Simplifying filter

Question

There is a lot of good stuff in CS6 but I would love to see a Simplifying filter added.  When making natural media simulations with photo manipulations (and some free hand painting) it is often really helpful to remove, or selectively adjust, the detail in a source photo.  This can give a good starting painterly effect as the basis for adding brushstrokes.  You can get somewhere near this using Filter>Blur>Smart Blur at extreme settings and Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise - but not near enough.  The first third party plugin to enable you to do this was called "Simplify" and was part of the buZZPro range (originally made by a UK company called Segmentis later called fo2Pix). Unfortunately, the company went belly up and the filter is no longer commercially attainable.  But if Adobe are reworking the filters in Photoshop it would be great if they could buy the rights to the Simplify filter and add it in some form to Photoshop.  You can also make very nice pen and pencil contour drawings with it.  I still use it with CS5 32bit - it won't work with 64bit.
TopazLabs produce their own version of this filter but that presumably doesn't stop Adobe producing theirs in Photoshop.   It would be a wonderful addition to CS6 or a later version and would complement well the more sophisticated brushing tools now available in Photoshop..

Answer 1

I'm sorry, just got to rave about Oil Paint again. Please stand back in case I gush all over you.
Let's say you want to create toon inklines for your picture--above all, a stylized animation character, but really, it can be any relatively simple, streamlined image.
We all know by now that the first filter to use is Photocopy, don't we? Foreground color slot black, background slot white. You can multiply the resulting inklines at 20% over the original image and you get lovely color-coordinated inklines.
Here's where PB comes in: before copying the Photocopy result, take your black inkline image and run it through Oil Paint, and this will finesse jaggies and other irregularities into graceful brush strokes. Granted, you are guaranteed to smear the eyes, so they will have to be knocked out. If you composite this version over the color original, the results are superb.
As a result of this pipeline, I would like to ask someone to invent 2 new PixelBenders. The first one I need is a Freeze tool like the freeze/lock tool for protecting regions during Liquify. Think how great this would be for use with every other PB filter.
The second one I need is a Dilate/Erode filter for my inklines. I downloaded the D/E PixelBender filter for Flash before I realized it's not compatible with Photoshop.
Thanks, and don't forget to tell users how valuable PixelBender is.