Creating hair texturs with GIMP?

Hi, I'm trying to create hair textures as described in Natalia's excellent blog post.

However, the GIMP "blur" filter doesn't do the straghtforward thing that Photoshop's does (take one pixel along the horizontal axis, and duplicate it in the same spot along the vertical axis).

Has anyone figured out how to make a good hair texture using GIMP?

BTW, commercial hair builders need not fear my competition; I'm doing this for fun but finding a serious lack of the necessary talent!

Also, if anyone knows of a set of decent free or inexpensive hair textures, please let me know. I've found Shizuka's on SLX, which look excellent and affordable for my purposes.

Thanks!

Motion blur in GIMP works much like it does in Photoshop, except you are limited to a range of 256 pixels, which works just fine for hair (in fact I do much shorter than that). The only trouble you're likely to run into that she didn't mention is that your bottom edge will look crappy. So, make your texture larger than you need and crop it.

The biggest trouble you'll have following Photoshop tutorials is the noise and clouds filters don't work like they do in Photoshop, so you have to invent your own tricks. For Photoshop-monochromatic-like noise in GIMP I use Scatter HSV with hue and saturation set to zero.

I tried motion blur, but I have two problems.

Well, one is a problem with GIMP in general: any time I try to enter any value containing a zero, the value disappears -- in any box with a value. Using the increment/decrement arror buttons doens't help: as soon as it hits any value with a zero in it anywhere, it resets the whole value to blank (setting sliders to zero). SO, I have to use 89 or 91 degrees. Perhaps this is the root problem.

The other issue is that when I use motion blur, it doesn't keep the colors distinct along the horizontal axis -- they get blurred along the horizontal a bit too, which ruins the 'strand' effect.

I just downloaded and installed GIMP, standard rev. Perhaps I should try the beta version.

Good idea about starting bigger and then cropping! I did notice the problem, and doh, I should have thought of that. A blonde moment, I guess -- can guys have them too?

Thanks for your help!

I don't know why you can't select 90 degrees, but that would cause some horizontal blurring. It's not what's keeping you from reproducing her results, though.

The longer blur you select (in pixels) the lighter your streaks will be and the less distinct they will be. If you select GIMP's maximum 256 you will get light, indistinct streaks.

In photoshop the max is 999, and you'd think that'd make your streaks even less distinct, but something odd happens at greater than 250 or so. The streaks become *more* defined. I think what's happening is that the noise is far less than random, so some vertical bands have more noise than others, and this affects the blur more as the length increases. That's a guess. There may be something else happening.

Anyway, she uses a 999 blur, so she gets very well-defined streaks. You can't reproduce that in GIMP, exactly. What you can do is select a much shorter blur. Try 40. You'll get much finer and slightly less regular strands. You may even prefer it to what she did. Also remember that you can not reproduce her noise exactly, so your blur will also look different from that. So, try different combinations of noise and blur. You won't be able to do exactly what she did.

This is why I switched to Photoshop. Everything you do in GIMP you have to invent yourself. All the tutorials and books are for Photoshop.

Just thought of something else. If you can't select 90 degrees (that's weird) use zero degrees. Blur horizontal rather than vertical, and paint your color stripes vertical rather than horizontal. When you're done, rotate the whole image 90 degrees.