[Nikita Zhekova]

I wish someone had answered this!

seems legit

[Nikita Zhekova]

I have a photo whose background needed blurring out, to simulate shallower depth of field. compared to adjacent areas unblurred, the blurred area was far too smooth. the rest of the photo contains pixelation as per jpeg lossy compression.
filter -> noise -> add noise didn’t do the needed job of matching the two adjacent areas. the speckles were a good start, but were too small. altering their percentage, the only available option, didn’t help.

However if you go to filters -> artistic -> paint daubs
and use a wide blurry brush,

adjusting the size of the texture to match the other areas of the photo, you get an approximation, though the resulting texture is slightly contorted to bestow ‘spontaneity’.

seems legit

[Nikita Zhekova]

a few things i’ve done have caused this, but not sure which was the seminal moment;

deleted all empty tracks -> no playback on timeline.
fearing imminent crash, saved, then saved again with new filename and exited. mistake.
on that occasion was forced to open a recent autosave, but still lost time redoing work

all in the same few mins;
grouped and disabled several audio clips on one track
imported an mp3 that had been extracted from avi to mono .wav, then converted into stereo mp3
placed the mp3 onto an empty track
-> no playback
retraced steps using ctrl+z til playback worked again.

at the time i was doing the above, i was working my way down through multiple tracks, isolating each as i went by way of the mixingn panel. wondering whether the problem might have had somethign to do with isolating one or more tracks in the mixer and then un-isolating them there. if so i have not been able to reproduce the effect.