NTP

Adam.

What filters are the most useful? (Freeware preferred! I survive on a minister's salary!)

What photoshop plugins work with Satori PhotoXL 2.29?

One image I have been trying is letting a fire "burn" through a map. Just can't quite get it right.

NTP

This is how I would do it in Satori; do it anything like this, and it'll look a million bucks:

1. Obviously you'll need your original map image on a top layer, and whatever your background is (colour, image or transparency) on a layer below.

2. Take time to first work on the map image to shadow and texture it appropriately, just to give it some 'life'. A good many of Satori's basic brushes are good for this, i.e. highlight or tint, with a large brush size. Try enabling the 'chalk' parameter in setup/styles, which will help establish a texture.

3. Next, go to Geometry and pick irregular polygon. Roughly establish a multi-sided shape which will be the basic 'hole' the fire has burned through. Making sure your geometry options are set to filled and cut, and render the image. Part of your map will now disappear.

4. This is where the fun begins. Select a rough brush such as chalk, at a fairly large scale so that the grain is fairly apparent. What we want to do is edit the edges of the cut polygon to give the impression of burned paper, so right-click (when the brush is over the image) to call up the brush menu, and select 'remove alpha'.

5. Simply dab the brush along the lengths of the polygon, VERY freely, which will have the result of 'eating' into the map. The grain of the brush completes the illusion of fire damage.

6. Remember to dab the brush well into the map itself, quite randomly, creating interesting intersections where the image has met the alpha channel. Experiment with varying the size of the brush.

7. When you're happy, select the brush 'soft air'. Using a dark, burned colour tone complimentary to the map, right-click again at the brush cursor but this time select 'replace'. This will just add colour to the perimeter of your 'alpha hole'. With a size of say 20 (if at 72dpi), trace the edges of the cut with your brush. It will now begin to darken as though licked by flames. Usage of fairly solid reds and oranges thinly around the same contours should increase the illusion of heat.

8. Actual licks of flame is more complex, but here I'd suggest multiple flame-like geometry objects, coloured by graduated *and* transparency fill, to allow the underlying map to show through. Again the shape of these objects can be edited by use of an alpha-removing brush shape (probably soft air in this instance). This, however, would be tricky to get right.

9. And that's it. For me, step 8 would seem fairly unnecessary - usually when paper burns from the centre out, you're more aware of that advancing perimeter burning glow than true flame.

Hopefully there's enough there to give you an idea, anyway. Although there are times when filters can solve some problems, by and large I tend to avoid them for 'traditional' artwork, generally because they look too algorhythmic and rarely do what they say on the tin.

Good luck!

Peter

NTP

If you literally want to put the whole map as a brush (meaning you press down and the whole map appears) then you can just create a new "movie" brush (using only the one image) using the map as your imported file (make sure you set the brush to use imported color). The help file explains how to create a new brush.

If you want to be able to paint and see parts of the map appear, you can use Satori's texture brush. In the Actions Palette on the Size tab (in the paint section) press "Texture". It will ask you to specify a source image (this image must be a .rir or .cvs). Do so and that image will open. Think of it as cloning but from an external image. So, you set your starting point on the source image and then you start painting the image onto the piece you are working on. So, if you want to paint the centre area of the map onto another image you load the map as your source image select the centre and then go back to the image you are working on and start painting.

Did that make any sense? I am sure the help file has enough info to get you started. If not, post again and we will help as much as possible.

Adam.

For those who understand (I don't)this is the error message:

SATORI caused an invalid page fault in

module KERNEL32.DLL at 0167:bff886e7.

Registers:

EAX=c00309c8 CS=0167 EIP=bff886e7 EFLGS=00010212

EBX=00000000 SS=016f ESP=00910000 EBP=00910014

ECX=c00309c4 DS=016f ESI=817b265c FS=4ca7

EDX=c00309c8 ES=016f EDI=009100bc GS=0000

Bytes at CS:EIP:

57 33 f6 8b 38 8b 19 89 75 f8 39 77 54 0f 84 1c

Stack dump:

817b265c 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 009100a4 bff87f0a 00000001 0000000e 009100bc 009100d8 817b26a0 817ad8f8 00000000 00000000 00000000

Norman

Peter

Other than that, I would suggest you go to "Windows Update" in Internet Explorer's "Tools" menu just to be sure you have the latest updates. I was having a problem where Windows wouldn't release a file/folder after being in use and I had to logoff and login again to move/delete them. I went to Windows Update, applied the latest fixes and everything works like a charm.

Adam.

Thanks!

Norman

Ok. As for Photoshop filters, I don't find myslef using them much simply because they aren't resolution independant. I have Corel Photopaint anyhow if I want filters that aren't in Satori.

But this site:

http://perso.club-internet.fr/gpl/

Is a good site for Photoshop filters.

As for the filters that are in Satori, I use mostly the tint (to create greyscale maps for 3d work - bump, specular etc..) and I use the blur filter alot. I also use the sepia tint CanvasFX filter quite a bit.

Again, it'a really hard to suggest a filter or filters because it really depends on what effect you are looking for.

As for your fire burning through a map, how are you trying to do it now? What doesn't look right?

Adam.