Rob A's (Im)personal Blog

A Better Fake Tilt-Shift with the Gimp

nospam@example.com (Rob A) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:48:13 -0500

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

Final

Original

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"

Ouroboros: A Processing Monster

nospam@example.com (Rob A) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:13:00 -0500

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.

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Flash Tag Cloud for Serendipity

nospam@example.com (Rob A) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:20:28 -0500

GIMP Script: Sample a Gradient along a Path

nospam@example.com (Rob A) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:11:00 -0400

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.

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GIMP Script: Tapered Stroke on a Path

nospam@example.com (Rob A) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:50:31 -0400

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!

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