smooth w/o destroying edge sharpness

PaK

What i really want to do is figure out a way to:

-despeckle
-smooth out
-retain edge info

for an uprezed image such as this:



I have tried the photocopy filter and such, but maybe there are a few filters and I can make an action? I dunno, i have been plying with this problem for a while and I thought i'd ask you guys for help.

I would love to figure this out without repainting it. As I have a whole whackload worth of textures to process in this way.

-R

Rick Stirling

hmmmm...I can't see the image at the minute

I dont ps here, but heres a wild idea...

copy all your edges to a new layer, do all the despeckle work ont he other iamge, then apply the edge layer.

you might be able to use a duplicate of the original, grayscale it, the adjust the levels - this will give you a contrast map that you could use to pick out the edges.

Ignore me, I'm blabbering.

Whargoul

Smart Blur?

Eric Chadwick

I was trying something similar recently, except I was trying to convert a photo into a bump map. Here's how far I got before I gave up on the idea.

I basically wanted to remove/reduce all the fine particulates without removing the macro forms.

For resizing images, there are some tools out there, but they aren't stellar.
Genuine Fractals is a popular one. Not cheap.
Fred Miranda compares some of the techniques, pushing his of course.

Good luck with, let us know how it turns out.

PaK

Rick's suggestion works almost. I'll tweak it a bit and make an action (he respnded to one of my emails, its not posted here yet)

Rick...yer brilliant, thx br0.

-R

Eric Chadwick

Yes, please do post it, I've never figured out how to do this nicely.

Rick Stirling

My method isn't great, but it works. Sort of.

My reply:
I've tried various methods or preserving the edges, and removing the
detail. THe best seems to be

Duplicate the image
Smart blur
Find edges
Ramp the levels up to get more contrast
Use the black as a selection mask to copy information off the base image
- select by colour range, black, grow selection, feather selection, then
copy the selection from the base. Switch off this partial image
Duplicate original Despeckle or smart blur to clean the image Switth the
partial image back on.

dur23

If you guys are using CS2 i've found that surface blur is probably one of the greatest inprovements to photoshop since 5.5.
It does exactly what i believe it is your looking for. It'll keep areas with high contrast as edges and blur the area inbetween. Its totally awesome for bumpmaps.

PaK

dont have access to that. Could you give it a whirl on the example image i posted up top and post your blurred version here dur?

Thx,

-R