Posted by Synthetik on November 12, 2010 at 5:05pm
I used the 4.02 vectorizer to generate this, so the original vector regions are filled with flat color. The soft gradient effect was generated with some additional ip op post processing.
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If you want to add a gradient to an existing flat color image, the trick is that you want to remove a small amount of low frequency information (high pass filtering). There are several image operation effects you can use to do that. For this particular image i used the very versatile Blur ip op. Bluring an image involves removing high frequency content from an image. So what we want to do is the opposite.
The Blur ip op offers the Frequency Inversion option for the Type parameter. What this does is invert the frequency response of the blur filter, so it turns it from a lowpass filter into a high pass filter. For this kind of processing, using the Luminance option for the Composite Color Space helps better maintain the original coloring.
The high frequency filtering effect washes out the image, so you need to boost contrast again. There are several different ways to do this. You can use the Blur filter again as a contrast sharpening filter, by configuring the parameters as shown below.
The interactive Adjust op mode with the Gain/Bias adjust effect can also be used to boost the image contrast and color density.
If you start getting any banding or noise effects in areas of the gradient that should be smooth due to the limitations of the 8 bit frame buffer, the Smooth ip op is great to filter those out.
An entirely different approach is to use the Vectorizer regions for path start regionization in the paint synthesizer. Then you can use the paint synthesizer to fill in the different regions, building a paint preset that draws each colored region with a built in gradient effect. And since the paint synthesizer can use MSG presets for region fills, you can use MSG effects to build color gradient fills as well.
We're going to try and put together a tutorial that discusses these different approaches, since this kind of effect is a cool thing to work with, and there are lots of different variations on the effect you can build in Studio Artist. The great thing about Studio Artist is that if you think through a particular problem there's usually at least 2 different ways to do something.
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The Blur ip op offers the Frequency Inversion option for the Type parameter. What this does is invert the frequency response of the blur filter, so it turns it from a lowpass filter into a high pass filter. For this kind of processing, using the Luminance option for the Composite Color Space helps better maintain the original coloring.
The high frequency filtering effect washes out the image, so you need to boost contrast again. There are several different ways to do this. You can use the Blur filter again as a contrast sharpening filter, by configuring the parameters as shown below.
The interactive Adjust op mode with the Gain/Bias adjust effect can also be used to boost the image contrast and color density.
If you start getting any banding or noise effects in areas of the gradient that should be smooth due to the limitations of the 8 bit frame buffer, the Smooth ip op is great to filter those out.
An entirely different approach is to use the Vectorizer regions for path start regionization in the paint synthesizer. Then you can use the paint synthesizer to fill in the different regions, building a paint preset that draws each colored region with a built in gradient effect. And since the paint synthesizer can use MSG presets for region fills, you can use MSG effects to build color gradient fills as well.
We're going to try and put together a tutorial that discusses these different approaches, since this kind of effect is a cool thing to work with, and there are lots of different variations on the effect you can build in Studio Artist. The great thing about Studio Artist is that if you think through a particular problem there's usually at least 2 different ways to do something.