Just been in the mood to do these of late (posted elsewhere). Thought I would share a result here. Used various G'MIC presets in extremely creative ways (i.e., don't ask) to get the result shown. Click here for another result.

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woodl ... odnant.JPG

That looks excellent Lyle.

Thanks Odin; just a big fan of the surreal CG feel that HDRs produce. Just don't have the patience to take and align 3 images to produce them so I've, over time, came up with close approximations using a single image.

Very good outcome Lyle, I like your result very much. What you've done on the pic is really good.

That looks great! The second result is my favorite.

Nice work Lyle, that looks awesome.

Thanks for all the cool comments. Been trying for years to get the Thomas Kinkade look. lol



edit:

Shared (sort of) my flow here. It, obviously, requires more then just this, but 90% of the flow is my fake illustration steps (don't ask where I shared that originally many years ago; lol).

You're 'Fake HDR' method makes it look like Photorealism.

Or Hyper-realism Odin. lol

I like the look since it reminds me of the paintings that Kinkade did. Anyway, still feeding my binge while I still have it. lol

ref: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... d_path.JPG

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34520999@ ... 3/sizes/o/

the depth it creates is amazing

I watched the Hobbit last night which inspired me to do the second one 2-ton. I agree; folks where I posted these results didn't like it when I called it fake HDR; maybe hyper-realism is a better term.

I like!

These are very cool images, maybe you can do a tutorial to share how you created these Fake HDR images.

I may do so after this weekend trandoductin (work weekend mids so pretty tired during the weekend).

Maybe the effect is a little bit too much otherwise it look really promising.

ref: http://www.fontplay.com/freephotos/2nd5 ... o-2226.jpg

OK; I'm going to do this is steps over the next few days (so feel inspired to experiment as I go; comment as you like). It will be up to an OP to consolidate this into a single tut (am I a mad man or what? lol).

Step one is to create the Convolution layer. To do so, you need to dup the original, and run G'MIC's Bilateral smoother preset with the following settings (and definitely experiment for yourself; this is what I do to fake illustrations as well by the way).



Set this layer to Grain Extract and then you will have your convolution layer:

To keep the suspence down, below's the compresses XCF file as a tutorial by file type of thing. I can't host it here since Tux won't appreciate an 11.4MByte file. lol

Also, this file will disappear after June (or is it July) since Ubuntu One's going out of business.

http://ubuntuone.com/6Q7f3jIdsmlhAQ2nVZl8o0

Note too, this is straight conversion; I usually add a heck of a lot of other things to the mix to my own tastes. I did reduce the blue channel since it was way too strong in the shadows for this one (so there's no straight forward flow that can lead to a preset in G'MIC, but then again, I could be eating these words. lol).

Also, as a diversion to my tut, here's a result where I ran Anisotrophic smoothing on one of the convolution layers and also blended in a result from Buzz (Buzz doesn't run in GIMP). Trimoon's site has been down for quite a while, but the wayback machine actually has a link that still works (used Irfanview as the surrogate to run this plugin; you can do so through shellout if you like). http://web.archive.org/web/201311040100 ... lug-In.zip

That looks so cool! Too bad, I can't get past the first step because G'MIC plugin for GIMP keeps crashing on me everytime i hit apply

Hope you get your issue resolved soon trandoductin. Anyway, now for phase 2. Copy visible and set the Top Layer to Grain Merge. Reduce the Opacity of the center Grain Extract Layer to taste (50% a compromise) and now you get this result.