Squiggly Brush by BrianDP1977

WOW!!! I must thanks you a million for this Amazing, Fantastic, Awesome, Original and highly creative filter that you have made.

When looking at the lifesaver preview I felt that this was going to be something special, but did not know how much special it could be until I tested it with some photos and have seen the really wonderful and beautifull textures and mixed shapes the filter can get out from the source photo.

I really love it very much.

There is only one thing that I would modify if it would be possible (or perhaps is already built and I do not know) and be able to have an option to apply soft borders, or feather a little the lovely small shapes that the filter makes, because for some things this is wonderful, but for some others if perhaps to much defined and hard edges. Although I could search for another filter that could soften and blur a very little bit that hard edges if needed.

Thanks really very much for this lovely creative filter that when used with higher resolutions images it gets beautiful results.

And here is the original photo to see the source

Great inputs SpaceRay. I think I figured out how to get the results you wanted pretty easily. Thanks to your recommendations I also found a couple other adjustments that may come in handy for people. The updates should be ready for download tomorrow. Be sure to check back.

Thanks again and I'm glad you like the filter.

Brian

Updates are complete. Hopefully the changes are what you were hoping for. I think simply adjusting the "Stroke Soften" setting should get you the feathering you were hoping for. However, the stroke can now be further adjusted by manipulating the stroke thickness and opacity as well.

I removed the pigment noise settings because they really didn't add anything to the filter and needlessly slowed rendering times.

I actually deleted it all together because it really only is useful if you apply the filter to a solid color. Also, the only resulting pigmentation color was gray. The reason for this is that all that portion did was apply a basic perlin noise overlay to the image to help breakup any solid colors in the image (i.e. it gave the image random gray undertones which helped bring out brush strokes in solid colored areas). However, most images that users use already have color gradations throughout their images. As such, this "pigment noise" was pretty much redundant and only added unnecessary complexity. I may mess with the noise pigment portion of the original filter at some point again later on. I was toying with the idea of allowing the user to define a pigment noise tint and/or an overlay type which would actually produce more of a true pigment noise/highlight effect which I think would have much more of a use (vs. only allowing for gray gradations). However, adding options like that made the interface somewhat confusing and increased rendering time such that the library would not allow me to upload the filter for others to use. For now, the simplified Squiggly Brush filter seems to be much easier for users to use (there are only 6 adjustment settings vs double that amount) and gives the same effect (minus being able to apply a gray noise overlay to the image to help break it up a little more ... something a user can do to the image prior to applying this filter).

If you still want the pigment noise option, however, I would suggest saving the original Squiggly Brush filter as something else in your personal library. Then download this newer version. After that, just open up the old version, copy the pigment noise portion of the filter tree (it's the bottom half of the tree) and paste it into the new version. I hope it works for you. If you find that users have lost a lot of utility that was available before this change, please let me know. I will see about adding it back in. I personally like this simplified version much better though. It strikes more at the heart of what I wanted the filter to be able to do.