently coloured pigments while making their paintings. Nowadays, we use the term to mean any set of colours that, for some reason or other, are grouped together. (The use has been extended to other senses as well as visual - a palette of tastes and so on.) Artists were known for their particular palettes, for example Rubens www.nationalgallery.org.uk/art… normally used a rich palette where the pigments were highly saturated, whereas El Greco en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Greco often used a limited palette of greys and blues, and Goya www.nationalgallery.org.uk/art… famously used a palette rich in dark and black tones. Nevertheless, all such artists were depicting more or less recognisable images from real, religious or mythic life and their palettes did not normally stray too far from natural palettes that the eye of the viewer could recognise. However, such considerations no longer applied when the great revolutions in artistic expression occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Abstract, impressionist, expressionist, colourist art and others swept the old ideas to one side and palettes became "liberated" from their naturalistic roots. Just take a look at works by Kandinsky ==> www.wassilykandinsky.net/ or Van Gogh ==> www.vangoghgallery.com/ to see how colour palettes changed. Cezanne ==> www.wikiart.org/en/paul-cezann… and Matisse ==> www.henri-matisse.net/ are perhaps the two artists who studied colour palettes in greatest depth and whose influence on colour theory cannot be underestimated.

If we look at some of my recent favourites we can develop some ideas about palettes. First, here is a photograph made by my friend Maria, Maria-Schreuders, of an outdoor late autumnal scene that has trees, bushes, bare earth, wooden seat and blue sky. Most of us who live in the temperate climate zones of the world would recognise the scene, if not the exact place, in large part by its particular variety of colours - its palette - colours - browns, greens, greys, ochres, and that blue of the sky. That set of colours constitutes the palette, in this case a natural palette, of the image. If there were a purple sky, yellow earth, blue trees with pink leaves, then we would think the image odd because the palette would not match the scene. The second image, from Norbert NB-Photo, follows the idea of a natural palette, but this time in th bush of Southern Africa. Although dominated by the two iconic subjects, the overall palette - set of colours - is typical of the bush in that part of the world - the palette is setting the scene, helping us accept the reality and to concentrate on the main subjects.

   

An almost complete contrast in palettes is seen in the third image below, made by my friend Goodwin, WagmoreBarkless. It illustrates a completely unnatural palette of blues, greens, yellows, reds and blacks that, nevertheless, "hits the spot" as far as the image of a modern musical offering is concerned. The vibrancy as well as the hues of the palette adds to its effect. Thus, what palette is used in an image can dramatically effect our perception of and feeling towards the image. A similar effect is seen in the fourth image, from my good friend M, 33M This image is a painting and M has used a vibrant and colourful palette that reflects and exaggerates natural colours: leaves are green and yellow but saturation is pushed up, the huge tree trunk is russet red and varous hues of blue and green, the child stands out because of the bright colours of the clothes, but such colours are part of the overall palette. Now, I don't know exactly how M created this, but almost certainly she would have had either a real watercolour palette before her - a dozen or 20 colours from which she could select and blend, or an electronic equivalent to be found in painting or editing software.

  

So, in photography we can accept and perhaps augment natural palettes, in real or digital painting we can pick the colours from real or electronic palettes and work with them as painters have traditionally done. The idea and importance of palettes is expanded in computer generated art, particularly those images based on fractals. We needn't go into the details of how these mathematical structures are generated, except to note one point: fractals have no intrinsic colours. In order to make the spectacularly coloured images, two examples of which are shown below, the software that creates the basic structures also needs to allow the artist to add a palette of colour. Software such as Ultra Fractal, www.ultrafractal.com/showcase.…, includes sophisticated palette creation and editing tools (also several default palettes) such that the final image reflects not only the user's skill in designing the structure, but also the user's prowess in creating a suitable palette. In the first of the two examples, this one created by Coco, kayandjay100 , she has chosen a restricted palette based around the colour we call burgundy, varying the shades and tints, but keeping the basic hue more or less the same. In contrast, Thelma's  image has a rainbow palette of blues through greens and on to reds. Thelma thelma often uses such a palette and her work is in large part characterised by this.


                                     





Several years ago, I came across this image created by a very talented colour mathematician by name of Bruce Lindbloom. His web address is  www.brucelindbloom.com/ and if you go there you can download this image as a zip file, which upon decompression affords a TIFF image. It appears to be an open access image free to all.

The image show exactly 16,777,216 colours, each represented by a single pixel in this 4096x4096 pixel array. That 16 million plus number of colours is the total number that you can possibly have in what is known as the RGB system of colour representation where R is red, G is green and B is blue, each of those parameters being allowed values from 0 to 255. 

This image really ought to be a poster child for digital colour and it looks quite spectacular if you zoom in to any portion, especially if you have a professional grade monitor capable of very good colour reproduction.



As this is a digital image in a well known image format you can, of course, load it into any reasonable image editing software and play about with it. 


What has  Bruce Lindbloom's image got to do with palettes? Well, you as a photographer, designer, digital groupie or whatever can use the 16 million plus image along with a photo editor to create any number of palettes and apply them to any image you like. The palettes created this way are unlike photographic palettes where the palette is intrinsic to the image and unlike palettes such as in a watercolour painting where you as the artist must pick and choose from a smallish group of colours and undertake blending of such as you go. You could select single colours from the Lindbloom image, but that would be tedious. Instead, you can pick a single or multiple ranges of colours according to criteria allowed by your editing software. Having done so, you can then map that palette onto the original image. Best if we work with an example:  Here is the original image of a leaf. That image has its own palette, based mainly on greens. Now, contrast that with the subsequent image. This has a palette based on a selection of red, yellow, green and blue hues from the Lindbloom image, a selection made using The Gimp software selection tools and picking appropriate tranches of colour from the Lindbloom image. Those colours become the palette and that palette is then mapped back onto the original image. I am not going into the details of this, but I'm very happy to discuss such with anyone who wishes to know and try this out.



                  

Let me show you some more:

In this image I have tried to get a wide range of red, green, and blue hues. I quite like the filigree effect in the background colours.



The following three palettes share one thing in common: they are all equiluminant palettes, that is the luminosity (brightness or lightness) of each pixel is the same. If you desaturate an image with an equiluminant palette you get a blank grey canvas! I'm thinking of calling such palettes Okavanga palettes as I seem to be the one who has discovered and use them!

    

The overall point here is that with modern software and editing tools we can use one image, in this case the Lindbloom image, to select a unique palette and map it onto any image we like. The possibilities are endless!

This Journal has run on a bit longer than my usual efforts, but the concept of image palettes and an understanding of what they mean in terms of defining and enhancing an image, I believe to be an overlooked and underappreciated area of studying photographs and other art work.  On the other hand, an artist's palette has long been appreciated in traditional art and is recognised as an important part of an artist's style. That aspect of palettes in art can now been seen to apply to digital work. Finally, using a "master" palette such as the Lindbloom image, we can select with the aid of editing software larger sets of colours, i.e. palettes, and map them back onto images, thus extending the use of palettes in new directions.



David aka Okavanga


Links

www.brucelindbloom.com/

www.gimp.org/

www.nationalgallery.org.uk/art…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Greco

www.nationalgallery.org.uk/art…

www.wassilykandinsky.net/

www.vangoghgallery.com/

www.wikiart.org/en/paul-cezann…

www.henri-matisse.net/index.ht…

www.ultrafractal.com/showcase.…