[ANN]: Gradient Kaleidoscope Galleries (and Rev 3.5 still crashing)

[Wilhelm Sanke]

According to the logs, there were 5700 hits to my website during the 
last three days (the individual images of the galleries that have to be 
downloaded with the html pages are counted) and a data-transfer volume 
of 500 MB ensued. So there has been some interest by list members. 
Locally I got positive feedback from our College of Fine Arts, where I 
had conducted seminars in the past.

Concerning the problem of the crashes, I received a detailed commentary 
off-list outlining possible causes or contingencies.

As I see it at present, the irregular crashes could be related to image 
behavior with masks, meaning related to how the engine handles masked 
images.

The last crash occured yesterday while I was online, which caused the 
Windows system error dialog to react. The error message - as far as I 
could understand it - pointed to an "exception" concerning the engine 
and mentioned "images". I tried to get a copy of the error message and 
was informed that an error file with a cryptic name would be found in 
one of the temp folders. However, apparently because I did not forward 
the error message to Microsoft, no such file was to be found afterwards. 
Next time I will forward the message to Microsoft and see whether I can 
get hold of the error file.

I will now list here a number of peculiarities I encountered while 
working with images in Revolution, some of these peculiarities could 
probably be assessed as features, others appear to be at least 
"anomalies" or even bugs:

1.  From the text of stack "More about Masks" of January, 2009,
<http://www.sanke.org/Software/MoreAboutMasksRev3.zip>
on the menu card accessed from the topright introduction button:
> A final observation concerning the creation of masks inside Revolution 
> and using the "import snapshot" format:
>
> If the resulting mask image is not first saved as an external file and 
> then imported again, meaning if it remains as freshly created inside a 
> stack or was just copied from another mask-producing stack, then this 
> mask image will have a different quality, which we might call a "pre-PNG".
>
> Pre-PNGs behave somewhat differently than normal PNGs: You cannot 
> transfer its alphamask to the image-to-be-masked when the pre-PNG is 
> hidden, at least not several times with resizing. After you have 
> resized a pre-PNG during the masking process, you might find that it 
> is suddenly "empty", but it can be restored when you copy and paste it 
> (it then appears in its original size and shape).
> A workaround to overcome this problem is to store the mask in a custom 
> property of its own and then to "initialize" the mask each time before 
> it is used in the calling script:
> "put the CPimg of img "transition" into img "transition""
>
> But of course you can easily convert a pre-PNG to a full PNG by saving 
> the image as an external file.
2. Sometimes when I apply "flip horizontal" to a masked image an 
additional part of the image becomes transparent, which may be followed 
by even more transparency when the image is flipped back, possibly 
leaving only a smaller middle part opaque. I did not succeed in exactly 
reproducing this behavior, like the crashes this happens quite 
unexpectedly, except that I noticed that I had used an algorithm to 
create a "diagonal mirror" of an image among the operations before the 
additional transparency appeared.

3. If  the mid-square of an image is turned by 90 degrees - as part to 
create a special effect - (shifting the pixels by script) this results 
in a semi-transparent overlay for the middle part when the width of the 
image is odd, i.e. you see both the original middle part and the turned 
middle part as if two image were put on top of each other with their 
blendlevels set to 50.

4. Some operations cannot be performed on an image when the ink is set 
to "notSrcCopy", e.g. replacing a color or color range by a specific 
other color

5. Exporting a snapshot to an image with a blendlevel (e.g. set to 50) 
leaves part of the former contents of the image intact, meaning you see 
both the former picture of the image + the image exported with the 
snapshot.--

Question is, are such anomalies in any way connected to the crashes I 
experience with my Gradient Kaleidoscope tool?  I have never encountered 
such crashes when using the "Imagedata Toolkit", but there I did not 
make use of masks.

Regards,

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