Caricature challenge

[Wilhelm Sanke]

Most things have already been said, and I will try to keep my comment short.

Bush was not a specific target for me, but more of a random choice to 
exemplify the new "caricature" features of my Toolkit. It could have 
chosen Hillary or Barack, or Putin for that matter.
I remember, someone - about half a year ago? - posted the address of a 
flash clip on this list which showed "Bush falling through the clouds - 
forever". This drew a lot of responses, as  far a s I remember not one 
of them negative, and no one complained that this list was not the 
proper forum for such occasional stuff. So I felt on the safe side with 
my choice.
As has already been pointed out: No specific political or national 
intentions on my side and least of all to antagonize Chipp as a citizen 
of Texas (By the way, I very much liked the description of Texan 
peculiarities in John Gunther's book "Inside USA").

And concerning Chipp's last post:

Chipp Walters chipp at chipp.com wrote on Wed Dec 19, 2007

>
>    
> Terry,
> (snip)
> I think you'll find it difficult to distort imageData the way you want 
> to in
> Rev without an external.
>
> Wilhelm's toolkit, while very complete and in it's right a wonderful 
> set of
> scripts, isn't setup to do this sort of thing. In fact, part of the 
> basis of
> his original toolkit were derived from some convolution matrix code I had
> generated years ago.
>
> best,
> Chipp



I think my attempt of a caricature indeed shows what can be done by 
manipulation of imagedata with Revolution -  even without  externals,  
although in different ways as demanded by Terry and proposed by Ken.  I 
had described this in more detail in my post, and these new routines 
(which will be part  of the next version of  my ImagedataToolkit)  had 
not been specifically designed to produce caricatures, but simply to  
copy and paste parts  of an image elsewhere,  to enlarge, shrink, and 
flip  them, and to  integrate the  selected ovals,  rects, or polygons 
with  transparent fringes into the  same or an another picture. 
Manipulating the Bush photo with the six alterations was a matter of 
about five minutes.

Chipp Walter - with his old stack he mentions - and Ken Ray - with his 
imagedata webpages -  were the ones that opened the world of imagedata 
for me.

I  give  Chipp credit for his external in the introduction to the 
Toolkit and have given him credit  elsewhere. Chipp's external later was 
replaced by Derek Bump's one, which did  not require to script around 
the Endian issue.
I  had an exchange with Chipp about the changes I applied to his 
non-external  script to use matrix filters, i.e. without the  external.
Here the intention of Chipp had been to demonstrate that Revolution was 
capable to use matrix filters even without an external. Speed was no 
consideration  for Chipp at that time and speed was not  needed in that 
sample stack of Chipp as the used image was  very small.

As I worked with larger images in my Toolkit I tried to rewrite the 
non-external script and succeeded in reducing the execution time for 
640x480 images from 90 to 7 seconds on a 2 GHz computer, which you can 
see using the present Toolkit.
Mark Waddingham, in a post last week concerning bug # 5113, still found 
additional potential in the script to reduce execution time even more, 
which is now down to 4.7 seconds on my Windows computer and 3.4 seconds 
on my MacBook Pro with Leopard.
Neverless I asked Mark, if also externals for 5x5 and 7x7 matrix filters 
could be added for Revolution - and both for Mac and Windows.

But, of course, matrix filters are only a limited part of the features 
of my present and upcoming Imagedata Toolkits.

Best regards,

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