Simplifying Photo to Create Painted Effect

[AxeMasterG]

Hi there folks,

I was wondering whether there's a way to take a photograph and simplify the colours in order to give it a "painted on" look. It's difficult to describe, but I have a photo of a cat that I would like to incorporate onto a flag in a way so that it looks similar to the California state flag (with the bear). Can anybody help? Cheers.

[rich2005]

The problem is: The bear is hand drawn. Not easy to replicate that from a photograph. There are ways to reduce colours but the average photo contains thousands of colours. In Gimp there is a posterize filter to reduce the number of colours, but add in shadows from a photo  and it becomes a mess. 

What you can try is the gimp_gmic_qt plugin. http://www.gmic.eu for a Windows installer. Get the pre-3.0 version.

Then the cartoon filter. That gets a reduced number of colours and keeps it recognisable. example:

   

[AxeMasterG]

(10-05-2021, 02:03 PM)rich2005 Wrote: The problem is: The bear is hand drawn. Not easy to replicate that from a photograph. There are ways to reduce colours but the average photo contains thousands of colours. In Gimp there is a posterize filter to reduce the number of colours, but add in shadows from a photo  and it becomes a mess. 

What you can try is the gimp_gmic_qt plugin. http://www.gmic.eu for a Windows installer. Get the pre-3.0 version.

Then the cartoon filter. That gets a reduced number of colours and keeps it recognisable. example:

Okay, that sounds like it should work, I'll check out that plugin you recommended. Thanks!