Great Blue Heron

I once spent approximately one month living off-the-land on an island in the Atlantic. While I saw few people during my stay, the remote island was a busy place, especially with regard to birds. The gulls owned the wild peas and the Great Blue Herons owned the trees. They would perch as high as they could in order to survey the ocean. I grew to respect their patience and their skill in fishing, but they could have improved on their landing skills. They would soar within reach of the landing, but they just could not control the landing. The noise that they made when crashing into the tree-tops was nerve-wracking.

Anyway, I grew to love their color, their markings, and their grace -- in the air, that is.

I blended two photographs to make this image. I then applied a new, Inkscape 0.47 filter-effect to the landscape only: Filter > Morphology > Warm inside.

Great Blue Heron photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/erica_marshall/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Landscape photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomidea/ / CC BY 2.0

Inkscape 0.46 oil painting filter-effect by jbrgfx

jbrgfx has designed an oil painting filter-effect using Inkscape .046.

The object of this experiment was to preserve depth while highlighting colors. The settings which produced these "paintings" may be seen in detail by clicking the following screen-shot.

Below are instructions for using the filter-effect, at least as I designed it for my own use.

Iced Coffee

Inkscape 0.46 may be used to simulate oil-painting. The new path tools in version 0.47 will make drawing the paths which hold the gradient-fills and gradient-blends faster and more flexible. More paintings like this one are part this blog's short-term plans.

SVG source in XML format is available on Google Docs.

Using Gimp filters on a smoke pattern

The following Gimp features and filters were used to alter the smoke pattern:
Gaussian blur, dodge duplicate layer, invert, desaturate, despeckle, treshold, merge layer down. Various Gimp tutorials entitled this affect "perfect masking using a highpass."
See, for example, http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Perfect-masking-using-a-highpass/28768 and http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Sketch_Effect/