Reducing Portrait to Basic Colors and Lines

[ev1lchris]

Hi everyone, I'm relatively new to Gimp after being an Adobe Photoshop user.

I was wondering how I could go about taking a portrait and reducing it to it's basic colors and lines? I want it to look like it was drawn or maybe etched.

[rich2005]

There is a standard Gimp filter in Filters -> Artistic -> Cartoon but it has been there a long time, there are better versions.

You could try the g'mic plugin http://www.gmic.eu which contains all sorts of effects. If you try it, read the instructions for a Windows install. You need to set up the correct path in Edit -> Preferences but one effect looks like this



edit:
A quick look around and an interesting procedure from Pat Davids blog.

https://patdavid.net/2014/09/woodcuthedc...ffect.html

It requires using a gmic filter, but nice resulting effect.

[Espermaschine]

A bunch of scripts on this blog, which has some nice basic effects (copy the code and save as *.scm into your scripts-folder):
http://joe1gk.blogspot.de/

I wrote a tutorial, that involves a lot of techniques rolled into one effect:
http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/201...orial.html

At the core you will probably need a way to reduce colours, with tools like Posterize, Indexed Mode, or filters like Quantize, combined with some edge detect for the lines (Artistic -> Photocopy is another option).

Seems like David has improved the G'MIC - Posterize. Nice !