Color Magic

Xhin · September 6, 2019

Color > Color Magic

It's been a while since I've posted here. I'm currently in the process of reorganizing/revamping my plugins as well as developing new ones.

Color Magic

This plugin lets you recolor an image in a pretty wide variety of ways with a lot of fine-tuning. It's designed in such a way to keep colors at reasonable proportions to one another, meaning that unlike other coloring effects (including even the regular Hue adjustment) , these hue shifts look quite natural. While it will probably take a lot of experimentation to get something in particular, the controls make minor changes which allow you to tweak things very easily.

In any case, let's take a look at what the plugin looks like:

Use -- Feeds different things into the Hue. The default setting is the normal image, which still allows you to use the other sliders for different effects.
Smoothness -- Determines how "smooth" the recoloring is. Values smaller than 1 will have much wider gulfs between hues, allowing you to make things be 2-color or 3-color pretty easily, while values higher than 1 make the effect more pronounced, and at high values will make things take on a "heat map" or psychedelic appearance.
Filter -- Filters out a specific range of hues from appearing. At 360, all hues *can* appear (they won't necessarily because of how the plugin works). The setting starts at purple and slowly removes hue ranges, going to blue, to green, to yellow, to orange and eventually at 0 only red will appear. Hues that have been "filtered" will bounce around inside the allowed range, maintaining their proportionality with other hues and not wrapping around randomly. As a result you get some pretty smooth transitions, though artifacts will appear sometimes.
Final Hue -- Lets you adjust the final hue of the image after all the other effects are done.

Now then, let's look at what some of these settings actually do.

We'll start with a normal image of Barack Obama. I tried to keep the image size set to what other tutorials use here, but it has been a while since I posted here, so mods tell me if I need to resize anything.

Adjusting the Smoothness slider will do things like this. You're basically recoloring hues in proportionate ways -- red/brown things change very little while blue things change a lot. There are some artifacts on the image to the right, which we can fix with the Filter setting:

No artifacts in either of these cases, though the hue of Obama's suit is also different. With a lot of tweaking, it is possible to find a dark green variant that does what you want it to do. That tends to be where the Use setting comes in.

Here's a tall image comparing different Use settings, with the normal image on the left for comparison. In a couple cases I've also adjusted the smoothness because the default values need some tweaking still. Again, mods let me know if the image is too tall or something (I still have all the originals).

What these different settings do is basically proportionately transform some element(s) of the image into a hue. So for example, in the saturation setting, parts of the image that are less saturated will turn red while parts of the image which are more saturated will become blue or purple. From here you can adjust the Smoothness setting to spread those proportions out or bunching them together, the Filter setting to constrain specific hues and the Final Hue setting to get a final result.

In any case, if nothing else this plugin should be fun to experiment around with. Here's a link to the DLL:

https://github.com/Xhin23/Paint.net-Plugins/blob/master/Color_Magic.dll

Edited September 29, 2019 by Xhin