The following image gallery above shows off a few random Smart Blur effects generated by using Studio Artist’s new Gallery Show features to randomly mutate new image operation effects in real time. This particular Gallery Show feature is very useful for previewing the range of potential different artistic styles that any given image operation effects can produce. You can also use it to automatically generate new effect presets via random evolution of effect parameter values.
The first gallery image below shows the Gallery Show preferences I used for this particular post example.
Note that i’m using the Random Cur IP Op option for the Technique preference setting. What this technique setting does is randomly mutate the different adjustable user controls for the current image operations effect. So if you use this techqniue and then run gallery show, Studio Artist will cycle through different randomly mutated image operation effect paramters for the current ip op effect you have selected.
The Wait in Sec preference control specifies the number of seconds gallery show waits between effect cycles.
The Source Option specifies what gallery show does with the source image for each cycle. For this particular example, I wanted to use the same source image that was currently loaded into the source are, so I set the Source Option to the Fixed setting. Oftentimes I use the Folder (random) setting, which tells gallery show to select a new random source image from a folder of my choosing every gallery show cycle.
Gallery Show is very flexible. You can use the Auto Mask Option control to specify different kinds of automatic masking operations for each gallery show cycle. And you can use the Start Cycle Option control to specify different kinds of operations that take place at the beginning of each gallery show cycle.
For example, you could choose to randomly run a different randomly chosen favorites preset at the beginning of each gallery show cycle. This is useful for simulating drip effects, where your current favorites presets are a collection of different water drip or melt presets. Since the whole point of this particular post example is to use gallery show to preview different artistic effects for a specific image operation effect, we turned off all of the gallery show controls that provide additional effect variability or masking.
To run gallery show, I just used the Action : Run Gallery Show menu (as shown in the 2nd gallery image above) to start my custom gallery show (as configured by the gallery show preference settings). Gallery show will then cycle automatically until I manually stop it by pressing the space bar.
For More Information
You can use Studio Artist’s movie or image stream features to automatically save each canvas image generated during a gallery show run. So you could let gallery show run unattended, and then cull through it’s automatically generated output later, looking for keeper images while throwing away the rest. For more information on working with Streams check out this tip.
You can also use Studio Artist’s History Sequence recording features to save all of the automatically mutated ip op presets generated during a gallery show run. The Image Stream name Option control in the gallery show preferences can be used to associate preset names with image stream file naming.
For more information on working with gallery show check out these tip posts.
