[faB]

Just found this interesting article on a hidden Painter 4+ feature called "ColorTalk".

You have to load an image, and then just press the N key.

http://kaburaya.pobox.ne.jp/eng/colortalk_general.htm

That's awesome !

I thought maybe we could post some formulas here for various effects

Btw in Painter 9 if you click Open... there are a few example ones.
_________________
"I'm not a shrimp, I'm a KING PRAWN !" -- Pepe.
selfportraits & stuff

[Jin]

Painter IX - "N" key

Painter 8 - Shift+N

Painter 7 - "N" key

Painter 6 - "N" key

Painter 5 - "N" key

The presets listed when you hit the Open button appear to be the same in all of the above Painter versions.

Download the Color Talk_Tech_Note.pdf from a link on Kaburaya's page or from this link:

Color Talk_Tech_Note.pdf

In any case, visit Kaburaya's site to read his explanation of this feature.



Jinny Brown
TutorAlley Forums - again open for new registrations
Tutorials and Painter Info at PixelAlley

[Impaler]

Mrs. Alvarado was right. I WOULD need Algebra later in life.

Now I just wish I had paid attention.
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QED, sort of.

[jfrancis]

That is fascinating.

The math is nothing new, but the fact that I can do it in painter is something I really want to explore more.

Thanks for the info; very cool.

[jfrancis]

According to the documentation to which Jin linked, the user is limited to floating point numbers between -8 and +7.99 . . .

hm.

And it turns out 256 * 8 is 2048.

And 2 ^ 12 = 4096. (which is basically -2048 to +2047)

So it looks like instead of true floating point math, they are doing the math in 12 bits and casting to 8.

I still might check it out, but this makes me less interested in messing around with it.

[jfrancis]

I was playing around with it a bit. It's very close to useless. Not quite useless, but very, very, close.

When I first heard about it, I thought, cool, I'll play around with it. Maybe I'll write a Mandelbrot set generator in it for Painter -- that could be fun, and won't take too long.

Then I saw it had no looping. Nor any if-then conditionals. So I lowered my ambitions.

Then I thought, well, maybe let me see if I can make a bunch of thin horizontal lines using a sine wave. That can be useful for making "tv screen" effects. Let's see, how many lines should I make? Hm, a few hundred, anyway.

Then I saw that the only numbers even PERMISSIBLE are 1, 2, 3, and 4, and some decimals that have to be dragged and dropped into the window.

bottom line:

This is a cool beginning for something that appears to have never been followed through on. In its present state, it's an odd toy-like curiosity.

The fact that the software can produce continuous grads tells me it works fine internally, but the user is severely limited as far as what numbers he or she can even EXPRESS as input to the program.

Considering it's a "secret" function, it's better than nothing -- but only just barely. Anything useful you can do with it you can do more easily through the GUI. Anything "slick" you'd like to try doing with it you are likely to find impossible to do with it in its current state.

I encourage Corel to flesh this out.

If I'm wrong about my evaluation of it, I'd like to hear more.

[jfrancis]

I missed this until now, but there are similar things for Photoshop

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/filterprogramming/