"curves" options

Do you mean something like this:

Curve.ffxml

hi ronviers,

no, i was referring to the thumbnail preview of any curves component, the actual curve of a curves component.

thanks, ssamm. i guess that's what i dont quite understand, why the curve has to touch the bottom. i know that's the way it is in almost any graphic editor, but i must be missing something about how curves work.

Now I think I understand what you’re asking – after ssamm’s further elaboration. Here is a small block from the skew filter I had been working on. Notice the impulse curves that while in absolute terms are touching the bottom, they have to since they’re functions, they are relatively higher which constrains their effects to a localized region of the artboard. If you play with the sliders you will see that all changes are made globally but on a relative basis. The Resize/Crop/Move has better examples of this but in my opinion they are not as clear. I hope this helps but more likely this is something you already knew.

Curve demo.ffxml

ssamm, thanks i guess it was the shaded blue that was throwing me. curves in photoshop and psp display as a line, not a shaded area. so, i'd actually lost the whole idea of plotting along a curve and was trying to plot the whole shaded area. so, you're right, a shaded circle wouldnt work right. i mean, you could do it, but it wouldnt outcome like i wanted/thought and it would be outputting two values for the same X position, one at Y(1), the lower and another at Y(2), the higher on the curve.

ok, got it now, except for one thing. i can make a feathered effect with a curve and the curve thumb will show this as a sort of lighter shaded blue where the feathering occurs. is this like a broken line effect in the curve? you said:

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This seems to give the curve an extra dimension where each horizon line in the gradient has it's own curve (instead of always using the same curve for each line). ...At least that's how I'm understanding it.

not quite sure what you're referring to when you say 'horizen line', but i'm guessing you mean that lighter shaded area and how it sort of looks feathered, and that each of those lighter shadings is like it's own curve/horizen, yes, no?

Maybe something like this?

CD2.ffxml

It may be that the range of the function vastly out numbers the display’s (artbox dimensions) ability to graph the domain so it only appears that there are multiple y’s.

Kraellin,

About inputting a green component into a curve, I'm only guessing at what's going on, but I'll try to explain my idea better...
In the blue curve thumbnail (in your example image above), I think we are looking at several curves on top of each other. Each curve will adjust just one horizontal row of "pixels" in the profiled gradient. (I.e. row-1 is adjusted by curve-1, row-2 is adjusted by curve-2, etc, etc.)


I'll attach a simpler example below. Instead of using perlin noise, I'm just inputting a linear gradient (rotated at 270 degrees) into the curve's threshold. (I then adjusted smooth to 0 for simplicity's sake.) This rotated gradient is creating vertical/threshold curves, where at the top (of the profiled gradient) the threshold curve is at 100, in the middle the threshold is 50, and at the bottom the threshold is 0.
So when theses curves "profile" the final gradient, the top row will only use color 1. The middle row will at first use color 1, then halfway across switch to color 2. The bottom row will only use color 2.
(So the idea here is that in the profiled gradient, there is no single location that is getting 2 different Y values, but rather each row is using a different curve.)


I hope this helps, but to be honest, things start getting unpredictable to me when I add in the slightest of complexities...


curvewithgreencomponent.ffxml

Interesting, Ron. It got me confused...

I'm starting to think that the "row" idea may be misleading though, where it might be better to just say each "area" uses a different curve.
I found a help page in the FF manual titled "Map Inputs" (under the "Components" section) which may be helpful here. However, still with me, I'll make a certain combination and not fully see why it gives certain results.
For example, in my attached filter above, if that first gradient is rotated to 0 degrees, I don't see why it results in periodic vertical gray lines with a white background in the final gradient. Since the curve's Smooth parameter is set to 0, how is there gray in the final gradient? (Maybe it does make two Y's for one location and then it blends them?)
...

Ron,

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I think there is a single curve and I think there is only one y.

Hmmm, I was/am thinking that there is a single curve for each location, ...but in total there would be 600x600 (or whatever) slightly different curves for the entire image/gradient.
That is, for each location, it uses the "same curve", but a different variable for the parameter that the map inputs to. For example, if the input-map's top left corner is black/0, then the threshold for the Step Curve will be 0 when it calculates the top left corner of the profiled gradient.
(BTW, I'm not sure if I'm repeating what you meant or saying something different.)

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FF must be compressing x by doing a simple arithmetic shift left on even and shift right on odd (a simply multiply) – whatever its doing it does it fast. Maybe the intermittent gray lines are just harmonics.

I didn't really understand this, but it sounds possible.

From what I can tell, the gray lines are just an anomaly when the input-gradient is linear, and when the profile gradient has the same rotation as the input gradient. By giving the input gradient a slight bias or gain, then things seem to work as predicted. I'll attach a filter to illustrate what I'm looking at.



curvewithgreencomponent2.ffxml

Maybe we should think of the additional y’s as x’es on z. Curves that extend perpendicular to x and y axis. That would make each component a cube.