Re: Photorealistic Clouds using...photos!
Yes. I think I will continue documenting the bitmap side of Xara for a few months, on and off, because there's neat stuff in there—as you can see with this Bleach mode example in combination with the Levels command.
The real "trick" to this clouds thing lies in the Bleach type transparency. Anyone who has a passing familiarity with Photoshop understands that Bleach Transparency type is also called Screen blending mode and it's actually a math calculation. When you use Bleach transparency, all the colors in the bitmaps that are lighter than the background tend to go toward light color or pure white. All colors that are darker than the background become invisible. The result of this operation visually is always a lighter color than you begin with.
And that is why if you use Levels to make the blue sky around my cloud pictures absolutely black, when you then put it into Bleach mode, the sky becomes invisible.
Get it?
This is a rich, fertile area of study in Xara, and really only the tip of an iceberg.
We'll do some more, right?
-g
Re: Photorealistic Clouds using...photos!
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Re: Photorealistic Clouds using...photos!
I wanted to do something using your cloud technique and the technique I am workiing on for making planets. This may not be very good but at the moment it's the best I have to offer. All the manipulation was done using XDPX. There is much to learn here Gare. Keep up the good work.
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Lately I have a real bug for doing planets.
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Re: Deep Space Clouds here!
I went abstract :) I experimented with layering spheres and two of the galactic images and different contone colours and transparency modes until I came up with a composition I liked.
Re: Deep Space Clouds here!
That's wonderful, Frances, and once again I've pushed the focus of this thread off-topic, haven't I?
In case anyone is interested, the name of the program I used to generate these "fractal flames" is Apophysis, it's open source and free. I'd love to say it's therapeutic like making seamless textures in Filter Forge, but it's not. It's actually wicked hard to get interesting images on your own and loading random samples will get you where you want to go, instead of trying to understand fractals and the underlying Chaos Theory.
My Best,
Gary