Filter Forge on Holiday Sale

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to announce we've started the holiday sale on Filter Forge. All editions are offered at a 70% discount, with the Baisc edition priced at only $44. The sale will continue until the end of the year.


-- Mark

Thanks Mark! That's a sweet Deal! :) and the textures you donated to the Christmas wrapping thread are awesome!

I gave the trial version a go with xara but when I use the live effect tool to bring the selected object into filterforge plugin it adds a transparent border/margin. See attached image. Is there anyway to avoid this happening? It makes it impossible to use it as a plugin in xara to create seamless tiles.

Attachment 93274

Hi Xtom first the filter you have selected in the screenshot is a photo filter it's not meant to be used as a seamless tile. Filter forge is capable of producing many effects and depending on what the filter author is trying to achieve they don't always tile seamlessly. The grunge filter can be applied to a selection in Xara with out the semi transparent margin if you tweak the filter and add a couple of components in the filter editor.

First In xara create a rectangle over your image that you want to apply the grunge to. Give this rectangle the colour you wish for your grunge.

With this rectangle selected go to your live effects and go to filter forge, one the filter forge window opens and you have the grunge filter open click open filter editor in the upper right ( don't worry you will be editing a copy of the filter so you won't lose the original if things go wrong, not that they will this is actually very easy)

Once you are in the filter editor open the components panel by clicking the components button. click external and drag an image component to the workspace near the result
click adjustments and drag a gamma component to the workspace
click Channels and drag a Set Alpha component to the workspace
Ckick and drag from the green triangle on the image component and "plug it in" to the source input on the gamma component.
Plug the gamma into the Set Alpha component in the same way

Click controls and drag a slider control into the workspace and plug it in to the gamma input of the gamma component you can name this control opacity or something like that. By controling how the gamma affects the externa image that is your selected image in Xara you can control the opacity of your grunge layer.

Click save filter and name your tweaked filter click apply to apply the filter and go back to Xara. Once the filter has been applied lock it by clicking the lock icon on the info bar. Currently All Filter Forge filters must be locked in Xara to avoid an error when Xara tries to redraw the effect. This has been reported to Filter Forge and last I heard they are working on a fix

This tweaked filter still won't be seamless because of the way it's set up to frame the image, but you can find some filters like this one that do produce seamless results.

Thanks for the tips Frances. I went for the basic filterforge though and it doesn't have access to the editor. But no matter what you bring into it from Xara and no matter what filter you use it ends up with a transparent border around the imported image. I think it's Xara that is adding this extra space around the image because I also tried using filterforge with PSX3, irfanview and stanalone and it works fine, no transparent border. You can actually see the same border I'm talking about in your second screenshot, when you import you shouldn't see any checkered area around the image, it should fill the entire area. Try importing straight from Xara and then compare it by exporting same image and importing it using just the standalone program and you'll see the difference. I can workaround it but it's a shame that I can't use filterforge with the live effect tool in Xara to create seamless images.

Sorry for a noob question – I'm quite unfamiliar with Xara, and its workflow is somewhat different from other graphic apps.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by angelize

First In xara create a rectangle over your image that you want to apply the grunge to.

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Do you refer to a vector rectangle? If yes, does this mean XDP doesn't have a bitmap selection function similar to that of Photoshop/PaintShopPro?
Filter Forge expects a bitmap selection, not a vector object, to be passed to the plugin – this may be the cause of the issue.

-- Mark

I tried with with just a photo (no vector shapes) and it still adds a transparent border.

Up in the top level of filters can you apply any of those with seamless tiling checked? Here is a screen grab of what I get when I run FF as plugin and I have a vector shape selected in Xara and I have seamless tiling checked in the filter settings. The filter I was using in the screen grab is called Foil and I think it's one that comes pre loaded with FF.

also I have attached a tweaked version of the Grunge filter which you should be able to apply to a shape in Xara, it isn't set up to tile seamlessly but I may look at doing a seamless grunge for use with Xara some time soon.

I had to zip the filter file as the forum won't accept the Filter Forge file as an attachment, once you download and unzip the file you should be able to open it in Filter Forge by double clicking it. Once you have opened the filter it will appear in the program list (I think under creative but I could be wrong on that) and should remain in the list when you next use FF as a plug in.

Some of the filters including the foil one you posted actually cover everything on the original image including the transparent border. But the underlying issue of the transparent border is still there and you can see it depending on the filter you use.

For example I wanted to add some rain drops to an image and make it seamless, but because most of the water filters overlay the original image with transparency you can notice the really bad effect with the border. And if you click the show original image checkbox at the top you can see the checkered background border aswell. That shouldn't be there. If you bring the image into filterforge using any other method other than xara you don't face this problem with the transparent border, the original image covers the entire workspace and you can make tileable images using even more of the filters including the water ones.

Edit: here's two quick screenshots showing the same image with a water filter applied...You can see the transpaerent border that Xara is adding really screws up the tiling effect

Attachment 93313Attachment 93314

Hi Frances,


I've downloaded the FF3 trial and pointed XDPX to it through the options tab as you showed on one of your tutorials.

I've just typed a letter onto the work area and applied a few random effects. Rather than just filling the vector shape I get the effect as a square tile covering the entire letter?


Any idea what I'm doing wrong?


I also tried copying the FF3 plugin from the programmes folder and dropping it in the PSPlugins folder within the Xara picture editor but same thing happens. You didn't seem to do anything different on your "Bling" tutorial and the effect was just applied within the bounds of the text?


Any help graciously accepted,

Mike.

Hi Mike, see my post #4 for instructions on how use the filter editor to tweak a filter to apply it to a shape or text :)

Mike some of the filters do what you are describing, and some fill the shape. I'm still trying to come to terms with it myself and don't know how to tell the difference, but there is one. I was messing around with one and changed something, gave a unique name and saved it, but that particular filter I created would only create a rectangular area and would no longer fill a shape. I for one need to spend more time with it and figure it out. From what I have seen the tutorials Frances did are among the best.

Thanks Larry, By the way you can mess around with filters in the editor to your hearts content and save your resulting derivation and the original filter from the program or the Library is still there untouched. Only the filters you create either from scratch or by editing a pre made filter will be saved in the My Filters section. The filters that come with the program and those you download from the library will be in the upper two sections.

Larry/Frances,


Thanks for trying to help but I just don't "get it" yet. I've randomly chosen 8 filters and all I get is the rectangular box and not just the fill within the vector shape that I'm after. I've looked in the components tab and can see nothing that would describe "switching" the fill to within the selected vector shape. It all looks rather complicated and feels more like a physics text book than a plugin to my eyes. I'd like to persevere with this but any extra help or guidance would be welcome.


The UI for EyeCandy 7 is so simple and slick but stability issues with XDPX rather limit it's appeal. Gawd, it's so frustrating but I suppose anything worthwhile requires a bit of persistence.




Mike

I'll tell you what Mike, if you can bear with it for a couple of days I'll put together a video tut, but I need to deal with some real world stuff first :)

Frances,


That would be brilliant. I really appreciate your offer.


If I could get to grips with it and find out what it can do for me I still have time to get FF3 at the discounted price before year end!


I'll keep checking in to keep an eye out for your tutorial.


Thanks again,


Mike

In the meantime, Mike have you had a look at any of the previous videos I've done on Xara plus Filter Forge? There are links to them through out this forum or if you click the youtube link in my signature you'll find them (and a bunch more Xara videos)

I'm hoping to have time by maybe wed, at this point though I'm not sure it seems Mother Nature has decided to add shovelling snow to the list of things I have to do today!

Frances,


I've watched tutorials 1 to 4, (the Bling one twice). I watch them again though.


BTW with some of the EyeCandy plugins, such as fur, you can designate for the fur to spill over the vector edge giving a much more realistic effect. If you use the "intersect shapes" method of cutting a shape from a bitmap fill background the edges usually look too regular. Whilst this looks OK for chrome etc it's not too effective on organic type fills imo.
Can FF3 give the random/spilling over the vector edge effect like EC fur?


Mike

Ok here it is, Thanks for being so patient :) In the video as well as showing you how to edit a filter to make it apply to a vector shape, I also did a quick bit about using filter forge as a stand alone to create a seamless tiling pattern that can be used as a fill.

Frances,


What a great, clear and concise explanation - fantastic.


I think I was right with the physics text book analogy - it is fairly complex but you do get infinite control over the effects. You broke it down into "bite size" pieces though and made the process
easily understandable. I strongly recommend others that may be interested in using FF3 with XaraDPX to watch the tutorials.


I probably pushing my luck here.... but is there a way to make the effect "spill over" the vector shape so that the edges aren't so clean cut ant regular? I'm thinking along the lines of EyeCandy's "fur" filter where you can specify how much fur spills over the edges of the vector shape it's being applied to?


Gratefully,

Mike

OK, I'm still having problems with filter forge. When I try to lock the effect I always get this error, and I even went so far as to uninstall both programs and reinstall them but that did not help. It does not matter if I lock the effect or just change the settings and apply I always get this same error and XDPX stops responding. Any ideas? I think I'll contact Filter Forge about this problem and see if they have a solution.

Attachment 93657

@ Mike: No as far as I can tell Filter Forge does not have this feature, but if you have Designer pro X you can use FF as a stand alone to create a seamless tiling image and fill your shape with it and then use the shape builder to roughen the edges of your shape to mimic the effect.

@ Larry: yes do contact Filter Forge support make sure to keep that screenshot and when they respond to you they may want to see it. Last I heard they are aware of these errors and are looking into fixing them, but they had some major problems with their website servers and they had to spend time fixing that instead of working on the upcomming version 4 which is still in an open beta. In the meantime you can still use FF as a stand alone to create many interesting and unique seamless tiling images (just don't forget to make sure that seamless tiling is enabled in the settings!) and use these as bitmap fills and transparencies.

France's, I tried the stand alone, but, I keep getting the message that my version cannot export high quality images. What I have been able to do though is fill a rectangle in Xara and export that as a png. Then I can use it as a bitmap fill. So far using my version has been a real bummer.

From what I can find even the basic version which doesn't give you the filter editor should be able to export images up to 3000 X 3000 pixels. If you can not export images that large your best bet is to contact FF support. I wish I could be of more help.

Thanks Frances,
I may wait till we get back from our trip to contact them. Leaving in the morning, returning Christmas Day. It's about an 8-10 hour drive. Merry Christmas to everyone.

I guess I missed something. How is it that all these offers from Filter Forge are not considered Spam?
- Andy

See the closing line of this post, Andy. Should answer your question :)

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...205#post463205