In the constellation of Cygnus
There lurks a mysterious, invisible force
The Black Hole
Of Cygnus X-1

Six Stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister’s loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night…

Rush » Cygnus X-1: Book One — The Voyage » A Farewell to Kings

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Rendered in Oxidizer 0.5.1. Post processed in Photoshop CS.

One thing I’ve always strived for in my artistic endeavors is to avoid posting slightly different takes of existing compositions; less repitition, more variety is the motto of the day. This image is one of the rare instances where that unwritten rule gets tossed aside.

While essentially being the same subject matter as Cold River, this alternate take was photographed just a little earlier in the day; enabling an overall darker, more contrasted starting point — a trait which gives this variant a richer and more vibrant feel. The dual sun flare nearly sets fire to an otherwise frozen twig and the rushing stream has four distinct areas of interest.

Edge sharpening was enhanced by using the ‘High Pass’ filter in Photoshop CS on a duplicated layer that was then blended over the original image using the ‘Linear Light’ option. Shadows and colors were deepened prior to sharpening.

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This happy little drop of H20 darn near held up a sign saying “Look at me!” — just sitting there and twinkling in the sun, suspended along the frond a Tiger Lily in the side garden.

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As Oxidzer 0.5 slowly crawls towards release its time to plan 0.6 so I though I’d let you guys to throw your hats in to the ring.

Here’s the ideas that I have in the pot, either my own, or ideas that people have suggested.

Take these as given…

• Update flam3 to the latest version .
• Update LuaObjCBridge if I see any advantage in doing so.

So the proper idea’s are in no particular order…

• Save / Load of sparse gradients.
• Double Click and Drag and Drop loading of flam3 files.
• A browser for the auto backups.
• Auto-previews for changes to all parameters like the Transformation editor
• Keyboard shortcut shift-cmd-L (or similar) for Lua Script.
• A genome pin board to keep genomes around on possibly persistent between sessions.
• An additional “#” column in the main list that gives the index of a flame
• Ditto in the transform editor, a column with numbers to identify the flames
• A “clear” button in the Breeder in addition to the load/+/- buttons, or multi-select genome ability.
• Check auto-post
• A script library/launcher integrated with the Main Oxidizer window.
• A Lua script console, to see the output of scripts.
• A reorganization of the XForms window to put the affine and post coefficients under the same tab.
• Persist the current set of flames across Oxidizer sessions.
• Allow the preview image size to be altered, hovering over the image well shows the bigger preview.

And the real blue sky one…

• Multi-preview - choose a parameter, set max and min and render a number of previews with that parameter set between max and min

So, over to you, which of these do you think would be is there anything else you can think of.

Dave

p.s. I’ll know if you’re hyping your own ideas :-)

Download » iPhone Wallpack May 2008.

A Friday morning stroll through The Whitmire Wildflower Garden at Shaw Nature Reserve reaps a nice collection of photos for our gallery.

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Grab your graphite sticks, Rapidograph 3×0 pen, that long discarded set of French Curves, and we’ll walk you through a 785-step tutorial on how this piece was conceived and brought to life using art tools that haven’t seen light of day in well over two decades!

Just kidding :^)

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Rendered in Oxidizer 0.4.5. Post processed in Photoshop CS.

Spirograph™ is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc.

Spring wears a red dress and my, oh my — she looks darn sweet, casually dancing in the breeze, teasing our eyes after the cold and colourless days of Winter.

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