Rip it up....

yep cool

Hey Red, looking good!!!

How is it going with the 'Adobe' stuff???

Sorry to hear that you have to go through that crap.....sounds like a pain in the arse.....

If you don't mind me asking.....what's your next recourse to get it???

Excellent!!!

I just recently read about the enhancements to CS4.....nice!!!

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garbanzo wrote: i really, really wish FF could render effects like these as transparent PNGs that could be use as overlays. how great would that be?

----Couldn't you render it as a .png with transparency, then blend it however you wanted in PS ? I'm no PS expert though, so perhaps that isn't possible for whatever reason.

jffe

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jffe wrote: Quote garbanzo wrote: i really, really wish FF could render effects like these as transparent PNGs that could be use as overlays. how great would that be? ----Couldn't you render it as a .png with transparency, then blend it however you wanted in PS ? I'm no PS expert though, so perhaps that isn't possible for whatever reason.

yes, to an extent. but rendering many filters with transparent images, or altering them to use transparent colors, usually changes the output of the filter. i've tried hard with several filters, but have had no luck.

really i want transparent PNG overlay graphics to use when making skins for an app called CD Art Display. filters like this, or like Vlad's Peeing Paint, would look pretty cool, but you can't exactly render them on-the-fly, you need a transparent overlay image to do the work.

i think i figured it out. if i run a plain white image through a filter, then in photoshop use an inverted grayscale copy of the image as a transparency mask, i should be able to produce a PNG with alpha transparency that will work fine as an overlay graphic. i've not tried this because i'm at work and there's no photoshop here, but the theory is sound

it should also work with certain surface filters like Squeaky Clean, even preserving the rainbow swirl!

i'm excited to try this out tonight!

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Kraellin wrote: why dont you just save as a .tiff with transparency?

what, from FF? well the point is that many filters don't have alpha transparency. and if i induce it artificially, like changing white to fully transparent, many filters stop working. so i need to render then as images that have no transparency, then induce it later.

it's not working like i hoped though. i started with Vlad's peeling paint filter. i got a good PNG overlay graphic, and my phothoshop mockup of the skin was beautiful, but once i built it and started flipping through albums, it didn't look so good. but that's not necessarily the fault of the technique i'm using, it worked as expected...

i also tried with a grunge filter with no luck. the results are just too subtle. i think i need to manually tweak the transparency mask so the midtones don't get washed out...

or i could just give up. i'm good at that

but effect filters require pixels as input. if you send all transparent pixels to the majority of effect filters, you get nothing.

this one may work, but most won't. right now i'm trying with Rain Ripples with no luck

yes that's what i want, just the effect, as a PNG, with transparency where the life preserver used to be. so... how?

threshold was my first attempt a few months ago the first time i was messing with this idea, but i had no luck with it at all

thanks for the tip, but that filter is very much an exception. you created an effect independently of the image, then dumped it on top. when that's the case, sending a fully transparent image through the filter is all it takes.

i guess i'm not explaining myself very well because nobody is quite understanding what i want, so i'm going to slip quietly away and figure this one out. i'll come back if and when i do

i'm at work now so i can't, but i'll have another go at explaining.

take vlad's peeling paint filter as an example. i want to figure out a way to make a PNG overlay graphic with transparency that, if put over the top of an image, makes that image look as if it went through the filter.

i tried to render the filter with a white image, then used photoshop to transform it to a transparent PNG. it worked, but the problem was that since i used the image as the alpha channel, where white is transparent and black is opaque, all mid tones became partially transparent, so the effect was washed out. so i need to induce transparency, but still keep the details. i don't think this is possible with post-processing unless i manually edit the mask, since photoshop can't know what areas should be opaque, preserving detail, and what areas should be partially transparent, giving shadows etc.

so then, how to do it in filter forge? if you drop a threshold in at the end and replace the life preserver with transparency, the filter no longer works, since it's a surface filter. so it can't be done in filter forge either. i would have to render it normally, then somehow use a modified version of the bump map to create an alpha mask. ugh.

ok, so how about a simple filter. well, anything with distortion is out, since that can't be put into a PNG overlay. in fact, anything that changes the pixel colour or position of the original image won't work. that's most filters. the remaining ones are frames, which present no problem, or things like that waterfall filter, also easy.

the other filters i was interested in were ones like bullet holes or plaster. i know those would have to be rendered then processed in photoshop to make a texture overlay. so i'm back to that. i think in the end i have to carefully craft my own transparency mask in photoshop, based on an inverse grayscale version of the image, but tweaked to work how i want it to. that's more work than i want to put into this, which is why i'm going to stop trying

yes that would accomplish the same thing, but would also present the same problems with variable transparency in the wrong places.

haha you make it sound like i'm being all secretive. actually i mentioned it earlier in this thread - i'm just making some skins for an app called CD Art Display. it's basically a remote control for your media player, but its main goal i life is to show the cover art for the track that is currently playing.

an optional component of a skin is a overlay.png graphic that is placed over the cover art when the skin is drawn. normally, people use this to add a nice glossy finish to the image, or to make it look like it's actually a jewel case. i thought that with FF behind me, i could make some pretty cool effects.

but it's proving more difficult than i thought it would be

thanks for the input. as for just processing the covers in photoshop, well that kind of defeats the purpose of having a skin that anyone can use

yesterday i messed with some post-processing of a render of peeled paint against a white background and i got about 80% to where i wanted to be. i just need to do some manual tweaking of the transparency map and i think i can get the rest of the way. i'm convinced now that FF can't help, so i need to turn to photoshop

Yeah, I see what you mean -- you can't extract JUST the highlights (transparent white) and shadows (transparent black) without the image itself, so you get light gray shadows by running the filter over a white background. You would have to construct the filter specifically to make your own highlights and shadows -- yes, it would get pretty complicated.

As to the transparency itself, you could do the same thing you're doing in Photoshop in FF but whether it is worth doing it that way depends on how familiar you are with FF versus Photoshop. For instance, you could mod Vlad's Peeling Paint like as in the attached and get your transparency, but it wouldn't handle the light-gray-shadow issue.

Peeling Paint Mod.ffxml

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garbanzo wrote: but since anything between black and white becomes slightly transparent depending on its gray value, all midtones get washed out.

----Hmm, I'm gonna take a wild stab/guess at it again here. This problem (quoted above) might be why you need to run the pictures through a modded filter. Because then you can crank the *Brightness* control up. http://www.filterforge.com/filters/3320.html - That filter used to make the bubbles all yellowish and even made the white background parts of the life preserver pic yellow/orangish because the *Brightness* wasn't up high enough and the *Saturation* was set too high and was 'coloring' it too much. That's what makes me think you are never really going to get it right using an overlay in Photoshop, or at the very least that there is a much more elegant solution doing it all with FF somehow.

jffe

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garbanzo wrote: ThreeDee, thanks for the input. i'm definitely more familiar with Photoshop than FF, which is why i've been working more on that end. running a white image through this filter gives me all the info, but the problem is then adding variable transparency. using the image to construct a transparency map works, but since anything between black and white becomes slightly transparent depending on its gray value, all midtones get washed out.

In concept, you would want to run the filter over a transparent image so as to be able to overlay it on any image, just as an effect + highlights and shadows.

However, very few filters are constructed to be able to do that.

The problem with running the filter on a white background is that it will introduce that white background anywhere where you have partial transparency, so will wash out the image by adding white to it.

Honest, you may be better off doing the modifications in PS, unless you feel up to modifying filters, in some cases pretty extensively, to get them where they work for this purpose. If you do, I can try and explain what to do with them. But I have to warn you it may really require more than a little modification in case of surface filters in particular, for you can't use the surface-filter-generated shadows and highlights but will have to add them into the filter some other way.