So I decided to play around with a photo I posted of the wild Discus I have. Then I thought people might like to know how to do this. The initial stuff is really easy. It just takes a lot of playing around with settings. (And gimp doesn't make it easy to play with the settings as well as photoshop since the preview in Gimp really stinks when doing more advanced things.)
But here is the original Photo after I cropped it:
(You load your picture into GIMP.)
Select your filters. Personally with edges I like the Difference of Gaussians.
Select your Radius, look in the preview to make sure things look sharp enough/edges are accented the way you want. (Again not the easiest with Gimp, but doable.)
Then you are going to want to change you levels. (This is where it stinks because a photo will look great on your computer and then on someone elses look like crud...)
And play with the settings to your hearts content.
And when you are done you can save it and enjoy...
Of course the hard part is getting it right.
Just to see here is are just the ones I decided to save that I didn't like...
While good the eyes are just too bury. (And bury eyes = a bad picture for almost everyone, same as having something covering an eye.)
So I decided to play with the radius to see if I could get it go better.
But needless to say they weren't working out right, and you can see how the colors can vary quickly with different settings... (And flipping what radius is bigger than the other.)
So I decided to resort to just darkening the eyes on both fish... (Using the dodge/burn button in the toolbox.) And finally things began to work. (I am posting two with slightly different threshold settings, as you can see with these fish they looked best with the body showing up, or in other words the whole picture has slightly a lighter color range which makes the first photo more neon looking. )
For now the only annoyance is that if I were to do it again I would try to have a photo without the second fish. I think that more than anything detracts for now, but to photoshop the whole fish out... lets just say it would be much easier to take another photo.
Hope you all enjoyed and feel free to ask any questions. (Maybe some day I will show off how to do it in photoshop. Things go a lot faster, but I don't think you end up seeing all the possibilities as much. Plus of course the software costs money.
Linear Mode
