I received an email from David Tschumperlé (interview, web) the author of GREYCstoration (blog), introducing G’MIC, GREYC’s Magic Image Converter. GREYCstoration’s capabilities (read: algorithms) have been moved to this new high potential framework: all the operations are now filters written in an easier-to-program macro language (gmic). That makes it more simple to add new custom made filters while retaining the power and infrastructure of G’MIC.
G’MIC is available here as a command-line tool or as a GIMP plug-in.
Among the 50+ filters available, you will find mirrors and tiles effects, a fish eye effect, quite a few painting effects (pen drawing and BW pencil being my favorites), and so on. I am not a great fanboy of filters – you either have a good enough image that defends itself or not and no amount of filtering will change that, IMHO.
However G’MIC offers 2 filters of the utmost photographic interest (and I chose my words): 2 denoising methods – anisotropic smoothing and patch-based smoothing. They are on par with the best commercial software available – at the cost of more parameters to set and longer time processing, though. The most recent patch-based method already reduces the amount of parameters to set while keeping a high quality output.
Just for the record, here is a quick test from my favorite noisy image:
Removing Red and Blue noise (so keeping my favorite grain-like output) with the anisotropic filter:
And the same with the patch-based filter:
As David mentioned, it is hard to objectively judge denoised output. The above example is not a full blown test, just an illustration of what is possible. Sill G’MIC is very interesting if you need a high-quality opensource noise removal tool.
All of these filters are neatly put in a GIMP plugin with sliders and instant preview, as shown in this screenshot:
Once you are happy with your settings, you can turn to using the command line tool (gmic) which offers higher bit-depth results. Be warned, though, that this will take a lot of computing power – so make sure your settings are correct!
If you are interested in this tool (and you should 🙂 ), you can get it from G’MIC’s Sourceforge repositories. Various pre-compiled versions are available, but if you need to compile GMIC from scratch, beware: it will bring your computer to its knees! To use the GIMP plugin, simply copy gmic4gimp to your GIMP plugin directory, restart GIMP and voilà, the plug-in is available at the bottom of the filter menu.
Linux Photography 
The original Greystoration denoiser plugin is good enough. The other options are only toys without much value.
There might be toys, but quality toys knowing the effort David made to improve GreyCstoration.
As Joel says, it offers options when we need to denoise a picture.
For me too, the tool I use most is the GreyCstoration.
But is also nice to have the other tools. Not that I’ve used them a lot, but they could come handy.
Does it include Sharpening Tool?
How about Photoshop Version?
“How about Photoshop Version?”
How about using GIMP? 🙂
G’MIC is a framework, the news here is that GreyCstoration is now part of it making it easier to improve in the future and allowing easy scripting to control it and combine it with other items. The other options with G’MIC are demos and are meant to show basic capabilities and give us users built in already done functions that can be combined to create new stuff. G’MIC gives us building blocks plus one fabulous already constructed building -GreyCstoration. It is missing the point to compare the building blocks (“toys”) to a finished building.
G’MIC rocks. It took me some hours to understand it but now I see the possibilities. Granted, it contains many operations that can be considered “toys”, but the underlying concepts are very powerful for image manipulations. I have started to play with it to do automatic batch-like developing of RAW images and I think it definitely is up to the task.
See
http://github.com/claes/gmic-extensions
manipulations. I have started to play with it to do automatic batch-like developing of RAW images and I think it definitely is up to the task.
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