18 most useful G'mic scripts for beginners.

The G'MIC plug-in for GIMP proposes a set of various filters to apply on your images, including artistic effects, image denoising and enhancement algorithms, 3D renderers, etc.. It is a quite large plug-in, integrating a lot of different effects. G'MIC has been made available as an easy-to-use plug-in for GIMP. It extends this retouching software capabilities by offering a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects. Of course, the plug-in is highly customizable and it is possible to add your custom G'MIC-written filters in it.

This plugin has many qualities like:

• Easy to use GUI interface.
• Preview window to pre-check the result of any particular effect.
• Easy update module to keep the plugin upto date.
• Setting windows for to control the operation of filters. etc.

Today I'm going to enlist some most useful filters from the huge list of G'Mic filters for beginners who cannot grab the whole plugin system directly but want to work with it.

• Polaroid : Create a Polaroid representation of normal images. You can change the settings as per your requirements.

• Reflection : Create a reflection of the current image. Easy to change setting.

• Cubism : One of my favorite filter. Cubify a normal image. Very useful while creating abstract arts or backgrounds.

• Soft Glow : Soft glow filter provides a noiseless, blurred and soft result if applied to image. Very useful while creating dreamy effects.

• Graphic Novel Fx : This effect turns your image into a graphical novel type representation in one click. Very cool plugin for photo-manipulation.

• Ink Wash : Ink and wash painting is an East Asian type of brush painting also known as ink wash painting. Only black ink — the same as used in East Asian calligraphy — is used, in various concentrations.

• Color Balance : In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors (typically red, green, and blue primary colors). An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors – correctly; hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance.

•  B&W Recolorize : This plugin help in recolorization of b&w pictures. 

•  RGB Gradient : Create RGB gradient norm representation.

• Water : Water based deformation.

•  Random : Random Deformation.

• Spread Noise : Cool plugin that grainify a normal image by spreading pixel noise.

• RGB Bayer Mask : A Bayer filter mosaic is a color filter array (CFA) for arranging RGB color filters on a square grid of photosensors. Its particular arrangement of color filters is used in most single-chip digital image sensors used in digital cameras, camcorders, and scanners to create a color image.

• Anisotropic Smoothing : Anisotropical noise reduction and smoothing.

• Patch Based Smoothing : Another noise reduction and smoothing plugin better than anisotropic in some cases.

• Bilateral Filtering : A bilateral filter is an edge-preserving and noise reducing smoothing filter. The intensity value at each pixel in an image is replaced by a weighted average of intensity values from nearby pixels. This weight is based on a Gaussian distribution.

• Dodge and Burn : Dodging and burning are terms used in photography for a technique used during the printing process to manipulate the exposure of a selected area(s) on a photographic print, deviating from the rest of the image's exposure.

• Relief Light : Emboss or plasticity effect.

That's it for now. Get acquainted with these filters first to fast-track your learning process.