: How to achieve this cartoon effect in GIMP? Cartoon filter doesn't make it. Desired effect examples: Image 1 source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1357489/1165509 Image 2 source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1357751/1165509

@BetL875

Here is a short guide on how to manually create a comic style image from a photo with standard Gimp (i.e. without the aid of plugins in addition to those that come in a default Gimp 2.0 installation).




Make color gradients within the photo smooth, remove details.


Choose Filter > Enhance > Despeckle with rather high settings for radius and adaptive unticked.
Make image still smoother with the Filter > Blur > Selective Gaussian Blur



Reduce the colours to < 24 by transforming to indexed with Image > Mode > Indexed > Generate optimized palette 24 colours


Manually remove unwanted colors from the flat areas (e.g. in the face) by choosing Select by color and using the Bucket Fill-Tool with the colour that should stay.
Transform the image back to RGB (Image > Mode)
Further smooth the resulting outlines using Filter > Enhance > Despeckle




When similar steps were applied to your sample image it may look similar to this:



Above image was done in a very rough and quick fashion. With subtle fine-tuning on the blur settings, color palettes, and manual removal of unwanted colors we will of course get better results.



For completeness, here's some of the G'MIC filters for cartoon-like effects:


Artistic > Painting

Artistic > Cutout

Artistic > Cartoon

Contours > Isophotes

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@Welton168

It looks like the feature you are looking for is the "posterize" feature. It allows you to set the number of levels of detail, and makes your image look like it's built of paper cutouts. I use photoshop, but I am almost certain that GIMP will have a similar "posterize" feature. Best of luck!

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