Experimenting in Filter Forge

[Fred Weiss]

Filter Forge is both a free standing application or a plugin for Adobe Photoshop which allows one to create seamless texture tiles. The textures are usually generated within the filter whereby various kinds of "noise" is manipulated to look like something in the real world or that one could at least imagine.

Filter Forge has additional capabilities to accept external images and manipulate them. In the example below, I have setup four images on a page with a transparent background in Photoshop and, with an unpublished filter converted them to a random sprinkling of the images fully covering the background and which can be tiled seamlessly to create a larger background. The filter can accept up to 16 different images as it is currently designed and can be manipulated to leave random openings allowing a background to show or full coverage as shown in the example here.

I can see lots of creative possibilities. Tell me what you think of the concept. I could care less about the particular images used.

 

[R08]

I know filter forge already has a seamless tiling capability but with a randomizing feature I can see the potential. For instance 4 samples of greenery or trees may give a forest looking background . Is that sort of what you mean?

 

[Fred Weiss]

Yes along with lots of other things one might need that can be supplied as silhouetted images. Coins, coffee beans, mixed fruits, currency, natural camouflage, you name it, limited only by your own imagination.

 

[R08]

unpublished filter

I take it, this is one filter you are not sharing with the filter forge community?

I'd love to take it for a spin.

 

[Fred Weiss]

I take it, this is one filter you are not sharing with the filter forge community?

I'd love to take it for a spin.

It's unpublished because the author is currently a licensor to me of rendered images in return for royalties. The "filter" is, at this point, five different filters suitable for use but lacking in the kind of polish you would get from a published Filter Forge version. They are something he threw together and revised at my suggestion because I suggested that such a filter would have a lot of possibilities. So I'm not at liberty to share it. If that changes I will be happy to do so. I can tell you that what I posted here was the result of a rendering from one filter used as the image for a second filter to render it again.

He may choose to share it in the Filter Forge library or someone else may also do so. An author named Uberzev first demonstrated the effect in the Filter Forge forums but, as of this writing, has not published it either. Here's a link to that post.

 

[R08]

Thanks Fred,
There is a published one that only does a single image. Big difference when you can sample several images at once. I think you got something there.