Border expanding

[Zyst]

I'm having difficulties with resizing some wallpapers here. Some I know can't be resized easily to look nice, and some will blur up noticeably. But some with a solid background color are very easy to change up. I was even able to handle an abnormal gradient thanks the plugin Trail by, I think, pyrochild. But then this one case came up, which I thought was easy enough to do. But it was tedious to make it look nice and be free of any sloppy editing.

I looked around the plugins section, and couldn't find anything that did what I wanted. The closest was the plugin Trail, which will pull an image in one direction, which can be a way of expanding borders. It works fine in some wallpapers I was resizing, but I came across a case where it didn't work out well.

See http://i26.tinypic.com/kap5zt.jpg

Now, speaking in terms of wallpapers, this image's dimensions were 1280x800. I use a higher resolution of 1920x1200. So rather than having the image resized to 1920x800 and become blurrier in the process, I wanted to simply expand the borders in the direction of each line as best as possible. I accomplished this, but it was very time consuming to get something that didn't look sloppily edited. If you're interested in the process, continue reading this paragraph. Otherwise, skip to the next one. I took that image, and resized the canvas and kept the image centered. I then added a new layer, and put a 1 pixel wide line overtop each of the black lines that expand from the middle (which I learned was slightly off center). I would then go back to the original layer, and use the clone stamp tool. I would use the lines on the above layer as guides to where to place the anchor and where I should place the next circle to set the distance. This involved recognizing patterns in the diagonal lines. You could count the pixels, and on one of the easiest lines, I could count the pixels vertically and noticing how many pixels they were horizontally, like in this image. http://i25.tinypic.com/302cr5s.jpg The pattern isn't 1-2-1-2.. as you might expect. But actually 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-2... Having to identify this pattern as best as possible (not easy when somethings were actually like 3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-5-3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-4-3-4-4-4-4... and there wasn't quite enough to the line to confirm the pattern.

In the end, I ended up with this image http://i27.tinypic.com/ivhkb9.jpg. If you look closely, you can find small irregularities.

I'm wondering if anybody has an easier method to go about accomplishing something like this (multicolored, but "simple" background with an object that should be centered to look nice). Or if a plugin were designed. A plugin that could be set to duplicate the flow of certain colors of pixels from a center point (that can be adjusted at the pixel level), and how large of a sample to take, and how far away from the center the first sampled pixel is, would be great. A visual might help explain what kind of plugin I'm looking for. http://i30.tinypic.com/1zqd1uf.png What I'd like to happen is that 2 radii could be set, creating a donut shape (square or circular), and based on the different colors of the pixels, a direction that their going in could be determined (if it could work with a curve, it could actually be used for a different purpose of creating interesting designs).

If a plugin that does something similar to this is already released, or if a plugin like Trail could be used to do this, that would be great to know. I can think of Trail being able to do this if you recentered the point where all the lines originate from, then duplicated the layer for how many lines there were, and used each layer to expand the image in the same direction as one of the lines. Then you would crop off the rest of the lines that don't match up (in the case of the wallpaper I showed, that would be all of the other lines) and repeat the process for each layer and for each individual line. Thinking this over, this could've been an easier method had I thought it through (as the angle was shown for all the lines I drew on the separate layer when I used my clone stamping method, and all I really needed was the angle of each line). But I guess that's what happens when you struggle through something like this at 3 in the morning. Heh. Still, if a plugin, or easier method is out there, I'd love to know. Thanks!

[Sarkut]

Working from a duplicate layer underneath, rotate and position

rectangular selections over each black line and some surrounding color.

Then copy/paste into a new layer, and reposition.

As long as you don't rotate the selection after pasting,

the angle is set correctly.

Fill in color with Paintbrush.

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Works pretty well for a background like this.

http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7907/screenshot792.png

Edited July 15, 2010 by Sarkut

[Zyst]

Thank you very much Sarkut. That is much better than what I had done.

[Lance McKnight]

I wonder if you have given Expand Border plug-in by Simon Brown a look. I don't think it might address your question, but I thought I would give it to you anyway.