Perfect Picture by xirja

Thought I'd share some details about this one, as I didn't include any description or hints as it stands as a beta filter.

This filter was created using best guesses based upon experience and improved upon through trial and error. Following is an image of the innards of the filter, a brief description of the process, and 9 examples of the presets in action.

All connections come from the source image at the top left. This is used as the foreground normal blend layer.

Most appropriate for this retouching application, the background layer is set by a percentile component, the type of which is set in turn by a 50% high pass from the original image. The percentile radius is set by the user and varies from 0 to 10.

The opacity of the foreground and background layers above is set by a complex two blend process. The first blend is in lighten mode and has the foreground layer as a user set gaussian blur fed to a fine edge detector. The background is set by a desaturated and inverted low threshold. This blend is the foreground for the next blend component which is also in lighten mode. The background of which is set by a high contrast low radius high pass connected to a 33% smoothed threshold. The two blends are finally sent to a slight blur and this becomes the opacity setting for the initial normal blend.

After the blending of the smoothing process, the result then is sharpened as the user requires.

This entire process can then be repeated 3 times in a loop for greater effect.


The 9 presets can generally be categorized as follows (smooth / sharpen / loop):


med / med / 1 , hi / lo / 1 , lo / hi / 1

med / med / 2 , hi / lo / 2 , lo / hi / 2

med / med / 3 , hi / lo / 3 , lo / hi / 3


The render times for the looping increases as follows using the example image, and for loops 2 and 3, there is a lag before the rendering starts:

1 ~20 sec.
2 ~90 sec.
3 ~340 sec

This filter will be updated when the final version 4 is complete, and there will be a description with hints of how to best use it , but until then this should suffice.

p2:

p4:

p6:

p8: