Supersmooth

When I first started using PSP, one of the filters that impressed me the most was the Edge-Preserving Smoother. This is very effective at cleaning up noisy images, and gives quite a nice artistic effect at higher settings. I've always wanted to create a similar filter so that I could experiment further; after a long period of thought and experimentation, I finally arrived at this...

	The quality of this image leaves something to be desired; click the thumbnail to see a larger version and you'll see what I mean. There's an objectionable level of visible noise.
	The filter has two sliders, 'Smoothing radius' and 'Edge sensitivity'. Keep both settings close to the default to perform noise smoothing, but be prepared to experiment a little to get the best result for individual images.
	And this is the result. Again, click the thumbnail for a better view of how the filter has dealt with the noise. Flat areas have been smoothed out quite nicely, but there has been no significant loss of detail. The fun doesn't end there, though...
	As the settings are increased, the image becomes progressively more like a wash or watercolour portrait. The 'Edge sensitivity' setting has more effect than 'Smoothing radius'; keep the latter setting reasonably low to preserve detail better.
	Click the ok button, and we now have a nice, artistic-looking portrait of the divine Miss Marceau!