Sync

Was looking for something that could produce more "authentic" looking Mosaics-- Nice job on this plugin, will have to play with it more to see where I can go with it. One thing I guess I'd like to see, is an algorithm that does a little more conforming to the shapes in the image-- I've used autotrace on images to outline different colored areas, and that begins to get there, but then what I would want is the ability to chop up the resultant segments further, without border slop other than the "grout" thickness between tesserae. Ultimately, what I'd like to see is something that is useful for taking an existing image and turning it into a plan for a real physical mosaic-- giving me a preview and then being able to print out "actual size" a plan that can be used for actually cutting the tesserae out of real mosaic materials. Essentially, allowing me to convert a computer image or photo into a blueprint for making it into a real mosaic. I don't think I've seen anything quite like that, but perhaps there is something out there I'm just unaware of. And of course, beyond that, being able to integrate other textural mosaic elements-- such as the kinds of things done by real mosaicists such as Sonia King: http://www.mosaicworks.com/gallery/artmosaics.html note the use of areas with relatively skinny slivers, circular islands of pieces-- working with existing shaped pieces, etc. Those are far beyond the scope of your plugin, at least at the moment, but I can dream, anyway. Perhaps some new ways to control the "random irregularity" could be a possible enhancement, like providing an external texture or bitmap that could guide it, giving additional controls over the patterning of the tesserae... At any rate, fun plugin, thanks... -- Sync

I second this motion, except for the "nearly useless" comment-- the netpbm series of programs (http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/) are useful command-line image manipulation utilities that have been available on Windows as well as Unix for years. I use this format all the time. I had been hoping to update my old version of Paint Shop Pro with Paint.NET instead, but this is one critical feature that is holding me back. The PPM formats are supported natively in Paint Shop Pro and by plug-in in Photoshop. Also, many third party image utilities utilize the format, such as the default GreyCstoration build (and BTW, I couldn't get the Paint.Net plugin for that to do anything-- goes through the motions with no change of the image, so I still use the original command line version which only does PPM format). These are quite easy to implement as there's no compression whatsoever, the PPM formats are supposed to be a real minimalist interchange format. It's also very easy to produce your own image hacks using this format as it's trivial to write programs for-- you can easily process PPM format files in virtually any programming language, even scripting ones like Perl. -- Sync