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288 CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS Fractal Explorer If you like beautiful fractal patterns like Figure 7-31, you can spend hours in Fractal Explorer. Figure 7-31. Energetic Diamond a type of Mandelbrot fractal If you ve never played with fractals before, start with the Fractals tab. The list there gives you a sampling of patterns you can generate. Double-click on anything in the list to see a preview. Once you find something you like, you can tweak it as much as you like. Go back to the first tab, Parameters. Twiddling any of the parameters will change the shape of the fractal. Make small changes: fractals are very sensitive, so a tiny bit of fudge in a parameter can mean a huge change in the image. The Colors tab lets you adjust how much of each color will be used in the image. One interesting property of fractals: the more you zoom in on a fractal pattern, the more detail you see. The Zoom buttons in Fractal Explorer let you home in on the center of a fractal but that s not really the point. The most interesting detail may be in one of the fractal s outer arms, as it is in Figure 7-31. Fortunately, you can also drag in the dialog s preview area to zoom in on whatever area interests you most (Figure 7-32). If you don t like what you see, you can Undo or Zoom Out and try another region. Since you can spend a lot of time tuning fractal parameters to get exactly the right curve, there are buttons to Save a pattern you really like in the Parameters tab, or Open one you ve previously saved.
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CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS 287 You can even make dashed grid lines by specifying a different color for the intersections of the lines. If you set the width of the grid lines to zero, Grid will draw plus characters at the intersections of the grid lines without drawing the lines themselves. Jigsaw turns your image into a nifty jigsaw puzzle (Figure 7-30). You can control the number of puzzle pieces, whether they re square or curved, and how heavily they ll be shaded. Figure 7-30. Jigsaw turns an image into a jigsaw puzzle. Maze generates a random maze in black and white. You can even make one that s tileable so you can use it as a background for large images. Qbist generates random colorful patterns. The dialog shows nine sample patterns. If you like one of them, click on it: that pattern will center, and GIMP will offer some other patterns similar to the one you chose. If you like one of those patterns better, click on it. Continue until you have one you like; then click OK, and your layer will fill with a pattern similar to the one you saw previewed. If you find one you really like, click Save to save the pattern to a .qbe file. You can Open it later if you want to use it again. Sinus won t give you a headache it makes patterns based on a combination of sine waves. It can produce anything from shaded bars to the grain pattern you see in a really nice piece of wood. It uses two colors, which you define in the Colors tab. By default, you ll merely get straight bars shading into one another. But vary X scale and Y scale (make sure they re not the same value), and then play with the Complexity to get much more interesting patterns. Circuit is outside the Pattern submenu, but it s similar to Maze except that it draws rounded traces in black and white. They look like the patterns on a printed circuit board.
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286 CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS Plasma creates a wild blending of many colors. It doesn t look like clouds, but it makes a nice background. Solid Noise looks like a lumpy surface photographed in black and white. It s useful in effects (you saw it used with the Warp plug-in in the last section) even if it doesn t look that good by itself. Nature Nature only provides two filters, Flames and IFS Fractal. They both use the mathematical concept of fractals to create intricate patterns. Flame doesn t actually create flames. It creates arcs and loops like something you might see if you whirled a can of paint around your head. Experiment with the Colormap options to make the effect a bit more colorful. The Edit button lets you choose different patterns. IFS Fractal is much more general. IFS stands for Iterated Function System, and with this plug-in you can create fractal patterns that repeat in a variety of different ways. The dialog presents you with three triangles, which you can drag in various ways to affect the preview. Click on a triangle to select it, and then drag it. You can add another triangle by clicking the New button, or use fewer by clicking on one and then choosing Delete. You can change the shapes, sizes, and orientations of the objects with the Move, Rotate, and Stretch buttons, or you can edit the Spatial Transformation numbers. You can turn the triangles into quadrilaterals by adding another triangle and moving it a bit, into pentagons by adding a fifth and moving it, and so forth. Choose Full in the Color Transformation tab to add a bit of color to the fractal you create, though controlling it is difficult. Actually, controlling anything in the IFS Fractal dialog is difficult. The key is to make small changes one at a time. Happily, Control+Z (Undo) works in the dialog, so you can back out changes that didn t work. If you want more general fractal patterns, keep reading: you may like Fractal Explorer better. Pattern Pattern offers a variety of well, patterns. Checkerboard is obvious (and the Psychobilly option can be fun). CML Explorer generates Coupled Map Lattices. Mostly, these are patterns that bleed down from the top of the image in random and sometimes interesting ways. You can choose from a large variety of functions that will be of interest to mathematicians. Everyone else, try making random choices and watch how the image changes. Diffraction Patterns is a real kick. Diffraction is the way light bends when it passes by an obstacle, or through a slit or a pinhole. This causes the light waves to interfere with each other in interesting ways. The Diffraction Patterns plug-in can simulate some of these behaviors, giving you mandala-like images that would look at-home on a sixties wall. There s no automatic preview: when you make a change you ll have to click the Preview! button. Changing colors won t do what you expect: increasing a color won t necessarily show more of that color in the final image. Don t miss the values in the Other Options tab, which can change the image quite a bit. Divisions can draw lines on your image to divide it into pieces, but the interface is obscure; for that, Grid is much easier to use. You can choose the color of your grid lines, the spacing between the lines, and their offsets from the top and left sides of the image.
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CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS 285 Step size controls how far a pixel can move in each step; Iterations controls the number of steps that will be run. Usually, you ll want to run quite a few steps (Figure 7-28 used 25 steps). It s fun to watch the effect of the warp as it proceeds. In Advanced Options, Dither size can add some extra randomness. Rotation angle is The angle through which the local gradient of the displacement map (control matrix) will be rotated before displacing the pixel in that direction. (Well, the dialog did warn you that this was an advanced option.) The plug-in s author recommends staying with 90 in most cases. You can add a magnitude map, another monochrome image that adjusts the intensity of the effect at each point (white means maximum effect, black gives no effect). There are several even more advanced options: experiment if you re so inclined. You don t have to use random maps. Try using a series of black feathered polka dots: start with a white background, choose the Ellipse Select tool and turn on feathering, and then make a small circular selection and fill it with black. Make another circular selection and fill it, and repeat until you have as many dots as you want and the layer looks like a dalmatian. Use that as a map for Warp: it s a neat effect and it s fun to watch it run (Figure 7-29). Figure 7-29. Warping text with a dalmatian polka-dot map Adding Patterns to a Layer The Filters . Render submenu offers you a collection of patterns you can add to the current layer. None of them are based on what s already in the layer, but they add to it. Clouds Clouds provides three ways to get random cloudy patterns. Add Fog looks like an overcast sky except that by default it uses an orange color. (Why orange? I m sure there was a reason once, but no one remembers it now.) Change it to gray if you want an effect like real clouds, or to any other color you want for other effects.
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284 CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS Tiling Make Seamless warps your image so that the right edge can match up to the left edge, and the top to the bottom. This is useful if you want to tile: use several repetitions of a small image as a background for a larger page. It doesn t always give a realistic result, but it s useful anyway. You ll use Make Seamless for making backgrounds in Chapter 9. Paper Tile s description is that it cuts the image, and slides the pieces. It s not a very real istic effect, though. Small Tiles replaces the image with scaled-down versions of itself, repeated several times (2 2, 3 3, and so on). Tile is similar but more flexible: it tiles the image at its full size into a larger image whose dimensions you specify. If you have a 320 240 image and you tile to a 640 480 image, you ll see four copies of the original. You can specify any dimensions, though, not just multiples of the original image size. If you ve just run Make Seamless to create a background and want to see how it looks, either Tile or Small Tiles can help. They re also useful if you re printing many small copies of an image. Warp Warp is like Displace but with a twist literally. Like Displace, it uses a gradient map to control how much each pixel will move. But Warp only needs a single map where Displace uses two. When warping, the difference between a pixel in the map and the pixels nearby controls the amount and direction of displacement in the source image. It s most commonly used with random maps. To try it out, create a new layer the same size as the one you want to warp, and then generate some noise (Filters . Render . Clouds . Solid Noise works well). Use the noise layer as the warp map (Figure 7-28). Figure 7-28. 25 steps of random Warp on some text and a rectangular border. The Rain pattern background was not warped.
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CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS 283 Figure 7-26. Lens effect using Displace If you displace in Polar mode, the two maps are interpreted somewhat differently. Instead of X and Y, you re mapping Pinch and Whirl. In Whirl, white rotates the pixel clockwise around the center of the image, while black rotates it counter-clockwise. In Pinch, white pinches the center of the layer in, while black bows it out. Polar mode is hard to visualize, but if you play with it you might get some good results. Try starting with 0 in the Pinch and Whirl numerical fields, and then changing just one of them by small amounts to visualize what each one does. Some Mapping Toys Fractal Trace turns your image into a fractal. This is a class of mathematical equations that produce all sorts of pretty pictures. There are several parameters to play with, whose details are primarily of interest to mathematicians. Illusion creates ghostly copies of parts of your image. There aren t many options to adjust, so give it a whirl. Map Object is another wonderfully useful GIMP workhorse. It takes an image and wraps it around some other shape, such as a sphere or a cylinder (Figure 7-27). It has lots of options, but they re fairly self-explanatory. Figure 7-27. Map object to a cylinder.
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282 CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS Once you ve selected the gradient, the preview shows that the text is indeed slanting from upper-left to lower-right, as intended. The background is also slanting, though that s more dif ficult to see. You can make the effect stronger by changing the displacement value from 20.00 to a larger number, like 50.00. How would you go about displacing in both X and Y at once? For this, it s best to think about each direction separately. Suppose you want to make it look like you ve laid a magnifying glass on the middle of the text. All the text under the glass should be magnified: text near the left edge should move left, text on the right should move right, text above center should move up, below center, down. Everything outside the lens should remain unchanged. How would you design gradient maps to accomplish this? Consider the horizontal problem first. Make a new layer for your horizontal gradient map; call it hgrad. Most of your text will be outside the magnifying glass, so it won t move at all. That means it needs to be medium-gray. Set the foreground color to medium gray (V = 50% in the color chooser), and fill the layer with that color. As long as you have that foreground color handy, this is a good time to make a second layer ( vgrad ) and fill that with gray as well. Select the hgrad layer again so that you can draw into it. Now make a circular selection where you want your magnifying glass to be. Give it quite a bit of feathering so the effect will be gradual at the edges. What should go inside this circular lens? Think about the goal: text at the left edge of the lens should move farther left, so the map needs to be white there. Similarly, the right side of the lens needs to be black. Set the foreground color back to black (the black/white button under the color swatches in the Toolbox are a handy shortcut) and drag the Gradient tool across your selection from right to left (Figure 7-25). Figure 7-25. The horizontal gradient map for a magnifying lens Now make your vertical lens gradient the same way. It needs to be white at the top, black at the bottom. You can select the vgrad layer and re-use the same selection. Cancel the selection, make the text and background layer active, and call up Displace…. Choose the hgrad and vgrad layers for X and Y displacement; you might want to increase the displacement a bit to exaggerate the effect (Figure 7-26).
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CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS 281 Figure 7-23. Text on a patterned background That means only vertical displacement, so don t worry about what happens horizontally. On the left side of the image, you want text to move up so that means you want white on the left side of the gradient map. You want the right side to move down, so that side needs to be black. A smooth gradient from white on the left to black on the right ought to do that. Make a new layer (call it gradient : it s important to give layers clear names to make it easy when you choose them from plug-in menus). Choose the Gradient tool and drag from the right edge of the image to the left to make your gradient. You can move the gradient layer down in the layer stack, or even hide it. It doesn t have to be visible to work as a displacement map. Now make the text layer active and call up Displace… (Figure 7-24). Uncheck X displacement since you won t be needing it, but make sure Y displacement is checked. In the menu next to Y displacement, select the layer with your gradient. You may not be able to read the full layer name in the menu, but look at the layer previews. You should be able to find your gradient there. Figure 7-24. The Displace dialog
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280 CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS room for both, so some letters may be left out. Use the tiny layer previews to the left of each image/layer name to help you figure out which layer is which. Once you ve chosen the text layer as the map, you can click OK to create the bump map. You ll probably have to make the map layer invisible in order to see the effect. (It s okay if you keep it invisible. You don t have to be able to see a layer in order for Bump Map to use it.) Bump Map has several options. The Map type controls how abrupt the map will be and whether it has sharp edges. Compensate for darkening brightens the image a bit after applying the bump map. The map is implemented using the Multiply layer mode (you ll work with modes in Chapters 9 and 10), and that has a tendency to darken the image. Normally, you ll want to leave this option checked to get the brightness back to normal. Invert bumpmap makes the bump appear to go into the active layer rather than rising above it. If you want an effect like letters chiseled into marble or routed into wood, use Invert. (Of course, you can also invert the effect by reversing dark and light in the bump map.) Tile bumpmap makes the bump map repeat across the image. You can use it with a small map image to get a repetitive pattern all the way across a large background area. Azimuth controls the direction of the illumination. The default, 135, makes the light appear to come from the upper-left, but you can light your bump map from any direction. Elevation controls how high off the page the light source will seem to be: a higher light source means shorter shadows. Depth controls how tall or deep the bump seems to be. X offset and Y offset shift the bump effect in relation to the position of the map layer. Most of the time, you ll already have positioned the bump map right where you want the effect to be, so you ll leave these at 0. Waterlevel controls the bottom edge of the effect when your bump map layer has trans parency, like a text layer would. Increasing Waterlevel can make the effect appear softer and more subtle. Ambient makes the light source appear more diffuse. When it’s set at 0, the light will appear to come from only one direction, but increase the value and some of the shaded areas will lighten a bit more to create a more subtle effect. Displace The Displace filter shifts pixels in the active layer according to a gradient map. The map layer must be the same size as the image you want to displace. (Images that aren t the right size won t appear in Displace s option menu.) What s a gradient map? It s a monochrome image where the gray value at each point spec ifies what will happen to the displaced image at that point. For the Displace filter, horizontal and vertical displacements are handled separately: you can use different gradient maps for the two directions. For horizontal mapping, a white pixel in the gradient map means that the corresponding point in the image will be moved to the left. A black pixel means the point will move right, while a medium-gray pixel means the point will stay where it is. Vertical mapping is similar, except white means move up; black, down. Confused? A couple of examples will help. Make an image consisting of some text on a patterned background (Figure 7-23). What sort of map would it take to lay this text out in a diagonal line from upper-left to lower-right?
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CHAPTER 7 FILTERS AND EFFECTS 279 Never fear. Although GIMPressionist doesn t remember your last preset, it does remember all the other settings. Click Update to verify that. If you re happy with your settings, type a name into the field above the preset list, next to Save Current…, and then click Save Current…. GIMP will prompt you for a longer description of your settings. The Map Filters The Map filters distort the image a bit, like the Distorts filters but only in very localized and specific ways. Bump Map The first map filter is Bump Map, one of the GIMP s most useful filters. It s used in many text and logo effects, but you ll find lots of other applications for it. It s easiest to see what Bump Map can do if you start with a new blank image and fill it with a pattern (Edit . Fill with Pattern). For example, use Pink Marble. Then, create a white text layer on top of that. In the Layers dialog, select the background layer, not the text layer. Then call up Bump Map (Figure 7-22). Figure 7-22. The Bump Map filter Bump Map makes bumps in the active layer, as if another layer (called the bump map) was pushing up from underneath. The map layer is chosen from the drop-down menu at the top of the Bump Map dialog. This menu lists every layer in every image that you have open in the GIMP. It can be confusing: both the image name and the layer name are crammed into the menu. Sometimes there isn t
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