On another forum I frequent, someone posted a link to a fake tilt-shift video and asked how it was done.

Previously I had seen still tilt-shift images and googled around to figure out how to create them using Gimp. Lots of references like this one at Gimparoo, or various blogs. One thing in common these had was using a gradient mask to blend a blurred copy with a non-blurred copy, or in the case of fancier efforts that use the focal blur plugin, a gradient to drive that plugin.

To me, these efforts left a bit to be desired, as the gradient would leave odd artifacts of focused bits of objects crossing in front of the focal plane gradient point. I figured a good way to get around this would be to construct a complete mock depth map based on the image. Here is an example of a before image, and the fake tilt shift.

Keep reading for the how-to...

Continue reading "A Better Fake Tilt-Shift with the Gimp"

Stumbling through the quagmire of the internet I came across a little project by Lukas Vojir to collect a series of user contributed "monsters" made using Processing.

It has been a while since I played with Processing, so dusting it off, and grabbing a few of the examples (most notably Blink Eye Monster) I created Ouroboros - the processing monster that eats its own tail.

Continue reading "Ouroboros: A Processing Monster"

While surfing about the net I ran across a nifty tag cloud implemented as a flash movie, WP-Cumulus. Unfortunately, it was a wordpress plugin^[?]. Fortunately the creator, Roy Tanck, was kind enough to not only open source WP-Cumulus, but to provide tips on how to incorporate it into other web sites!

I tossed out the idea in the S9Y forum and had some interest, especially once I discovered it used the SWFObject javascript which, according to the creator,

is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

So I hacked it into my local blog (sorry for the down time ) and got it working with hard-coded parameters, then migrated it into the freetag plugin that Serendipity has. Garvin (the creator of S9Y) made a few improvements, and it is now bundled into the application, and available via Sparticus, the S9Y online plugin manager!)

Previously, I had developed a small script to take an image and turn it into a GIMP gradient. This was mainly due to my desire to convert some of these tonal gradients into actual GIMP gradients. This script was posted to the gimp-plugin^[?] repository by someone else (with my permission) but seems to have been removed.

My work with paths when creating the tapered stroke script got me thinking about making a script that could sample along a path and create a gradient.

Continue reading "GIMP Script: Sample a Gradient along a Path"

Several times I have seen techniques in PhotoShop that use brush dynamics to taper a stroke. Unfortunately GIMP doesn't have this capability (yet...but it is rumoured for 2.6) so I wrote a little script-fu to do it!

Continue reading "GIMP Script: Tapered Stroke on a Path"