[ANN] Seamless Tiles Generator 2

[Wilhelm Sanke]

Version 2 of my "Seamless Tiles Generator" of last year.

The stack should run on all platforms (tested on Windows and Mac OS X). 
On Mac OS X it needs at least a 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 (8 MB) directly from 
<http://www.sanke.org/Software/SeamlessTiles2.zip> or

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

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What the "Seamless Tiles Generator 2" does:

You can import JPG and PNG files - either in "real" size or set to sizes 
640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, or 1600X1200.
The last imported image can always be retrieved using button "reset 
imported image".

A few sample images are embedded. The first two with a size 640X480, the 
last one in 6 sizes from 400X300 to 1600X1200 and as "real size" with 
2048X1536 pixels.

 From the chosen image you select a rectangle for further processing. 
The various possibilities to select in version 1 of  stack "Seamless 
Tiles" have now been replaced by a single selection graphic which can be 
resized using the red handle at the bottomright corner and dragged 
around on the 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 (of 
which the first two are unique, i.e. nowhere else to be found) to create 
a seamless 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
- "paler colors" : make colors successively paler to produce unobtrusive 
backpatterns, which is probably one of the most important buttons of the 
stack
- 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")
- five quick "hues" filters
- matrix filters (12 filters are provided which could be useful for 
background patterns: "fine emboss", "textured emboss", "contours", 
"thick contours", three variants of "lithography", "gray relief", "red 
tint", "despeckle 3x3", and "despeckle full"). An external is not needed 
here.
The despeckle filters rely on a "median" algorithm and do more than 
simply remove noise from the image; especially the "despeckle full" 
filter, which produces painting-like tiles.

All modifying effects can be combined 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..

Eventually, the tile can be exported in PNG format for further use.


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