I love the "discovery" that Studio Artist provides, but wish it was easier to reproduce results. A lot of the exchanges here are about "how do I reproduce [a desired aesthetic]" and the responses are often somewhat complexe and hard to follow. This led me to wonder if embedding the "recipe" into the images themselves would/could help.

SA makes it relatively very easy to generate a lot of images while modulating attributes in search of particular combinations of settings that yield aesthetically pleasing results. And it sounds as though this is just going to get better in version 5.5. However, it is often difficult, it not impossible, to figure out what combination of settings resulted in a particular effect/outcome. While some of this boils down to the "butterfly effect", wherein small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes (i.e. even if you had the recipe, applying it to a different source will lead to unpredictable outcomes), a lot has to do with how many settings there are, and determining which were use in any particular case and in which order.

Since it is possible to record action history, would it be possible to have an option to embed these instructions into, and extracted from, the images' EXIF data?

Use case 1: Running in Gallery mode, potentially maximizing randomization, saving the Image stream in order to allow discovery of aesthetically pleasing effects, that could then be applied/reused on subsequent source images. (To be clear, I remember seeing instructions on how one could record all the history while Gallery was running, but this had some important limitations, e.g. the need to map the output images to the relevant snippets of the recording, and scalability, i.e. how long can you record before it'll crash).

Use case 2: Sharing Generative Strategies simply by sharing output images with the embedded recipes.

I don't know enough about EXIF to know if the spec would allow this kind of thing. For what it is worth, this basic idea has been suggested here before

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  • We would like to get gallery show to output a PASeq for each cycle as an option.

    In existing V5.5, you have to record a history sequence and then deal with that manually.

    If you use the run single cycle button in the Gallery Show Toolbar (or use the equivalent menu command in Action) you can erase it before you run the single cycle.  Other wise they are going to accumulate in a single history sequence.

    There is an existing issue where some of the gallery show paint draw options that auto-generate bezier paths in the bezier path frame and then paint them in, some of those bezier commands are not being run in a way where they are recorded in the history sequence.  We intend on dealing with that, but not before the very imminent V5.5 release.

    Due to the 'magical properties' of the current PASeq format (thats a joke), we can't embed a PASeq in exif  meta-data. Maybe in the future when we switch the file formats, but i kind of feel having it as a separate PASeq file makes more sense,

    Also, keep in mind that practically all of the gallery show output i generate is using a generate strategy that is based on over drawing on the existing canvas, where the final image accumulates over several gallery show cycles. So don't expect a PASeq (or exif tag) associated with a single image to duplicate that output.

    We haven't even gotten to things like frame randomization if you are working off of source movies, or the mysterious Load Style option, which could potentially also be frame randomizing or randomly be loading from another folder of images, or live video grabs, or auto-generated selection masks being generated from randomized src, etc.

    I do totally understand what you are asking for, and why. I think the PASeq option we are thinking of will get you there for many gallery show situations, but certainly not all.

    I also have to say that i find myself becoming less attached to specific presets as i use Studio Artist V5.5 more.  Since it's so easy to generate more on the fly as your current whim moves you.

    What gallery show does generate is obviously hugely influenced by both what images you are processing, as well as what sets of presets you are working off of. What comes out of gallery show runs with the trial of V5 preset database and the small set of images and movies we provide with the program is a shallow sub-set of what i see when i run it on my personalized image folders and my much more extensive preset collection.

    • I should point out that there are menu options in Action to copy History to PASeq, and vice versa.  The file format is identical, a history sequence is a PASeq as far as the program is concerned.

      • Is there a gauge/counter to show the steps in the Run of Gallery show/or even other actions and sequence  that shows where we are now And what is the program doing? (Since I have always worked with the 32-bit version of Windows, I have encountered this problem many times, the shape of the mouse has changed and I have been waiting for the operation to finish while Windows has stopped the SA maybe because of memory and I did not know and just stared at the monitor for a while until noticed the bug) and
        Would you please make it possible for us to stop and call the previous one or the next one as needed in Gallery show?

        • You can press the space bar to stop gallery show.

          If you hold down the shift key and then press spacebar (while still holding down the shift key), you can get gallery show to stop the current cycle and skip to the next one.

          Studio Artist V5.5 also let's you set a 30 second timeout for paint actions.

          When doing things in gallery show that generate parameter randomization, it is possible to hit 'extreme' sections of a particular effect's internal parameter space.  This can cause it to take a really long time to run.  The Vectorizer, and Ip Ops like Watershed Sketch being notorious culprits.  Remember, they can both be embedded into a paint action step. Or auto-selection.

          I usually ride those situations out. It can mean waiting for minutes while it processes.  For some things, press the ESC key can cause it to drop out of what it is doing.

          We are of course very willing to try and find these various 'extreme' sections of the parameter space and encourage our generative algorithms to avoid them.  And in fact a huge amount of fine tuning associated with this has already gone into gallery show. So i expect this kind of slow performance issue will improve over time.

      • Thanks, as usual, for the detailed response.

        I understand that there are many steps and processes which cannot be reliably captured and replayed to replicate predictable results. However, anything that makes retracing steps will be appreciated,  particularly if version 5.5 males it even easier to change directions on a whim.

        Perhaps a low-hanging compromise would be to provide the option when saving (but also in the galleryshow or image stream settings) to export the history action to a file with the name that matches that of the output image. At least this would facilitate the subsequent association of the recorded actions and images, and would avoid problems associated with accumulating them in a single sequence.

        • You may be right.  Maybe we should add the history sequence auto-output now, and have people live with some GS cycles not being fully recorded in the short term until we resolve that issue.  I will think that through.

          • I've often had gallery show hang in processing for hours, even overnight. So this idea of a timeout would be welcome.

            Also I've long been interested in ways to improve reproduce-ability of the path to a particular output in GS. However after a lot of manual attempts to reproduce a specific GS output, I get the feeling that the history playback is not going to be the recipe-book to get what I want. A small change early on in the sequence is like the butterfly in Mongolia affecting the weather in Yosemite, Florida and Greenland. I think if I were able to play the history sequence on a different starting image, the end result would likely be nothing like what I expect (i.e. a certain style but applied to a different composition). But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

            • The history preset auto-record and playback feature some are asking for really only makes sense for people building gallery show effects that run in a single GS cycle. So then that history preset runs a single GS cycle on any source.

              As soon as you start talking about things building up over multiple cycles, then it's really a different story. You would have to reproduce everything exactly from the very beginning. And gallery show randomization insures that is never going to happen.

              We went to great lengths to avoid any 'fixed cycle' randomization situations in gallery show. You want it to always be fresh, nor start generating the same sequence of random images or other things every time you run it.

              For people who want to use the new generative strategy features in gallery show to help auto-construct new presets, then having the ability to save what happened in a complete gallery show cycle is useful.  You can do it now manually by running single cycles, have history sequence record on, and erase the history sequence before you run the single GS cycle every time you do it. If you liked what happened in that cycle, then save the history preset which you can open as a PASeq preset later if you want).

    • For now, Is it possible to add an option that when we save a canvas output image ourselves or automatically SA Suggest the name of the preset used for it to be added to the file name so that later by looking at the file name we find out which preset is used have been?

      For example, I use Preset:Factory>Abstract1 for my work and SA suggests this name to me when want to save: In Save Canvas File Name> it suggests me: [Factory_Abstract1] now I can Delete it or add my file name to this string and save my output Like: [Factory_Abstract1]_MySample1.jpg  

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