I am looking for ideas and suggestions on how to use Gimp to modify photos for marquetry. I have turned photos into marquetry by hand. I draw outlines around different colars, transfer those outlines to veneer, cut them out on a scroll saw and assemble into a "painting in wood". An example is included below.
I am now trying to transition from hand cut to laser cut as the laser can deliver much more detail than I can do by hand. The laser requires a vector graphic of the lines to be cut. I am using LightBurn software to produce this vector graphic from a bitmap graphic. LightBurn has a great ability to outline different colors or shades of black & white. The outlines are delivered in a new layer and can be used to drive my laser.
The problem I am having is the shades of color or gray scale are too complex and convoluted in my photo. So I am looking for a way to simplify the photo so the different shades have smoother borders and there are fewer shades, no more than 20, as each shade needs to represented by a different veneer.
I am hoping that a few of Gimp's filters might work for me, but have found them complex and confusing to use. 

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to use Gimp for this photo processing. This problem has probably been solved before and am happy to be pointed in the right direction. Thanks for any ideas you want to share. 

Yellow tones in second photo are artifacts of the conversion from jpg to a small png, as I have no yellow veneers.

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As soon as I open the Hue-Saturation box... I see colors change in my image?! This is new.  Every level is at 0 in the window, yet it is doing some weird changes and seems to be desaturating all 'Magenta' right off the bat.

Gimp 3.02 is not stable and I just need to go back to an earlier version.

A Gimp newbie here. I searched for previous threads on how to install GMIC for Gimp 3.0 on a Mac, but found none.

I made the following attempt to install GMIC this afternoon. I successfully used MacPorts to install the latest GMIC package on my new Apple silicon MacBook Pro running Sequoia 15.4.1. Gimp did not show GMIC in Filters menu.

I found the gmic_gimp_qt file and moved it to the User/Library/Application Support/Gimp/3.0/Plug-ins folder. Gimp still did not recognize that GMIC was available.

Has anyone installed this plug-in successfully for Gimp 3.0 on a Mac running Sequoia?

Appreciate any and all comments, thanks.

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On the second layer, first screenshot, after rotating the element with my mac pad, I clicked "rotate" in the tool window, just to see what happened. That created a floating layer, I don't know if I am really supposed to click on "rotate", after doing it manually.
Basically, what I need to do is removing the excess mask from my element, but the mask on the second layer is no longer active after creating the floating layer.  Is Gimp trying to tell me that I should create a new mask on the floating layer?
The screenshots order is inverted.
Do I necessarily need the floating layer after rotating? thank you

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Hi

I’m brand new on this forum and using GIMP as well!
I would like to know if there are any 'automatic' selection tools such as: straight-edged (square/rectangle) or elliptical (circle/oval) with other shapes: stars, hearts, etc.? Maybe by downloading extensions?

Thanks

I have a bunch of Photoshop *.8bf plugins - some are quite good, and I would like to be able to use them in GIMP 3.
I tried PSPI - doesn't seem to work...maybe I am doing something wrong here.

Any ideas?

Hi, I am trying to get the RawTherapy plugin for importing Canon CR2 raw files into Gimp working but am struggling. I have installed RawTherapy successfully but when I try to open a CR2 file from Gimp I get the error:

There is no RAW loader installed to open 'Raw Canon' files.
GIMP currently supports these RAW loaders:
- darktable (http://www.darktable.org/), at least 1.7
- RawTherapee (http://rawtherapee.com/), at least 5.2
Please install one of them in order to load RAW files.

I am on Ubuntu 24.04.2

I believe I need to install RawTherapy into the "Plugins" folder but cannot locate it's path.

Can any help me with this?

Hi, I just upgraded to Gimp 3.0.2 recently from one of the 2.X versions. For reference, I'm on Windows 10. I'm still getting used to the changes, but one immediately noticeable missing feature is that there doesn't seem to be a 'recent folders' option when exporting files like there used to be.



Since my folders can be a bit all over the place or buried deep in subfolders, this is a real pain, and I don't know why it was removed. Am I just missing something? Thanks.

I'm sure this could be done in v2.10. I copied an image into another one. When I tried to bucket fill / paint the new layer and nothing happened. I merged down the new layer into the original layer and still nothing. Am I missing something?

Is there a script or plugin for gimp that does the same thing as PS 'crop and straighten photos' to separate multiple photos from one scan?