Topic awaiting preservation: My first released plug-in: Level3

Still dinking around with junk.

Long story short: I was getting tired of doing this the long way and decided to make my own plug to do my grunt in a way that I like. Filter Meister ahoy.

It's primary function is to desaturate using L from Lab. Apparently Photoshop does this a little bit different than from what I've been able to find. With a little trial-n-error, I managed to get the error down to 15%. Even then, the % error occurs when Sat is around 75% for most Hues. I find this acceptable and haven't bothered with more detective work.

The desat tweaks are very similar to Levels, but with my own personal twist.
There are 4 sliders:
1. Black
2. Low Gray
3. High Gray
4. White

Black and White operate like in Levels for setting the black point and white point. However, Low Gray and High Gray 'split' the grey slider like in Blend If. Any value that falls between Low and High will be 128, then the rest is linearly interpolated to the appropriate black or white points.

Rather than spend time with a better over-all interpolation scheme, I went with order of precidence. Also didn't bother with error checking in this area. That is, you can move the sliders around more than you should be able to and the results will be funky if you move the sliders out of order, so to speak.

Save As to directory of your choice.
When fire up PS, should show Filter > Tech Slop > Level3.

Level3.8bf

Win XP SP1
PS 7
and it works dandy for me.
No idea for Win XP SP2 or PS CS.

My uses? Primarily for my own wallpapers.
I have my own set of rules that I follow for wallpapers, and Level3 takes care of a lot of my rules.

For just messing around, it's kind of fun to use Level3 to grunge it up real quick.
Drop a bunch of photos into the same doc, Level3 them, then mess with blending modes. Mostly grey-centric modes like Hard Light, but whatever.

Still getting the hang of this stuff. For example, I still have to figure out how to make the preview a little bit bigger. Once I get that ironed out and a few other little things, I'll have even more junk to toss around. For example, desat based on L (Lab) and the 6 major hues with tweak-arific weights.

This work just kicks ass. Many thanks for sharing it I really apreciate that :-] And oh yes it just works fine on photoshop 7 and photoshop cs as well. With or without SP2 installed :-] Thats great.

Thanks for dropping a note about that, Dreamer. Mucho appreciated. And you're welcome.

I've got a few more ideas for a few more controls. Gotta learn a little more about nesting, though.

You know, I just love writing my own junk.
My tweaks, my level of control, my way under the hood - love it.
Kinda wish I had gotten into FM or FF a few years ago.
If/when I get far enough, I'll set my sights on the SDK. Then I'll seriously start tearing it up.

Well it also works with Win2k and PS7.

Very smooth ... thanks for sharing

sib

Very Nice!

Somebody give'im a Cookie will ya. =)

Thanks for caring and sharing WarJ.

Got to thinking about more tweaks and I don't think I will add any more. The things that I was thinking of can easily be done with Levels, and all I was really after was a quick-n-sleazy way of splitting the grey.

Splitting the grey, heh. A trick that I find very useful, and no quick-n-sleazy way of doing it with stock PS. There are a few things, like Selective Colour, but I find the results *very* unsatisfactory.

With some of the fiddling that I've been doing with related things, I realized a simple variation on a desat trick. You know the ad-layer combo for desating a photo? You know, one HSB ad-layer with Sat=0, then another ad-layer of choice to pre-manipulate the channels and hues. Yeah, that one.

Instead of using HSB with Sat=0, try this:
Fill a layer with any shade of grey.
Set blending mode to Saturation.
Then ad-layer of your choice inbetween for further tweaking.

What the grey layer will do is desat to L in Lab. In some situations this is good because it will 'map' the high sat hues to human perception. For example, yellows will be brighter and blues will be darker. The difference can be subtle, but it's nice having that little extra oomph before the real tweaking begins.

Of course, as that kind work goes, not for all occassions.
Use the force, Luke.

Thanks again, folks.
If you come across anything interesting with Level3, a combo or something, I, for one, would like to hear about it.
I mean, Level3 might be a stupid filter trick. I'm sure most of you went through one of those filter crazy phases and grabbed the infamous FF/FM collections. Largely junk with no real use outside of getting crazy with the Cheese Whiz.
Hmmm...

Maybe later I'll ramble about some of my fiddlings.

(Edited by warjournal on 10-06-2004 14:54)

Outstanding, Warjournal.
Kudos, and thank you.

Past day or two have been pretty taxing. I'm going to relax by rambling about some junk that got me headed in this direction. Here come some stupid HSB tricks.


Extracting Hue

Hear a lot about tonal variation. What combination of HSB wiggle does this include? I wanted to know the role that hue plays in tonal variation, so I set about studying the hue of various photos.

The first thing to do is to 'level out' the lightness. You have to get rid of the lightness wiggle before you can get to the hue or sat.
New layer above photo.
Fill with 50% grey. Yes, it has to be 50%.
Set blending mode to Luminosity.

Once you do that, you should be looking at some ugly pastel-ish colours.

Above the 50% grey lum layer, add an Ad-Layer > HSB and bring the Sat all the way up.
What you should be left with is a beautiful rainbow of hues.

In doing all of that, damn near pure hue is all that is left. Any place that is sat=0 will now be 50% grey.
Although, there may still be a bit of wiggle. In my tests, I haven't gotten more than 5% error, which is more than acceptable.

By examining hue in such a way, I learned a few things.
When it comes to fleshtones, hue is rather uniform. This means that tonal variation in fleshtones is primarily in the S and B.
Also, I got a pleasant surprise when I took a few peeks at the raw hue of leather. Wow.


Extracting Sat

I can't even come close to getting raw saturation with stock PS tools.
Sat is too dependant on B and is proving extremely problematic.
Guess I'll have to write a plug for this one of these days.


Extracting Lum

Start a new layer above the photo, fill with any shade of grey, and set blending mode to Saturation.
Any shade of grey has sat=0, and sat=0 means no hue.
All you are left with is L in Lab.

Of course, the L in Lab is a far cry from B in HSB.
But, once again, I find this acceptable.


Man, I must be getting extra sloppy in my old age. All of this error crap and doing things the wrong way - and I'm accepting it. What's up with that? Where have my standards gone?


In fiddling with all of this, I came up with a combo that I'm rather fond of.
Start with extracting the hue as above.
Copy the original photo and order it above the hue.
Set the copy of the photo to Saturation.

By now you should have a bit of a mess. However, I really like it for artsy-fartsy-ifying a photo. Well, not the end result as is, but as a better starting point for arsty-farsty-ifying a photo.
For example, I like to mess things up and smooth them out with Smudge set to around 25% with spacing turned off.
Not only does that helps smooth and mess, but also adds in the human touch lacking in a stock tool only approach.
After a pass with Smudge (or whatever your prefer), run with it.
I like tossing Smart Blur intot he mix.

This is one of the main reasons why I wrote Level3.
When dinking around with these things, I like to add a little extra punch with the highs and lows, but I was getting tired of doing it the long way.

That's enough out of me.
Back under my rock for a bit.

Yesterday I knocked out another 'filter' in VB6. This one is based on Worley/Voronoi but with my own little twist as I have some issues with Worley/Voronoi. Not that W/V isn't good, but it just doesn't cut it for some of my uses.

Scatter a bunch of points using a threshhold, create a sphere at the points, give them some z wiggle, then blend them together using Lighten.



Currently, all of the spheres are of the same radius, but I'll add some basic fractalness to take care of that.

Right now I'm a little apprehensive about converting to Filter Meister. Even if I jam on it, converting will take me about a week.

So, are there any code geeks out there willing to give it a shot? Converting this from VB to FM?

Filter Meister
Give FM a look and let me know if you want to convert.
I know I will appreciate it.

edit:
Nevermind.
If I want to learn how to do this, then I've got to learn how to do this.

(Edited by warjournal on 10-10-2004 18:48)

When I look at the humungous number of tutorials that started with either noise or clouds/dclouds, the two only fractal-like filters in Photoshop (that I can remember now), I wonder why there are only two of them!

You should submit your Bubbles Plug-in/Code to Adobe, so that they include it in PS CS2!!!!

How many new creative uses could have such "basic" filters? (I'm rather against "ready made" filters, where the result it sufficient by itself -for some/a lot of users-)

Go Stroker/WJ, go!!!

Pierre Courtejoie

Thanks, Spec.

I did add interations to the VB version. Very nice.
When I set about converting to FM, ran into a basic problem - can't do circles for some odd reason. I think it has something to do with internal handling of data types, but I can't say for sure. Even joined the mailing list, but my submits aren't showing up. Gonna have to talk to someone about that.

Photoshop definitely needs more procedural texture filters.

edit:
Minor Update

I've been messing with the scripting plug for PS7. Seems to be working fine, but it's a bit slower than I like.

Script 'connects' to PS.
Grab height and width.
Do the cellular thing.
Dump it into the clipboard.
Back to PS.
Add a layer.
Paste.

Not quite all the way there, though.

Also, I *might* be able to compile it for PS CS, but I'm not entirely sure.

:sigh:
When am I going to get my chores done, damnit?

(Edited by warjournal on 10-28-2004 21:01)

Ah... fuckit.

It does exactly what I want in the way that I want.
Fiddle with controls, hit Go, and it's dumped to the clipboard.
Then just paste it.

cellular.zip

Input X and Y dimensions.

Threshhold for more or less spheres (might have to tweak the ranges under the hood).

Radius is the base radius.
Wiggle is the percentage to randomize the base radius.
For example, Radius = 50 and Wiggle = 50 will result in spheres 50 to 150.

Interations
How many times to run the entire process. For each interations, Radius is divided appropriately.

Higher threshholds, larger radius, and more interations = massive speed hit.

The speed isn't that great, anyways. Because of this, I didn't use progress bars. Instead, a dialog will pop up to let you know that it's done.

Works dandy for me.

(Edited by warjournal on 10-29-2004 01:03)

WJ, what is this file? an exe?

Pierre Courtejoie

Yes, it is an exe totally separate from PS.
It does it's thing and dump to the clipboard.
Windows like before.

That HSB thing I was talking about - I'm finding it much easier to do fleshtone work with it. Separate the HS from B, do some work, then put back together.
Although, it's not a complete separation, but it's working great for me.
Finding it much easier to match fleshtones and even 'meld' flesh together from different sources.

Kind of weird that there's still quite a bit of stuff about this that I don't understand. For example, Sat is giving me a hard time for some reason.

Also been thinking about G-Maps and selections lately.
How would you like a selection tool based on interesecting HSB values?

Hey, if anybody out there can come up with a way of getting Sat to greyscale using stock PS tools, I would greatly appreciate it. This one has been vexing me for several months. I have no problem with H or B, but S is a bitch.

Man, too much stuff to dissect, understand, and apply.

edit:
Nevermind about the Sat problem.
I figured it out and it sucks.
Turns out I was doing a little something wrong.
Oh, the embarressment and wasted hours.

(Edited by warjournal on 10-31-2004 23:05)

Holy crap.
Talk about ChOps.

This is a quick fiddle I just did with interesecting hue and sat to extract hair.
This is the first time I tried it with absolutely no feel for it.
Not only that, but I tried several background colours and this is the ugliest one I could find.



For a quick fiddle with no feel, shows potential.

Damnit.
And I promised myself I wouldn't write any more junk.
:sigh:

In the extras folder on the install cd, There should be a HSB/HSL plug-in, It's a hack and kind of goofy but might do the trick.


J. Stuart J.