Hmmm... I'll jump into Gimpressionist and see what the standards are.

Try saving it as a pgm file.

You save the pgm file for GIMPressionist brushes. I've saved a few including a rice grain for my Rice Mosaic preset a while back. The problem with GIMPressionist is it's regularity w.r.t. circles. Either the placement is way too regular, or the result is too clumped. Neither desireable for the circlism result. Does make a cool litebrite simulation (if you add a few more tweaks) though and did create a GIMPressionist preset for litebrite too.

the great difference i see with beine works is the use of the circles and more of the space between circles

to simplify (he didn't really do that , he use a manual procedure )he use the outline of the circles overimposed (as in darken only mode) to a simplificated version of the image , don't remove or cover the the (simplificated) original image from the spaces between the circles

...i would say that good old greycstoration if used with high blur compensated by high anisotropy could simplify a image in a similar way...same for bilateral filter and patch smoothing

Ro that base should be added the circle outlines

Instead in most of examples here the space left between the circle is of a solid color that hide the original image behind, so make the image less readable, and the circles are without a outline that also is relevant for the effect

just my ten cent

PS edited because some lines went lost and that in combination with typos made it unreadable

PS 2 corrected again now should make sense

Just taking my favorite Doll model for another spin as I continue to inch closer to the look I'm trying to achieve. Used a reverse aniso (dup, run G'MIC Bilateral filter on Top layer set to Grain Extract) technique with result autoleveled for the target for the Voronoi stipple program with 500 dots then I open the result invert and make the white dots bigger (on black background of course) and rerun the Voronoi Stipple program with 1500 dots, then use Inkskape to individually size the dots in such a way and to try to eliminate overlap, then use the result as a mask for Sauls Mean Fill Script-fu.

ref: http://www.fontplay.com/freephotos/seve ... 107-03.jpg

I like it !!

Thanks PC; I think you might even like this one better. I got another brain phart to use G'MIC's Stencil (lyle's preset; thanks David) to guide the dots better. Two passes per my previous outline otherwise.

Much better result!

Thanks Mahvin. Still not anywhere near Ben's quality, but I never give up, even if it takes years. This whole process took 2 (or is it 3) years of my fiddling (on and off of course) already. Getting happier now. The biggest help is the Voronoi Stippling program. Just with someone would look at the ImagemagicK script and update it using current commands (since it's much faster then this plugin as I recall; can't get the gpu to work unfortunately with this program). Still, faster then me trying to place the dots by hand. lol

Faked it with a Bokeh brush.