Re: [pygame] GIMP-like image enhancement?

[Jasper Phillips <jasper@peak.org>]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Daniel Joyce wrote:

> I just did this...
> 
> 1) Go into Gimp, create a 64x64 grey background image
> 2) Run Clothify on it as you like.
> 3) Select all
> 4) Create brush from image. Script-Fu -> Selection -> To Brush
> 
> 5) Create plasma cloud for cruddy 'land mass' map.
> 6) Select the brush tool, select clothe brush defined early. Set mode to 
> "multiply" ( Burn )
> 7) Apply brush to 'map', and get rouch clothe-like surface. I just drug it 
> around to see what it would look like.
> 
> This should be easy to do something similair from Pygame or PIL using the 
> bitmap for the brush ( created in Gimp ) and a bitmap for your map. The 
> clothe brush could be randomly rotated as applied to avoid obvius seams. You 
> could also generate several random brush bitmaps, and switch between them as 
> you paint them over the map.
> 
> Simple, looks good.

This was an interesting idea, as the only part of clothify that I'm truly
making use of dynamically is bump mapping.  So I tried it out...  The
results were... well, they were horrible!  As a programmer I hope you take
my candor in the good natured manner in which it is intended. ;-)

I was able to improve it by drawing the brush in Overlay, Soft Light, or
Grain Merge mode, but that still left many problems:

Colors are distorted.  Ubiquitous tiling artifacts, which the tricks you
mention are insufficient to fix -- and would in themselves be a time sink.
The code isn't generally usefull.  The mechanics behind the ok-ish brush
modes are just as tricky to dig up as bump mapping, noisify, and constrast
stretch.

While clever, the above approach looks to me like more work, gives poorer
results, and would be difficult to reuse.  Clothify (with the right args) is
pretty much _exactly_ what I want.

-Jasper