[ANN] Preview Gallery for "Imagedate Toolkit 3"

[Wilhelm Sanke]

I have uploaded a preview gallery for the forthcoming "Imagedata Toolkit 
3" at

<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia/PreviewToolkit3.htm>

An interim version of toolkit 3 will be released during the next week.

What's new in  interim version 3?

While the focus of the "imagedata toolkit 2" was on "hues", toolkit 3 
concentrates both on median-despeckle filters and the distortion and 
deformation of images to achieve various kinds of "painting" effects. 
Both filter categories have to be used in conjunction to produce such 
effects.

There are 12 such median-despeckle filters, the most powerful of them is 
"despeckle extreme", which does not only remove noise, but also minor 
details, thus achieving larger color areas in an image.
I have discarded the "Kuwahara" filter of "Imagedata Toolkit 2". While 
it was a fine exercise to port this known filter to Revolution, it was 
really the slowest of my adapted scripted filters and much less powerful 
than my "despeckle extreme" filter, which is also 3 times faster.

The distortion/deformation filters comprise:

- various kinds of multi-pixel noise
- solid and blended rects of different sizes
- the dissolution of images by shapes of various sizes (ovals, 
rectangles, regular polynoms - triangles, rectangles, pentagons -, and 
the application of this dissolution either at random or in a systematic 
fashion - dissolving the image with vertical columns of shapes.

Other improvements of interim version 3:

- the slight color shift when using the "jitter" filter has been fixed 
(there was a one-char typo)

- a "wet paint" filter has been added to "jitter and noise"

- the scripted "blur" filters (as opposed to matrix filters) now 
comprise "progressive blurs" with pixel distances vertically and 
horizontally from 2 to 8 and for "extreme blurs" with pixel distances 
from 10 to 60. These blur filters with their precise and powerful 
effects are genuinely new and nowhere else to be found.

- a "venetian mirror" option has been added under "mirrors": reflections 
of any size can be added inside the images horizontally and/or 
vertically, which also provides the possibility to produce 
kaleidoskop-like pictures.

- special "max" and "min" effects have been added as a variation of the 
despeckle-median filters (using the median algorithms, but substituting 
the median function by minimum and maximum), which then need another - 
despeckle or lithography - filter to achieve worth-while effects.

- images can be exported both as JPEG and PNG.--

The final "Imagedata Toolkit 3", which probably will be released in a 
month, will also have the following additional features:

- adding horizontal, vertical, and diagonal "gradient noise"

- replacing colors: selecting a color-to-be-replaced by clicking on the 
image and choosing a replace-color by either also clicking on the image 
or a color wheel. This color replacement can be implemented for a 
specific color or a selected color range with the additional option to 
choose a computed gray-average as the basis for replacement

- simplifying colors: similar procedure as above: the selected color 
will replace a defined color range
´
- adding transparency to selected areas of an image, implemented also in 
a similar fashion as with replacing and simplifying colors (see above). 
As the one of the main features of the Imagedata Toolkit are two 
superimposed images, the underlying image will appear in the transparent 
areas, thus producing a new image that can then be saved or exported as 
a new non-transparent image.-

The current "Imagedata Toolkit 2" is still available - for those 
interested to experiment with structures and colors in images and photos 
in the meantime until Imagedata Toolkit 3 will be released -  at

<http://www.sanke.org/Software/ImagedataToolkit.zip>

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>