Hey everyone, new here to the forum but have been using Gimp for 17 years (since I was 13)
I hope this is the right place to pose this question.
I had recently stumbled across a Photoshop tutorial (I know, taboo and heretical) but it displays how to create a square image and turn it into a specific style of a circle.
Normally that would be pretty easy, but it's the way the end product looks that I'm having trouble achieving in Gimp even with G'MIC. And it's been driving me crazy.
I'll attach an image to the sort of final result. It began as a square picture of some clouds that turned into an inward circle and I've been wracking my brain as to how I can achieve that effect in The Gimp.
Can anyone help me with this? Suggestions? Tips? Tutorials? Anything? (Again I'm new so I'm unsure if this is, in fact, the right place to be asking questions regarding tips and techniques inside of The Gimp but it seems to be from the other threads I noticed)
Thank you all so much for your time and help! I have some wild ideas I'd love to try if I can get this circular portal looking shape down.
(04-21-2020, 06:45 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: Create a square image (for best results it should be laterally seamless), and Filter>Distorts>Polar coordinates and tick the To Polar option.
Thank you so much! That did indeed work! You are my hero, seriously.
Is there any way to soften it? I tried with a square image but the further out the edges got, the more distorted and unrecognizable they became.
Do you think this problem might be resolved if the image that's being distorted is much larger and then cropping into the more "clean" parts so to speak?
04-21-2020, 08:55 AM (This post was last modified: 04-21-2020, 11:27 AM by rich2005.
Edit Reason: typo
)
@AngelUnit01
It is another PS, "carefully-choose-the-image-to-use" video.
Even then the section mentioned showed a bit of "fudging-in" the joint. I could not make out the tool, might have been some sort of clone. In Gimp the equivalent might be the resynthesizer + heal-selection plugins.
Another way is make the image tilable then there is no joint to 'fix' Try double canvas width, duplicate, flip horizontally and merge.
Gmic is still an option, the filter is Deformations -> Sphere and there are controls to blur the joint and edges.
I did this in Gimp 2.10.18 then realised you are using 2.8 Back to the drawing board, so now the above using Gimp 2.8 https://youtu.be/uZRgM5mNj88 duration 3 minutes.
Just the same in Gimp 2.10 except for the GEGL on canvas rendering.
Edit: While I was using the 'flip' tool that is not necessary with polar-coordinates as there is a 'Map-from-Top' toggle.
Using Gmic? I thought a flip might be required but it looks like that orientation setting has the same function.
(04-21-2020, 06:45 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: Create a square image (for best results it should be laterally seamless), and Filter>Distorts>Polar coordinates and tick the To Polar option.
Thank you so much! That did indeed work! You are my hero, seriously.
Is there any way to soften it? I tried with a square image but the further out the edges got, the more distorted and unrecognizable they became.
Do you think this problem might be resolved if the image that's being distorted is much larger and then cropping into the more "clean" parts so to speak?
If you look how it works, the width of your base image becomes the circumference of a circle of the same diameter so it it stretched by a factor of Pi. If this blurs your image too much, you can start with an image approximately 3x bigger, transform it, then shrink it 3x.
A good way in 2.10 to make a image seamless is to use Symmetry Painting, with a tile of the size of the final image. For my image above, I created a 1000x1000 plasma image and used it to paint a 400x400 tiled image with the Clone tool.
It is another PS, "carefully-choose-the-image-to-use" video.
Even then the section mentioned showed a bit of "fudging-in" the joint. I could not make out the tool, might have been some sort of clone. In Gimp the equivalent might be the resynthesizer + heal-selection plugins.
Another way is make the image tilable then there is no joint to 'fix' Try double canvas width, duplicate, flip horizontally and merge.
Gmic is still an option, the filter is Deformations -> Sphere and there are controls to blur the joint and edges.
I did this in Gimp 2.10.18 then realised you are using 2.8 Back to the drawing board, so now the above using Gimp 2.8 https://youtu.be/uZRgM5mNj88 duration 3 minutes.
Just the same in Gimp 2.10 except for the GEGL on canvas rendering.
Edit: While I was using the 'flip' tool that is not necessary with polar-coordinates as there is a 'Map-from-Top' toggle.
Using Gmic? I thought a flip might be required but it looks like that orientation setting has the same function.
(04-21-2020, 09:02 AM)Ofnuts Wrote:
(04-21-2020, 07:04 AM)AngelUnit01 Wrote:
(04-21-2020, 06:45 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: Create a square image (for best results it should be laterally seamless), and Filter>Distorts>Polar coordinates and tick the To Polar option.
Thank you so much! That did indeed work! You are my hero, seriously.
Is there any way to soften it? I tried with a square image but the further out the edges got, the more distorted and unrecognizable they became.
Do you think this problem might be resolved if the image that's being distorted is much larger and then cropping into the more "clean" parts so to speak?
If you look how it works, the width of your base image becomes the circumference of a circle of the same diameter so it it stretched by a factor of Pi. If this blurs your image too much, you can start with an image approximately 3x bigger, transform it, then shrink it 3x.
(04-21-2020, 09:10 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: A good way in 2.10 to make a image seamless is to use Symmetry Painting, with a tile of the size of the final image. For my image above, I created a 1000x1000 plasma image and used it to paint a 400x400 tiled image with the Clone tool.
Thank you both so much for the help! I will be sure to take all of that advice into consideration. In fact I'm going to likely update to Gimp 2.10 so I have a more up to date version. I just need to make sure there's a G'MIC plugin that functions with the new versions.
I will take all of those suggestions for sure and use them to the best of my abilities. from using giant images and shrinking them down, to trying different techniques with G'MIC and upgrading to Gimp 2.10
Perhaps there's a way if Gimp 2.10 doesn't have a compatible G'MIC plugin I will have to figure out a way to be able to have two versions of Gimp installed on my computer. Hmmm. I'll work that one out later.
Again: Thank you both so much for all of your help. This problem had been driving me bonkers and it's nothing I've done before in other work so this was uncharted territory to me. I really am grateful for all the info and feedback. I'm so happy to see that the Gimp community is so welcoming, kind, caring, and willing to help if they can. That's sadly a rarity when it comes to communities dedicated to other things.
You both are the absolute best. I'm gonna see what I can do and try things out to see if I can get the desired look. So far I made one that I'm very pleased with so that's a great start straight out of the gate.
Oh! Is there any place dedicated to posting/sharing work you've made using Gimp to some capacity? I can't imagine it's this section of the forum since all the threads here are related to assistance and ideas to deal with or do certain things.
Thank you so much, you are all the greatest. Much love!!
(04-21-2020, 08:39 PM)AngelUnit01 Wrote: Oh! Is there any place dedicated to posting/sharing work you've made using Gimp to some capacity? I can't imagine it's this section of the forum since all the threads here are related to assistance and ideas to deal with or do certain things.
Back to the drawing board, so now the above using Gimp 2.8