Robot Writes

Who doesn’t like M C Escher? what no? then you’ll have to leave right now I’m afraid, because todays experiment is all about the Droste Effect, a visual technique occaisionally used by the aforementioned dutch head-shredder mathmatician and printer, but digitally pioneered, popularised and perfected  by Josh Summers . His Droste Flickr set in particular blows my mind into little tiny but brilliantly coloured pixels. (Check out the chessboards…)

check out my Yoda Furby

I followed his posted tutorial and although quite pleased with the results i was sure there was more too it, especially as his later work has many more complex elements. So i waded through the comments (frequent and helpful replies are always a good sign) and got a bit more involved.  So here is a little tutorial based on my research:

You need some software first, namely the latest version of the GIMP , GTK , the latest version of Mathmap for windows and version 1.2.0 of the mathmap.exe , which we’re going to use to revert mathmap back to when it still played nicely with Josh’s latest script – version 10, which you will also need. you may also like to get this script from Lorenzo Marchi , which is a simpler droste effect but using straight old feedback recursion rather than getting all funky with the spirals.

Installation

1. Install the Gimp and GTK, and then install Mathmap.

2. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\*your name here*\.gimp-2.6\plug-ins and replace mathmap.exe with the 1.2.0 version.

3. I had some problems so i double bagged it by then copying everything in the above folder to C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins .

Image Preparation

4. Now photograph yourself/significant other/partner in crime holding a picture frame. Allow plenty of space all round when framing the shot as we’re going to be cropping it down. when you’ve got your shot transfer it over to your computator.

mine looks like this:

Tat Club

5. Open the image manipulation program of your choice, either P’shop or the Gimp and erase to tranparency the area that will become the ‘frame’ so you get something like this:

cropped and ready

(I’m really new to GIMP so like Josh i did it in photoshop. if you’re not sure check out his tutorial step 1.)

6. Save as a .PSD file.

The Fun Part

7. Fire up the GIMP and open your PSD.

8. In the dropdown menus go to Filters>generic>mathmap>mathmap .

9. Mathmap should open 2 windows, one full of computery looking code stuff -ignore this unless things are going wrong- and a friendlier looking regular interface. in the interface go to the settings tab and uncheck ‘auto preview’.

10. In the expressions tab delete the existing filter code then replace it by copying and pasting the Droste version 10 code into the expressions tab. get no more or less than everything from ###… to …end. copy it straight from the webpage. don’t paste it into notepad thinking your going to save the script somewhere and then copy that into mathmap because notepad screws up carriage returns and this will in turn screw up mathmap.

11. Click ‘Preview’ and after about 20 seconds you should get a picture that looks almost right.

11a. Power tip: click the ’save as…’ button at the bottom of the expression tab and give the script a name, like ‘Droste_v-10′. Then next time you do a droste pic it will be listed in the examples tab of mathmap.

12. Almost right is no good so we need to do some tweaking. go to the ‘User Values’ tab, which will now have filled with all sorts of interesting sliders and checkboxes. Make one adjustment at a time, previewing as you go, until you get something your happy with. here’s some tips for where you should be messing adjusting, in this order:

Outer Radius: defines the edge of the picture. I found bringing it down to 97 helped keep things tidy.

Inner radius: helps mathmap find the ‘frame’. around 40 is a good ball park figure. black areas are bad and if you see them you need to set you’re inner radius higher.

Zoom and Rotate: help fine tune positioning. you want to avoid having the outer ‘tail’ of the spiral visible. for me these ended up around 17 for zoom and 11degrees for rotation. ymmv.

Xcentershift and Ycentershift: tell mathmap where the centre of your ‘frame’ is. negative values of X will move the centre point left, positive – right. negative values of Y will move the centre down, positive – up. I think…

X shift and Yshift: moves the overall image, use these to line the whole composition up.

I’ll leave the rest to your curiosity.

13. When you’re happy hit OK and it will make the changes. after a couple of minutes you should have a pretty nifty looking picture.

14. File>’save as..’ in GIMP and click ’select filetype by extension’ and jpeg, then save that crazy sucka.

15. make a cup of tea, you deserve it. I had a lemon crunch cream with mine because i like regular crunch creams (sort of a rich mans custard cream) and the lemon variety were on offer.

This is just the basics but it should get you started. It’s definitely got me thinking about framing my shots when i’m out and about in a whole new way. and googling for mathmap scripts could turn up some fun stuff.

Finally thanks must go to Math-Art for finding and sharing.

Ciao