Subject: [ANN] "Seamless Tiles Generator" released

[Wilhelm Sanke]

This stack - produced in the alternative Metacard IDE - was intended to 
be part of the enhancements of my "Imagedata Toolkit", but is now 
available as a separate application. It should run on all platforms 
(tested on Windows and Mac OS X). On Mac OS X it needs at least an 
Revolution engine version from 2.7 up to work properly because of the 
restrictions as to image size and divisibility for backpatterns in 
earlier versions.

The stack contains its own "Answer Dialog" as a substack, because I need 
the functionality to place the dialog close to the buttons that use the 
dialog. This dialog should cause no problems with newer versions of 
Revolution. If you get a warning because of a "duplicate stack", simply 
disregard this.

You can download the zipped stack (6 MB) directly from 
<http://www.sanke.org/Software/SeamlessTiles.zip> or

from page "Sample Stacks" of my website <http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>

where you also find a short description.-
===================================

What the "Seamless Tiles Generator" does:

A few sample images are embedded. You can import your own JPG and PNG 
files, which will be resized to 640 X 480 pixels.

 From this basic image you select a rectangle for further processing. 
You can select

- the whole image (not very useful as a tile)
- predefined large and small rectangles: You use a draggable graphic to 
select a segment from the basic image.
- segments of a customized size: The height and width of the selecting 
graphic can be adjusted using sliders right and below of the basic 
image, and then also be dragged within the rect of the basic image.

The selected rectangle of the image is then transferred to page "create 
seamless tile" using the button on the upper left of the card.

On card "create seamless tile" you can choose between three options to 
create a tile:

- "Overlay mirrored" mirrors the "overlapping" parts of the tile borders 
with an optimized transition blending
- "Overlay stretched" stretches a selected border region into both 
directions
- "Overlay cropped" produces a blended overlay of the border regions and 
crops the resulting tile to provide exact tile borders (This is - to my 
experience - the most often used variant of producing seamless tiles 
(Photoshop, PainShopPro etc.))

For all three options you can determine five sizes of  the "transition 
width" of the overlapping areas, from "wide" to "very small".

Of course, it depends very much on the nature and structure of the image 
segment used for producing the seamless tile which "option" and 
"transition width" is most suited for your purposes.

The produced tile can be tested immediately as a screen-size pattern.

The tile can be modified (before and after producing the "seamless" tile):

- proportional resizing
- simplifying colors (brighten, gray scale, three-threshold gray, 
"reduce colors" to 8, 27, 64, and 125 colors)
- changing colors ("complementary" negative colors, "rotate colors" 
successively red, green, and blue, "sepia", and "duplicate colors")
- matrix filters (7 filters are provided which could be useful for 
background patterns: "fine emboss", "contours", three variants of 
"lithography", "gray relief", and "red tint"). An external is not needed 
here.

All modifying effects can be used successively, e.g. you could "rotate" 
the "red tint" to green, or "brighten" the "contours" filter effect 
until you have got an unobtrusive background etc..

Finally the tile can be exported in PNG format for further use.-

Enjoy and experiment in case you like this sort of stuff.

-- Wilhelm Sanke