If I had to choose one open source application that I cannot live without, it has to be the GIMP.

The Tools

The Gimp is a very versatile image manipulation tool thats open source and is also available for Windows. This article will talk about using GIMP to make nice painting out of a photograph. There are a number of oil-paint plugins available, but none of them give us the desired effect.

How long will it take, hmm... 10 - 20 minutes

Choosing the right picture

Not everything lends itself to be a good painting. Photos with too much detail and background activity rarely make good paintings. Choosing a good picture is as tricky as choosing the right subject for a painting, think like a painter, think of vivid colors, less cluttered backgrounds and something that would make an interesting centrepeice.

Close up shots of flowers are perfect subjects for paintings. Pick one of your favorite photographs or go ahead and pick one from our goodies section. open it in the GIMP

The Layers window

Now the first thing in painting is to have a rough outline of what you're going to paint, I prefer a light pencil for the same. Doing the same in the GIMP involves using layers, Open the layers windows CTRL+L

The outline

When making an outline of the subject, we would need just the lines and edges that make up the subject. So right click on the image, choose Layers->Colors->Desaturate. That gives us a clean B&W image to work with. Most pictures have a lot of activity in the background and we would want only the subject lines.

You can get a step closer to that by adjusting the brightness and contrast of the image such that only the subject is in focus, if you prefer you may even blur or de-focus the background. Rt-Click on image ->Layers->Colors->Brightness-Contrast.

Dont worry if the image has lost its good looks, the objective is to pick all the lines in the picture. Just make sure that the outline of the subject is clear

Once your eye can see the subject outline clearly, GIMP has a filter to highlight all the edges, Right click on the image, Rt-Click on image ->Filters->Edge-Detect->Edge. The image should now appear with a black background and all the edges higjlighted.

The pencil sketch

One thing that appears wrong in this is the background, its black. Most canvases are white and the pencil is supposed to be black. So lets invert the image Rt-Click on image ->Layers->Colors->Invert. Now the picture should looks like a shaded pencil sketch

Time to paint

Gimp has a very sophisticated set of filters. I choose the Gimpressionist for most things. Rt-Click on image ->Filters->Artistic->Gimpressionist. Gimpressionist allows us to choose a wide variety of brushes, stroke and angle, intensity, type of paper.

Here's what I found that works well for paintings.

Whats missing is the color. Adding color to the paint is a very simple process of taking the original picture and applying just the color values to the painting that we have. First we need to add a new layer on top of the modified painting. bring up the layers windows CTRL+L, Right click on the image layer and add a new layer thats transparent. Now open the original picture in a separate window and copy the whole image as it is, paste it into the newly created layer in the painting window. The last and final step is to just apply the color from the original picture to the painting. in the layers window select the newly pasted original photo, and modify the layer mode to color only now move the opacity slider to the required amount of color. Viola here's the painting. Hope you enjoyed it, let me know if you know a better way to do this..