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GIMP could achieve. Relying solely on the “If you want something done, EXPERIMENT” attitude, I set about finding a way to get a smooth looking emboss.
I found that if you take your image - anything will do, but photographs work a lot better (I used part of a wallpaper of Charlize Theron for this tutorial) – duplicate it, guassian blur it by 3-5 pixels - anything else will modify the result quite conspicuously – and set the layer mode to grain extract, you’d get an almost perfect result. After this, the only thing you need to do is create a new white layer and set it to colour.
This is what I got using this simple tutorial:
Just as a reminder, this is what it looks like using the emboss filter:
Using 12 pixels, I achieved the following result, and it inspired me to go one step further:
After creating this version, I flattened the image and used the ‘Colour Range Mapping’ tool, which can be found at ‘Filters – Colours – Map – Colour Range Mapping’. I changed the top white box, by clicking on it, to 808080 and left everything else it was. This created what looked like a drawing, but didn’t have enough definition, so I duplicated the layer and used the ‘Colour to Alpha’ tool at default settings. I set this layer to overlay and achieved the following:
Repeating all of these steps, changing the blur to 27 pixels, this is what I got:
How’s that for an emboss, and how’s that for a drawing?
