And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images.
I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I will have access to the edges/ vector images, so there is no need for accurate edge detection- but such organic edges would add a lot if there is a way to do it.
The most important thing in watercolors is the texture of the paper.
They use a texture for sea, another for land, and so on. If you look at the see you will see how the sea and land repeats itself. You will need to make a seamless texture that you can repeat ad infinitum. Those are made with filters on photoshop or GIMP, or you could crreate them using fractals(very difficult for it to feel like a realistic watercolor, that is the reason they did not used them).
I don't like GIMP for that, plugins had a very confusing syntax, I prefer ImageMagick or better I use my own programs. Using Photoshop you can do it "with your hand"(selecting a vector shape, grow it with border transition, apply texture, and repeat), record and then use the macro for all your vectors.
I would use an OpenCL or CUDA program, faster and way more control.
Thanks! I did not think of smoothing the vector shapes, that partially explains how it blends so well.
The other thing is the edges of the shape- they are darker and blend in the lighter body of the fill. I guess that works by inverting the shapes, blurring, and using that as a mask for a different more intense blend.
And in both cases, I see there is some cool randomness going on. I see how I may be able to handle it for the latter- through a texture etc., but not sure how to handle the randomness in shape creation.
Also, it would be great if someone can suggest a good library to implement this. I am currently using Processing to render the image, but it may not be the best way for these set of procedures. The other image processing libraries I found were not high level enough.
PS: I have a hunch that their textures are not monochromatic. They seem multicolored and they are probably varying the hues of a colored texture to manage different shades.
Thanks a lot! It is often the right things to search for, and this really helped.
Also, your installation was a big relief from gradschool stress. And I enjoyed guessing the algorithms that went into different visuals, though I am sure I was mostly wrong, as I was here.
And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images.
I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I will have access to the edges/ vector images, so there is no need for accurate edge detection- but such organic edges would add a lot if there is a way to do it.