Hey! I'm having an incredible learning experience, not only learning how Blender works (yes, still learning), but also about Open-Source and the incredible software available. Stick around!
Gimp Engrave
Posted by Marius Oberholster on Tuesday, October 14, 2014 Under: Quick Blog Tutorial
Hey all!
Now this is one I am really glad to share with you all. I am working on a project that requires some seriously old printing techniques and when I found this filter in gimp, it was like yey!
What filter is that? It's the one that looks like this:
Why is this so important? Well, in the late 1800's there were already various printing techniques, but for the most part, to my limited knowledge, you needed engravings for images. In a lot of cases even today you still do, but there was this one method where the entire images is made up of horizontal lines, varying in thickness along them, to distinguish light and dark areas. Possibly an early form of image transfer, I don't know. Anyway, Gimp has this filter and today, I get to tell you how it works!
Okay, so when you open an existing image in Gimp or a new one, you have to make sure that whatever image it is that you're using, has an alpha channel on the layer. You can check this out by right clicking on the layer and looking near the bottom of the list for "Add Alpha Channel". If this option is greyed out, then Remove Alpha Channel has to be click-able. If it's not and Add Alpha Channel is greyed, then you have the wrong mode for the image and you need to change that to Image > Mode > RGB
Why did we do the above? So that the filter will work. For some reason, it only works if there is an alpha channel on the layer that you want to apply the filter to.
Excellent! So we have our alpha channel on and now we can move on. In order to get the result I have above, I used a duplicate of the original image in greyscale. I did this, because the raw result has too few colors to fill out the details needed. It's incredibly harsh:
Now this is one I am really glad to share with you all. I am working on a project that requires some seriously old printing techniques and when I found this filter in gimp, it was like yey!
What filter is that? It's the one that looks like this:
Why is this so important? Well, in the late 1800's there were already various printing techniques, but for the most part, to my limited knowledge, you needed engravings for images. In a lot of cases even today you still do, but there was this one method where the entire images is made up of horizontal lines, varying in thickness along them, to distinguish light and dark areas. Possibly an early form of image transfer, I don't know. Anyway, Gimp has this filter and today, I get to tell you how it works!
Okay, so when you open an existing image in Gimp or a new one, you have to make sure that whatever image it is that you're using, has an alpha channel on the layer. You can check this out by right clicking on the layer and looking near the bottom of the list for "Add Alpha Channel". If this option is greyed out, then Remove Alpha Channel has to be click-able. If it's not and Add Alpha Channel is greyed, then you have the wrong mode for the image and you need to change that to Image > Mode > RGB
Why did we do the above? So that the filter will work. For some reason, it only works if there is an alpha channel on the layer that you want to apply the filter to.
Excellent! So we have our alpha channel on and now we can move on. In order to get the result I have above, I used a duplicate of the original image in greyscale. I did this, because the raw result has too few colors to fill out the details needed. It's incredibly harsh:
Granted, if you prefer that, then use it like that, but I sure don't, hahaha.
Now that we have our original image layer, a greyscale verion of the original image and a duplicate thereof on top of everything else, we can now apply the filter to the top layer.
To apply, go: Filters > Distort > Engrave
You will then see this window:
I personally do not click the limit line width, but if you prefer, you can. If you don't limit the line width, you can get pure whites. If you do limit line width, then it becomes a case of having lines through-out your whole image:
Left: No limitation, Right: Limited
Image: A red scribble in various shades passed through the filter in two different ways.
To
get the smoother result I have in the beginning of this post, all you
do is reduce the opacity of the filtered image, so the smooth greyscale
one shows through. Optionally, you can also apply a slight blur to the
filtered image, so that the lines aren't so sharp. I didn't in the
result in the beginning of the post.
And that's all there is to it! :D
I hope you find use for this filter if you feel a little vintage on a particular day :D, hahaha.
You can also use this to show a horrible looking color printout:
(haha)
Thank YOU LORD for helping me find this filter and for having someone write it in the first place! :D
Link to Gimp
(Download and use of gimp is entirely at own risk)
Now that we have our original image layer, a greyscale verion of the original image and a duplicate thereof on top of everything else, we can now apply the filter to the top layer.
To apply, go: Filters > Distort > Engrave
You will then see this window:
I personally do not click the limit line width, but if you prefer, you can. If you don't limit the line width, you can get pure whites. If you do limit line width, then it becomes a case of having lines through-out your whole image:
Left: No limitation, Right: Limited
Image: A red scribble in various shades passed through the filter in two different ways.
And that's all there is to it! :D
I hope you find use for this filter if you feel a little vintage on a particular day :D, hahaha.
You can also use this to show a horrible looking color printout:
(haha)
Thank YOU LORD for helping me find this filter and for having someone write it in the first place! :D
Link to Gimp
(Download and use of gimp is entirely at own risk)
In : Quick Blog Tutorial
Tags: jesus engrave filter gimp vintage
