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New Wacom Tablet: Intuos4

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Wacom Intuos4 Medium

Wacom has just released its new line of pen tablets - the Intuos4. From the product write ups it looks like it might be time for me to upgrade. I currently use an Intuos2 tablet with my desktop for all my “real” graphics work. My Intuos2 was an upgrade from an older, smaller Graphire tablet which I still use on occasion with my laptop at home and when traveling.

I must say that once I started using a pen and tablet combination for my graphics work, any time I went back to use my mouse it seemed like a giant leap backward. For the Intuos4 it looks like the biggest advances have been made in the areas of pen sensitivity and responsiveness - the very features that attracted me to the Wacom tablet in the first place. If you have never used a pen and tablet in your graphics work, take this test. First, with a pencil and paper write in cursive your signature. Then, with the paint program of your choice, write your signature using your mouse. You will see that your mouse-created signature is no where near as smooth or as natural looking as your pencil and paper signature. Writing using a tablet and pen is very much like writing using traditional media. While not as versatile as a traditional paint brush, the Wacom pen is as close as you can come digitally.

I am not going to go into a detailed list of the Intuos4 features - there is a good summary of the features at the Amazon Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet product page.

Once you’ve bought your Intuos4, you will be able to download several pieces of software that come bundled with the product. The software consists of the following two plugins for Photoshop:

Nik® Color Efex Pro™ WE6
Wacom Brushes 3.0 for Photoshop

and your choice of two of the three following software packages:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Windows or Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh
Autodesk SketchBook Express® 2010
Corel Painter Sketch Pad

Given that I already have the full blown versions of Photoshop and Painter, I would download SketchBook. While I wasn’t able to find any information about Autodesk SketchBook Express 2010, I did find the following about SketchBook Express 2009.

Back to the Intuos4, it is available in four sizes (dimensions given are for the active area):

Wacom Intuos4 Small Pen Tablet (6.2 x 3.9 inches)
Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet (8.8 x 5.5 inches)
Wacom Intuos4 Large Pen Tablet (12.8 x 8.0 inches)
Wacom Intuos4 Extra Large Pen Tablet (19.2 x 12.0 inches)

The size of my Intuos2 puts it somewhere between the size of the Medium and Large Intuos4. Based on that I will probably upgrade to the Wacom Intuos4 Large Pen Tablet as it is somewhat larger than my Intuos2 and is just over $300 cheaper than the Wacom Intuos4 Extra Large Pen Tablet. Also, the footprint of the Large is a manageable 18.7 x 12.6 inches whereas the Extra Large consumes a hefty 24.5 x 18.2 inches of desktop space.

Only one question remains: when I upgrade to an Intuos4, what will happen to my old but trusty Graphire since my Intuos2 will be reassigned to laptop service.

Ad Astra, Jim

Tags: intuos, Painter, Photoshop, tablet, wacom
Posted in Computing, Digital Art, Graphics Software | 2 Comments »

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Processing: Finding Beauty in Math

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Processing Rectangles Experiment

Since last week I’ve been fixated on Processing. What is Processing? Processing is an open source programming environment within which one can write programs using the Processing language to create digital art and animations. Both the art and animations can be either static - using predefined parameters, or dynamic - responding to user mouse and keyboard input. Processing traces its roots back to the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

I say fixation because I have embarked on a crash course approach to mastering this tool by reading and fully understanding the book Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (book cover shown below). Written by Ira Greenberg, the book provides a solid introduction to graphic programming and animation in the Processing environment.

Processing

Processing itself is a Java application so requires that Java be installed on your computer. The Processing programming language is similar to Java but much simpler. Artists without programming experience may find some of the object oriented programming concepts tricky to follow. Do not let this discourage you. From the book’s description:
"This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary."

It has been some years since I have written Java programs. In fact as far as I can tell my Java applet Mars Database of Named Features was the first such tool available on the Internet. Unfortunately I have not updated the data elements since the last program update in 1999.

I have always found algorithmic art fascinating. Many years ago I wrote a Basic program to produce Lissajous curves based on user input and shared it with a few friends. The program was created and ran on an OS/2 system. Do you remember OS/2? OS/2 was the IBM operating system for the PC that was a pleasure to use. Unlike Windows, it was a real operating system and in my mind far superior to its Microsoft counterpart at the time. One objective I have is to revive this old program and port it over to the Processing environment. Perhaps even turn it into a Java applet on my web site so that others can play with it. Of course this is assuming that I can find it (see Doomed Diskettes).

I created the graphic Processing Rectangles Experiment (shown above) using a simple Processing program I wrote. The program has just 11 lines of code. The "vision" aspect consists of having a picture in your mind of what you want to create and then being able to translate that vision into lines of code.

Having only just begun to learn Processing, one concern I have is the apparent limitation to images being no larger than the physical screen size. It appears that Processing does allow large images to be opened in a memory buffer and displayed on the screen one section at a time. I don’t know the answer yet but it may be possible to draw to this buffer area; display sections of the buffer on screen; save the sections to disk one at a time; and then reassemble the image in Photoshop. I do hope so.

Processing Videos and Games

Following is an example of a video created in the Processing environment. Titled Moscow Olympics: Second Trace it was created by Vimeo user Eduardo Omine. It serves as an example of Processing’s animation abilities integrated with audio.

Moscow Olympics: Second Trace.

Another interesting example is a game created using Processing.
Benjamin Nelson’s SlingStar is more easily played than explained.

Processing Resources

For more information about Processing and examples, check out the following.

Happy Processing, Jim

Posted in Digital Art, Graphics Software, Videos | 1 Comment »

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Context Free Art

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

Context Free Art Example

My favorite aspect of digital art is the seemingly endless possibilities for mental and artistic exploration it provides. For example, I have only just begun to learn how to use Context Free. Context Free is a graphics program that creates an image based on a set of written instructions. These instructions are termed a grammar and consist of rules and parameters. These rules are saved in a Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) file.

For me, this is reminiscent of the way computer graphics were created back in the early days. Unfortunately I do not recall the name of the programming package I first used to create graphics on an Apple II+ back circa 1982. Having no input device other than the keyboard meant that the only way to create graphics was programmatically.

The colorful geometric figure above was created using Context Free. The program I wrote to create this illustration is shown below.

// A sample Context Free CFDG
startshape Art
rule Art {
draw{ hue 120 sat .5 }
}

rule draw {
SQUARE{ b -1}
SQUARE{ s .995 b 1 }
draw{r 30 s .995 hue +1 }
}

In brief, the above program works as follows. To begin, the startshape directive tells Context Free the name of the rule to start drawing with. In this case the name of the rule is Art.

The rule Art consists of one statement: an instruction to execute the rule named draw. You will note that the draw statement has two parameters. The hue parameter specifies the color to draw and the value of 120 corresponds to green. The sat parameter specifies the saturation of the color, in this case 50%.

At this point control is passed to the draw rule. The first statement, SQUARE, tells Context Free to draw a square. The parameter b is used to specify brightness and the value of -1 corresponds to black. So a solid black square is drawn. The second statement, SQUARE, tells the program to draw another square. In this case there are two parameters. The s parameter is used to specify the size percentage. In this case .995 tells Context Free to draw this square at 99.5 percent the size of the last square drawn. The parameter b, used to specify brightness, is given the value of 1 which corresponds to white. So a solid green square is drawn. If this were the last statement, then the result would be a simple solid green square (from the second SQUARE statement) with a black border (from the first SQUARE statement).

The magic happens in the final statement. The draw rule is directed to execute the draw rule. When a statement or function calls itself, this is referred to as recursion. The beauty is that in this new call to the draw rule we can modify the initial drawing conditions. The r parameter tells Context Free that the first thing it should do is to rotate the drawing angle by the number of degrees specified, in this case 30. The s parameter instructs Context Free to reduce the size of whatever is to be drawn to 99.5 percent of what was drawn last. Finally, the hue parameter says to increment the value of the hue by 1.

The draw rule is then executed using these new initial conditions. And when the statement to call the draw rule again is encountered, the initial conditions are again altered by the parameters. And again and again and again. The draw rule will be called over and over until the size of what is being drawn shrinks down to nothing. When this last draw is executed, it returns control to the draw that called it and so on all the way back up the chain until control is finally returned to the Art rule.

Writing programs for Context Free can give you a nice mental workout. The program shown above is a very simple one that just scratches the surface of what is possible. You really should give this software a try. And I’ve saved the best for last: the Context Free software is free. You can download a copy for yourself from the Context Free web site.

Go ahead - give it a try. Jim

Posted in Algorithmic Art, Computing, Digital Art, Graphics Software | 2 Comments »

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Teaching Computers to Appreciate Art

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

A Binary Mona Lisa

I recently came across an article about teaching computers to appreciate art - at least that was the title of the news story. The story actually dealt with a software program under development that would be able to analyze a work of art and associate it with an artist in its database. The software would also be used to spot art forgeries.

The program was created by Daniel Keren, a professor from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Haifa in Israel. The software works by subdividing known paintings by an artist into discrete blocks. Each of these blocks is then mathematically reduced to a formula. The multiple formulas can then be combined and compared with one another. The underlying program logic is that these sets of formulas will uniquely describe the artist that created the associated works of art.

Models were created for five artists - Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt van Rijn, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Wassily Kandinsky - using 15 painting per artist. The program was then tested against another 15 paintings from each artist to see if the program could correctly associate a painting with an artist. The program was able to correctly associate a painting with its artist 86 percent of the time.

Over the course of the article it becomes clear that the program has a very long way to go in order for it to be considered truly functional. I am skeptical as to the program’s chances of ever surpassing, or even equalling the judgments of the art specialist. While this program could develop to the point where it becomes a more useful tool, I can not see it ever reaching a state of reliability such that it becomes the arbiter of authenticity. I am even more skeptical of the ability to apply the program’s technique to the analysis of digitally created art since digital brushwork does not have the same characteristics of traditional brushwork.

If you would like to know more about this program, see the article Teaching a Computer to Appreciate Art

Binary Mona Lisa

Since this post is about software “appreciating” art, I decided to create an image reflective of the subject. The image used to illustrate this blog entry is a digitally manipulated rendition of that most famous of paintings, the Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, painted by Leonardo da Vinci slightly more than 500 years ago. The woman in the portrait is said to be the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.

Ad Astra, Jim

Posted in Digital Art, Graphics Software | No Comments »

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New Version of Photoshop FITS Liberator 2.2 Released

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Photoshop FITS Liberator screen shot

A new version of the free ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator plugin for Photoshop was released earlier this month. This plugin makes it possible to open FITS files with Photoshop. For you Photoshop users who are not familiar with FITS, the Flexible Image Transport System is the standard file format for astronomical data, like that of the Hubble Space Telescope for example. For more FITS information visit my Making Astronomical Art with your PC Resources page which I created for students in the astronomical art class I taught at the Adler Planetarium.

According to the release notes, the following enhancements are in this new release:

Universal Binary for Mac allows native CS3 operation on Intel-based systems
Flip image checkbox allows image orientation to be selected on import
Stretch Root functions now operate antisymmetrically about x=0
Version 1.1 of the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard is fully supported. For more information see http://www.virtualastronomy.org
Improvements to importing coordinate metadata from the FITS header

I went to the version 2.2 download page and downloaded this new version. There is also a Photoshop action called Colour_composite.atn that can be downloaded. This action automates the production of color images from the individual RGB grayscale layers. I’ve never used their action preferring to use one I created myself. I installed the plugin without difficulty. On opening a FITS file (M27 for the curious among you) I observed that the main dialog for this new version was essentially the same with the only modifications being to the Stretch Function dialog (item 3 in the list above) and the addition of a Flip Image option (item 2 in the list above).

You can learn more about the plug-in, how to use, and even get some sample FITS files from the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator Home Page.

Ad Astra, Jim

Posted in Astronomy, Graphics Software, Photoshop | No Comments »

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CB Model Pro Beta Version

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

3D object created in CB Model Pro

This last week I learned of and downloaded a new 3D modeling program. The beta version of CB Model Pro is a free download that can be used indefinitely if you fill out the online registration.

CB Model Pro sports a very simple user interface. It operates by deforming the surface of either the supplied primitives or very simple imported objects. The supplied primitives are the sphere, cylinder, cone, cube, sheet, and torus. 3D object operations that are available are Point Pull, Flatten, Bend, Neck, Scale, and Poke. The degree of deformation applied by these tools is controlled by two simple sliders. There is also a Mirror option so that operations performed on one side of the object are mirrored on the other side.

In addtion to modeling, you can also paint your object. This is accomplished either by applying an image to the model or by using the paintbrush tool.

Once finished with your 3D model, you can export it as either an obj, stl, wrl, or 3dxml object. However, for the stl and 3dxml formats, only the 3D mesh is exported. The CB Model Pro web site has a gallery of sample textured objects to give you an idea of what can be done with the product.

If you have questions about the program, you can turn to the 12 page PDF for program documentation. There is a forum for the software advertised on the web site but stupidly they have chosen to restrict both read and write access to only those people who have previously purchased software from SolidWorks. Definitely not a bright marketing move.

The Pluses

Okay it’s free. It’s also a very simple program to learn and use. I created the object in the picture used to illustrate this article in minutes using only the Neck tool and application of a texture image.

The Minuses

It would be nice if you were able to name your saved models - rather than having the program arbitrarily assign names like file1.cb3d Precision of manipulation is really not there. It is a simple tool that performs simple tasks to create simple objects. You start with a primitive, select an operation, click somewhere on your primitive and drag. And a forum closed to everyone except owners of SolidWorks software is not at all helpful.

Summary

If want to play with creating simple 3D objects in an intuitive manner then give CB Model Pro a try.
Ad Astra, Jim

Posted in Digital Art, Graphics Software | 1 Comment »

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NASAView Limitations

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

NASAView JPEG vs GIF Comparison of a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRise image

NASAView JPEG vs GIF of a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE image

For those wanting to work with the raw data files returned by various NASA planetary missions the first order of business is to convert the data from its native PDS (Planetary Data System) IMG format into something usable by standard image processing software, like Adobe Photoshop. The NASA PDS Software Download site provides a variety of software packages for use in processing various NASA data products. For Windows users the only program available there for converting IMG files is NASAView. The most recent version of NASAView is 2.14 and was released in June 2007. Earlier versions of NASAView supported saving IMG files only as GIFs. Recent versions have included the option to save to JPEGs.

By design, GIF files are limited to 8 bits of color information per pixel. In the case of PDS IMG files, this means that each image is limited to a palette of 256 gray levels with 0 representing black and 255 representing white. Because the PDS IMG files from earlier missions contained only 8 bits of information per pixel, there was no data lost in the translation from IMG to GIF.

But what about when saving the IMG file as a JPEG. I do not know what the rationale was for adding the ability to save JPEGs. Perhaps so people could easily have an image that was more web friendly in terms of the file’s size. I strongly advise against ever saving an IMG file as a JPEG in NASAView. The reason is because of the JPEG compression. Unfortunately NASAView does not give the user any control over the level of compression. From what testing I have done, it appears that NASAView defaults to a quality setting of 75%. While this may be fine for dumping an image on the web, it fails when it comes to producing quality print images, especially if you want to enlarge the image.

To illustrate the impact of JPEG compression in NASAView take a look at the image at the top of this article. This is a 300% magnified view of a segment of a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE image. On the left is the JPEG version and on the right is the GIF version of the same area, only mirrored. The JPEG artifacts are obvious and take the form of square blocks. Of course there is a significant difference in file size. Whereas the GIF version is just about 7 megabytes, the JPEG version is just over 1 megabyte. Another differences between the JPEG and GIF versions are that the JPEG version is brighter than the GIF version.

In closing, my advice is that if you are using NASAView to convert IMG files to a standard graphic format file, never ever use the “Save JPEG” or “Save JPEG AS” options. If you need a JPEG version, then save your file as a GIF and use another pieces of software to do the conversion to JPEG so that you can control the amount of image compression used. Hopefully in the future a more robust version of NASAView will be released which offers Window’s users greater control on output file format and quality.
Ad Astra, Jim

Posted in Astronomy, Graphics Software, Mars | 2 Comments »

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A Review of Serif PanoramaPlus 1

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Which Flag Do You Prefer? Before and After Using Serif PanoramaPlus 1

I was in a local bookstore last week going through the magazine section and pulled the current issue of the astronomy magazine BBC Sky at Night. I’m in the habit of going through all the astronomy magazines in search of interesting articles. Unfortunately for Sky at Night I’ve never came across an article in their magazine that would make it worth its price. Looking at the May 2007 issue, it wasn’t what was inside the magazine that grabbed my interest but what was on the CD that comes with the magazine.

The CD has a full version of Serif’s PanoramaPlus, version 1. This program automates the creation of panoramic images given a list of individual source images. Previously I had created my panoramas by using Adobe Photoshop’s Transform Tool and layer masks. Needless to say the Transform Tool is definitely suboptimal - especially when it comes to altering the geometry of the individual images. While I wasn’t thrilled that as a part of the software activation process I had to call the UK offices of Sky at Night, I figured that would be cheaper than going out and buying the software. What bugged me about this is that for all other magazines containing CDs with full versions of software being offered, I’ve never had to make a phone call to activate the product: either it was ready to go or all I had to do was point my browser at the specified web page to complete the registration.

Fortunately the software did have a one time use without registering so that I could fire it up and test it out. I fed the program a total of 11 images from an Apollo 16 EVA to merge. Their combined file size was 8.5 megabytes. PanoramaPlus quickly stitched them together and as far as I could tell from the software’s preview window, had done a good job of it.

The final step was to export the newly created panorama. Therein lies the source of my disappointment. The only export format available was to save as a jpeg. Not only that but there was no option to specify image quality and no documentation identifying what compression setting the software was using. The other shock was the size of my new panorama - just 3000 pixels wide. PanoramaPlus had taken 11 separate images with a combined width of 25,740 pixels and combined file size of 8.57 megabytes and created a panorama just 3000 pixels wide with a file size of 880K.

As a before and after comparison I took the American flag from the panorama and enlarged it to match the flag in one of the source images. The comparison of the two flags is shown at the top of this article. Note that the image shown is a scaled down version of the full size comparison. On the left is the original source flag image and on the right is the flag image from the PanoramaPlus panorama, upsized to match the size of the original flag. The qualitative difference is obvious.

Going to the Serif web site, I see that they are now on version 3 of the software so it is probably no longer the same product. Bottom line: if you’re thinking of buying the May 2007 issue of Sky at Night because of the PanoramaPlus version 1 software, don’t - big mistake. And the special upgrade offer they are running in the magazine: if you’re in the U.S. and paying in U.S. dollars, the standard price for the software is cheaper than the Sky at Night special “discount.”
Ad Astra, Jim

Posted in Digital Art, Digital Photography, Graphics Software, Photoshop | 2 Comments »

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New Wacom Tablet: Intuos4