Alternate image input

I know I am brand new here but I just stumbled across your wonderful tool here and the thing I love abot this thing is that you can create new filters that you can adjust. Magnificant!!!!

The reason for this post is, as I was messing around I was trying to accomplish something with a particular texture. I was trying to cause multiple things actually. I was going to plastic wrap a painted brick wall and then make it look like it was peeling and cracking off to the unpainted version. well none of the filters did it so I thought I would fix one up. Well no one could do it or come close and I found two that could do it but I would have a pain and I would have to end up making a mask and doing work anyway. (Not that I am lazy.)

As I was trying make a filter to do this and I realized you cant add a transpancy to the image I was altering. I found that I could alter a transparent image and add to that. I searched the forum and realized that many people have asked about a similar thing... in a way... and the answers I have seen lead them in other directions. I didnt feel as if they had the answer they wanted... mostly because I didnt have mine. So a looked and looked at the tool to make filters and I looked at another filter tool (Alien Skin stuff) and I realized the answer to the issue.

The answer really is an alternate or secondary image dialoge. I know that was easy to say and for me to picture but let me give you a better understanding:

Lets say I wanted to tile an image I made so it looks like a wall and then I want to make a melt a portion and instead of black nothing left in there I want a lava to pour through a hole.

Im stuck with making a very complex filter for a single application. The way it is now is that a person would have to make a melted wall (with a filter) and then mask out the place they want the lava and make a lava (with a filter) and put the one behind the other and merge the layers.

Now IF you did one of two things this would save the work of masking (which is time consuming and sometimes a pain in the butt)If lets say the filter that had a melted wall added a portion of tranparancy (alternate image input in the filter construction) I could just lay the image ready over another. The filter would lay a transpancy much cleaner if it was a backgound option (to the filter) then I could. and to that end you could make endless sets of filters. More like overlay filter making.

The other possibilty is to add a dialoge of alternate/background image so as the final filter user I can just make a lava image and then make the melted wall and in the filter dialoge name the lava background image bingo. Done!

As it is now in the filter creator I can only call on the original image that I am filtering not another or add the option to filter using an undifined image. This tool sets each part over the image in stages, so it could call another image as referance in the final filtering.


I hope you understand what I am suggesting as I think it will open a whole slew of possible filters to come about.

I am very impressed with how simple this tool can be as a filter user and how involved you can get with the filter creation.

Thanks for your time,
Keith

keith,

yes, this has been requested before. the answer, currently, is to call FF from ps, psp or whatever you're using and work with your images rendered in FF there.

FF could be expanded to include extra images at one time and it could be even done with layers, which would be great. the use of layers is what you really want, i think. imagine applying one filter to one layer in FF and then highlighting another layer and using another FF fitler on that. you could then export a merged copy back to ps or psp or export as layers. would be sweet

i forget what the FF team responded regarding all this, but you can look it up in the forums or maybe one of the FF team will respond. but i'm sure in favor of it!

craig