Hello and welcome back to another tutorial my name is Mike Davies and in this video
I'll be showing you how to easily create a low poly portrait inside of GIMP. I'll be
using GIMP version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial
But of course before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com.
As always I have tons of GIMP and Inkscape tutorials on here, you can get more by becoming
a DMD Premium Member, and I have tons of free software Help Articles so definitely check that
out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy.
You can enroll in any of my Skillshare classes by visiting GimpSchool.com. And as I mentioned you
can get more by becoming a premium member and you can use code 15OFF2020 by December 31st for 15%
off an annual membership. And I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links
from this tutorial in the description of the video. Here is the "low poly portrait" we'll
be creating for today's tutorial. This is going to be using the Mosaic filter, which I used in
the last tutorial I released pretty recently. And this effect is going to work best when you
have a solid color background, although you can do this without a solid color background.
But I'll come over here - this was the original portrait, and here is the final low poly portrait.
So I'll start by opening up the original portrait photo. I'll go to File>Open Recent (in my case)
and I can come over here and choose the photo I want to use. I'll hit "Convert" which will
convert this to GIMP's native sRGB color space. So right now this photo is pretty large - it's
2500 by 3125 px. The Mosaic filter is not a super fast filter so I do recommend scaling this image
down to whatever the smallest size the photo can be. So in this case I'll go to Image>Scale Image,
and I'm going to set the height to 1920 - that way that is our maximum dimension - and hit the "tab"
key. And I'm going to change the Interpolation to "No Halo" and come over here and hit "Scale." you
can check out my tutorial on minimum quality loss when scaling for more information on why
I chose No Halo. But now I'll fit this in the window by hitting ctrl+shift+j on my keyboard.
You can also just use this little icon in the top right corner - just click on that once. So
now we're going to come over here and duplicate our original image. Let's just rename this one
"Original" - this layer - by double clicking on it. And rename this layer - double click - "Geo."
Hit the enter key. So now we're going to go to Help>Search and Run a Command and the shortcut
key for this is forward slash "/". And then we're just going to type "Mosaic," and then we're going
to double click on this filter, which is a GEGL filter. That just means we're going to get a
live preview as we work on this. And so I'll come over here - and you can choose whatever
geometry you want for this. I'm going to go with "Triangles." And inside of my "How to Create Low
Poly Backgrounds" tutorial I do sort of cover the Mosaic filter in more detail than I will
in this video. So if you're interested in learning more about the Mosaic filter definitely check out
that tutorial. But what I'll do is just increase the tile size until I get a pretty good size here.
One thing to keep in mind is that the larger the tile size is, the less detail you're
going to get in the portrait itself. So as you'll see here her eyes basically disappear
and her lips are going to get color-averaged as well. So those aren't going to look great.
So you basically want to find a happy medium between a good tile size with lots of detail,
but not too small because then it doesn't really look low poly. So as you can see here
we're starting to get pretty close to what we want. I'm just going to keep decreasing
until I get the amount of detail I want while still not getting too much detail.
So that looks pretty good to me. We could probably tweak this a little bit - maybe go to 40. And
"Tile height" is going to be up to you, but that's basically how much depth you want to add to
the little tiles themselves. I prefer to go with a flat tile, so I turn this all the way down to 1.
"Tile neatness" is going to be how skewed or warped these little tiles are as well as how
random each shape is. So the higher you increase the value, the more uniform the shapes will get.
So you'll see here this is going to create a really cool equilateral triangle effect,
and if I go all the way to zero it's going to be totally random. So that's going to be up to you.
I tend to just sort of move this little slider to the left or right and see what looks best
to get the most details out of here while still maintaining that cool low poly effect.
So i'll go with about right there. "Color averaging" is going to create these tiles where
each one contains an average color as opposed to without color averaging where it's basically
just going to show the original image but with these tiles overlaid on top. So I do recommend
turning on color averaging for the portrait that way you get this really cool "averaged" look,
which is pretty quintessential to the low poly effect. And then "Tile color variation" is just
gonna be how varied each of these tiles look. So if I were to turn this all the way down to
zero you'll see we're gonna get more uniform looking tiles here. So if you want this to look
more like there's a lot of shading going on you can increase this. Obviously too much
makes it look not great. So I like to just add a little bit of tile color variation.
I just think that looks a little better. "Allow splitting tiles" is basically going
to - as I can see here - hold ctrl, zoom in - it's going to split the tiles anywhere where
it sees some detail. So you can see here these tiles are split up. If I come over here in the
nose you can see the tiles have been split to show the curvature of the nose there. So when
you're using this on a portrait I do recommend keeping "Allow splitting tiles" turned on.
"Tile spacing" is going to increase or decrease the space between each tile. So that's going to
be this line here called the "joint." And you can change your joints color over here. I'm going to
change this from black to white. I just prefer the look of this especially with the blue going on.
So I'll come over here and click ok. You can change that joints color to whatever you want
but we can either increase the spacing between each line or decrease it depending on what effect
you're going for. I like this with the decreased spacing, but you guys can play around with that.
And then the "Light direction" there is a light that's off here in the top left.
I'm going to keep this set to the default, so white and up in the left corner. I'm not
going to move that. If you want to change the "Seed," which is just basically the
random pattern that's being used to display our triangles in here, you can come over and click
"New seed." That's just going to sort of create a different variation of how the tiles are
displayed. And you can keep hitting new seed until you get a variation that you like. I think all
these look pretty good so it's really just up to your discretion and maybe what you're going for.
And you can always come back here and change this back to zero to go with the default.
So that's what we started with and we don't really need to change the blending mode here,
and we also don't need to touch the opacity. So i'll come over here and click "OK."
And now we have our low poly portrait. The only thing is that we've got these polygons
or these triangles going on outside of the actual portrait. In my case I don't
really want that - I want to erase that. So what I'll do is I'll just hide this - that
will show our original layer - and then I'll come over and click on that original layer.
Now I'm going to come over here to my toolbox and go with the "Foreground Select Tool" inside
of this tool group here - the third tool group. And you'll see I have "feather edges" turned on
with the "radius" set to 3. That's fine. You can turn off feathering edges if you don't want that.
That's just going to smooth the transition between the background and the foreground. So what we're
doing here is we're outlining our subject and separating it from the background. So what I'll do
first is just draw around these subjects. So this is just telling this tool this is the main subject
we're trying to separate from the background. And I'll connect this and hit the enter key.
Next we're going to draw the foreground here - so I'm going to increase the size of this - and if
yours is set to "Draw background" make sure it's set to "Draw foreground." Sometimes that happens.
And let me just change the color here to "black." So we can see this more easily.
So we're just very quickly denoting that this is the main subject that we're trying to select.
And we can always release our mouse and then just draw the inside. You don't have to be exact
with this - it will use a sort of algorithm to select the subject from the background.
And i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to this tool if you want to learn more about it.
Alright so once we've selected a decent amount here - and let me just make sure
we have some more on the back end here since this is pretty light -
once we have a decent amount of that painted I'm going to hit the enter key.
So that is going to select our foreground object, which is our subject,
and I'm just going to paint here any major parts that maybe aren't selected by this effect.
We're just going to make sure those are painted. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Alright so that's pretty much selected how I want it, so i'm going to hit the enter key
one last time .That's going to draw a selection area. If you want to make sure there's no holes
in here you can go to "Select>Remove Holes," and that will remove any small holes maybe you don't
want in here. And you can see here that there's sort of this little area that was selected. What
I'm going to do is come over to the "Free Select Tool," and I'm going to change the mode of this
to "Subtract from current selection." And I'm just going to get rid of this because it's not really
important for the low poly portrait. So I'll hit the enter key. That's going to draw that out,
and everything else looks pretty good. Now what I'll do is come up top here to the "Geo" layer
and unhide that. I'm going to click on that layer, right click, go to "Add layer mask"
and under "Initialize layer mask to:" we'll choose "Selection," and click add.
That's going to mask out all of the low poly triangles going on in the background. And I'll hit
ctrl+shift+a to deselect that. And if I hold ctrl and zoom in you can see there's a bit too much
of the original hair going on here. So one option is we can grab the Paintbrush tool, and we're just
going to hit the "x" key to switch over to white. And any time we paint white on a layer mask it's
going to reveal whatever's on that original layer. So in this case it'll reveal some of these shapes.
And so what that'll do is just sort of cover up that hair with these shapes and help that look a
little bit better. And I'll hit ctrl+z to back up. If I wanted to I can just hide the original layer.
And let's come over here and create a new layer. Let's name this "Background" - hit
the enter key. And we can fill this in with any color - for example we can just go with white.
And there you can see that will also get rid of those little hairs.
Alright so that's it for this tutorial, hopefully you liked it. If you did don't forget to like this
video and subscribe to my channel. You can click the bell icon to be notified each time
I have a brand new tutorial. You can also check out any of the links to my resources
in the description of the video. But thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!