Quick Sharpening of blury sculpting layers (upscaling technique)

Resources Tutorials
1

Also see upscaling technique in first comment below. Okay so this is a method I’m playing around with that I find produces decent results.

Im using a soft smudge/sculpting brush and the result is blurry. (I used the brush on a blank layer set brush preset to overlay mode). So I played around with gmic to see if i can make it sharper. There are probably other good filters to try but I ended up using Local Variance Normalization. With high amplitude and low smooth/threshold.

I made a duplicate layer of the brushwork. This layer i used the GMIC LocalVari.Norm. on. Then you can change the blend mode. A few might work, insert blend mode.
I select the area of the original brush work. Do Ctrl-Shift-I to inverse sel… Then i feather and delete some of the edges of the GMIC layer because the edges are too sharp.
(I might also use color to alpha. Too. Especially if I apply GMIC twice. )

This method works great with highlights too if set to pin light.
NoGmic (blury)
keep in mind this is 200% zoomed in so at 100% its sharper.

just the brushwork-noGMIC
just the brushwork-noGMIC671×761 35 KB

With LocalVArianceNorm:
with localvariance norm-GMIC
with localvariance norm-GMIC682×791 46.8 KB

Only downside is that the contrast is greater, but ill see if I can fix that.
Its a little crisper.

Stay tuned ill try and complete a piece and show other findings.

6 Likes
2

okay so i’m trying some other stuff:
i did mean removal to the above changes.
then I did GMIC upscale DCCx12 (edit or rather the upscale diffusion is better)
and reduced the upscaled size down 50% to get back to original size.
the upscaling and resizing process smoothed out the meanremoval noise whilst still keeping the sharpness.
Sharpened Result:
mean remov plus upscaled then resized
Original:
original brushwork

6 Likes
3

I wonder if that could be turned into a one button command by Krita devs. There really is a blurriness issue. However, the best would be focusing on the smudge brushes and making tjem less blurry. The thing is when I try to imitate some painting done in PS, the result comes out always blurrier with Krita.

1 Like
4

Ya, though I’m pretty sure Gmic can do a good job of sharpening and working at a big resolution helps too if you then reduce picture size before publishing.
We could use a new smudge parameter or engine to tweak out the blurry-ness (even a little).

2 Likes