Question: David's watercolors v3 action

[Rocker]

Hello,

Some of you might have some experience with the above action created by Dave Kendal a couple of years ago.

I've played with it a little and modified it just a bit - but I still have one problem with it that I cannot resolve.

I was in touch with Dave about it but he had no solutions to the problem...

If one is to play with this action, especially on larger images, you will find that there is some sort of a 'grid' created that is especially visible in lighter areas of the image.

The grid seems to be introduced by the application of the "Anisotropic" diffuse filter and is made significantly worse by the application of the Watercolor filter.

Does anyone know of a way to circumvent this?
Is there another way of mimicking the "Anisotropic" diffuse filter?

Thanks in advance.

[DannyRaphael]

Depending on image characteristics, it's possible the grid symptoms you report could be due to .jpg artifacts made larger if an image's size is increased. Have you tried a touch of Dust and Scratches, Neat Image or something similar before applying the action? That might be the ticket.

Regarding a functional replacement for Anisotropic:
I don't recall the specific steps in Dave's action, so I'll give you the generic opinion.

If you have a layer of "just lines" like you would get by applying Smart Blur > Edge Only and inverting the result, one approach that's in the ballpark is to do a little blurring (Dust & Scratches or Gblur) followed by either Levels or Unsharp Mask.

For other situations I can't think of a method that would yield similar results.

I hope this helps a little.

~Danny~