The grab-bag
Samples from various experiments
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An effect produced by oversharpening the image and then applying the "Rock" effect. It works better on some images than others, and it may be necessary to fiddle a lot.
thanx to Helen Peters and Banson, now living in Texas these many long years
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The same image with the colors reduced to 2. Again, this may not give a good result without some fooling around with contrast and some images just don't lend themselves to such an easy change.
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I discovered the "gold wire effect" while fooling around a couple of years ago. First you use "Edge Detection," then adjust gamma and contrast, then convert to grayscale, then modify the color by reducing blue a lot and green a little. Play with gamma and contrast until it looks shiny enough. In this case, a small cropped selection was oversharpened and resized before applying the other effects. I usually "Edge" twice.
A selection from the ubiquitous Microsoft Water Lilies, reduced to 16 colors and sharpened slightly for an effect resembling an old lithograph. IrfanView does a nice job of dithering when it reduces color depth.
Oversharpen, grayscale, adjust contrast, resize a little smaller, adjust again to suit taste.
Sometimes it is necessary to resize both larger and smaller at different steps in the process. The Lanczos resampling filter is best for retention of form and detail.
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After a few texturing fiddles, I applied G. Mehdi's kaleidoscope2-1.8bf, one of my favorite things.