Is this the end of the world?

Many people are asking. Is this the end of the world?

Fortunately, the Washington Post assures us this is not the case. 

I quote: "No," said Pierce, an apostolic prophet and leader of a prophetic ministry. "The Lord's shown me through 2026, so i know this isn't the end of time."

Good to know.

Now about that image. Working with a curated folder of topical news photos. Not my coronavirus image folder, but a very different one that still relates to the subject. The coronavirus folder always has to have a person wearing a mask in it. Not the case with this folder, in fact no face masks allowed.

Used my custom image folder as the source to Gallery Show processing. Using the new Gallery Show toolbar controls to drive. I added a custom Favorites folder of water wash presets, and used them at the beginning of the loop processing. GS Technique was mutating the current temporal image operation effect.

Much post processing afterwards, including modulated interactive warp, unsharp masking, sharpening, etc.

Hello Kitty

So i was messing with this custom 'raised look' oil paint preset. Desperately trying to make it look not at all like what you see here. So i finally gave up in disgust and moved on.

So then today i looked at it again, and kind of liked it's Japanese quality (for lack of a better way to put it). I then spent a lot of time mucking with a self modulated interactive warp in multiple steps to get it to this final place.

Now how can you apply this to your life. Here's an art strategy. Try to follow where Studio Artist is taking you. As opposed to trying to bend it to your will. You may end up in a totally unexpected place. And that's a good thing.

What About Transit?

California 'shelter in place' order now in effect. Guardian asks, "what about transportation". All non-essential travel "on foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit" is prohibited. Does essential travel include a beer run?

And yes, i do love Symmetry. Studio Artist's Interactive Warp functionality was designed from the start to help you work with it when building up a final image.

Meltdown

Working with sets of curated topical images and auto-mutating Gallery Show processes. Again, i'm randomizing the Composite settings as well as the effect setting. Found and fixed a bug with this particular feature and temporal effects.

I have to do a lot of 'finish' processing to pull some of these images into focus. I built a set of multi-octave enhancement and sharpening paint action sequences to do this for me. So the output of the auto-mutation would be too washed out to be useful. But through the magic of Studio Artist effect processing you can pull it all out of the mud and into view.

If noise is an issue in your image (and when isn't it), you can use the Smart Blur ip op effect and configure it to generate an adaptive blur effect that can smooth out ragged edge noise. You use this prior to your multi-res sharpening and enhancement.

Part of what i'm trying to convey here is that you need to develop a set of personal tool you keep around (in a custom Favorites preset category for example), and then interactively work with the output of auto-generative or auto-mutating processes to fine tune and optimize their appearance to get to a fully finished effected output image.

Mr Potato Head

Auto-mutating photos of idiots can lead to some interesting results. They don't get smarter, but at least you can laugh about it.

Working with individual ip op effects, and auto-mutating them using gallery show features. I built a new gallery show toolbar to make this all easier to work with interactively.

I'm also randomly mutating the Composite settings for the effect in addition to the other adjustable controls for the effect. So you keep the previous Gallery Show output in the canvas and then composite into it. Builds additional complexity. Like all directed evolution processes, you need to ride the process ignoring the junk until you get to something interesting, and then save that.

My Plague Year, a4

More gallery show experiments in directed auto-mutation of temporal image operation effects. Working with a curated set of source images that gallery show can input into temporal effects as opposed to the normal movie frame input.

I'm using an edited factory preset for the black border effect. I modified it so that the brush orientation was randomized for each nib application, and also reduced the overall image brush size in Brush Source control panel.

The Crash

I started by using the ReInitialize paint synth macro edit command to generate a generic smooth tube paint. I then used the Default Dynamic Paint Regionize Edit macro paint synth edit command to convert that generic soft paint into a rather sophisticated dynamic brush paint effect.

I then went to Path Start control panel and tweaked the settings associated with the path start regionizer. I boosted the Max Stroke setting to generate more regions, turned on Smart Start to use the facial feature detection, and messed with a few other paint synthesizer settings to dial in what i wanted for the particular source image i was using.

I also used the Make Paint Wet 1 macro paint synth edit command to make the dynamic paint have wet mixing properties.

Then ran that multiple times without erasing the previous paint cycle to build up a nice smeary paint image. Then started working with enhancement effects like smooth, sharpen, lighting gradients at multiple resolutions and very small Mix settings. Then worked with some Rank Edge ip op effects again with small Mix settings and different Composite algorithms to add some more structure into the dark areas of the painting.

So i'm compositing directly into a single layer throughout all of this, as opposed to building up 100 layers of different stacked effects and never making a final decision like in some other image processing programs.