Even not being that much special, it is interesting; it is something of a starting point to experimentation.
All in all, I think that doing of this Orton stuff can be used for some pictures. Often you find that you have shot just regular pictures; but it could turn out that playing a bit with them you can make them outstanding.

Nice show!

The algebraic analysis of operations is a good idea. One should think about it when writing a script or a tutorial for a new method. 16 Bit will reduce the influence of rounding errors – and GEGL will make it possible to recalculate a stack of operations. We have to wait.

When the Orton effect was first mentioned in the forum I did some similar experiments. But after a while I was wondering what I was doing. It was not so much different from other technics with no name but used every day when working with gimp or other programs. The main point of the Orton effect seems to be that Mr. Orton invented the layers long before they were a standard feature of every software for photo manipulation.

There are always a lot of different ways to get to similar results. When you mentioned Mathematica I got the idea may be someone could come up with a algorithm which could help to simplify the stack of operations we apply to a picture. This could be done by evaluating algebraically the result of the operations and decompose the result back to available operations. This could reduce errors from excessive rounding.