I have decided it is time to learn about the “Effects” available in Intaglio. I try to explore the many long lists of all the effects available, and have tried to apply some of them to selected objects. I have two questions.
(1) Is there a source from which I could obtain a readable list of all those effects, preferably with a description of what they do or an explanation of what they mean?
(2) When I try the effects (more or less at random - I’m just exploring), 9 times out of 10 I get an alert “Can’t complete this command. There isn’t enough memory”. The application then seizes up, and I have to use “Force quit”.
But my machine is massively endowed with memory. I should never, ever encounter memory problems, and never do, in any other applicaton which I use.
Am I completely misunderstanding something about using “effects” in Intaglio?
There are two apps that come as a part of the Developer tools which are quite useful (Developer tools are not installed by default, but are included on the DVD-ROM that came with your Mac… I’m not sure if they are available for download separately): Core Image Fun House, and Quartz Composer.
As far as the “Can’t complete this command. There isn’t enough memory.” error, can you provide specific details of one of the scenarios that exhibits this behavior? I a fairly new user of Intaglio, so I may not be much help. However, there are several others on this forum who may be able to help if they had more detail.
Thank you for your suggestion. But referring me to Mac docs is like showing me where the forest is when I am looking for a particular tree. Those docs all suffer from what I call Mackitis - they tell you that you should already have studied some other long and complex documents, they offer you links to many others, but they never actually contain what you are looking for, unless you are prepared to spend many head-aching hours. I give up too quickly.
I went systematically looking for an occurrence of the memory problem. I drew a filled rectangle, to which I applied, one after the other, the effects available from the list in the “Effects” window. All the “standard” effects worked perfectly, so I started on the list of special effects, of which the first set happens to be “Blur”. Box Blur, Disc Blur, Gaussian Blur, Median - all OK. Motion Blur produced the memory error. Zoom Blur and Noise reduction were OK.
And it goes like this all the way through. Some effects work. Several others produce the memory problem. It may be the case that because I don’t know enough about the effects ( which is why I asked for a readable list), I am asking for inappropriate effects for given objects. Perhaps, for example, it is unreasonable to expect a “Motion Blur” to work on a filled rectangle.
I’m sorry Apple’s reference guides weren’t helpful. I should have dug a bit deeper to see exactly what they were. I admit, finding good explanations of the Core Image filters seems difficult… and that shouldn’t be the case.
I have taken a quick look at “Quartz Composer”, the app that is a part of the Developer Tools, and I think it has what you are looking for: excellent documentation on what each filter does. And “Core Image Fun House” is a very straightforward way to play with all the effects: they even give you a few images to play with. I have found it very useful. So, it might be worth it to consider installing the Developer Tools. Fair warning: you’ll need nearly 3 gigabytes of hard drive space, and you’ll end up with XCode and all the software development stuff installed.
Here’s an excerpt from “Quartz Composer” on “Motion Blur”:
“Blurs an image to simulate the effect of using a camera that moves a specified angle and distance while capturing the image.”
“Note that the image produced by this filter may have infinite dimensions. If this is the case, since Quartz Composer doesn’t know how to render such images, you will need to convert it to finite dimensions before rendering it - typically using the Image Crop patch.”
“Core Image filters might not produce any image if any of their image inputs are undefined. Be also aware that they expect coordinates expressed in image pixels and not in Quartz Composer units.”
Being forced to install 3 gigs worth of software development tools to get this doesn’t seem right… it’d be nice if you could just get to the documentation, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
I’ve tried to reproduce your memory error on my machine, which is a Macbook Pro, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. I am running Mac OS X Leopard, version 10.5.1 and Intaglio version 2.9.7
I started with a filled rectangle (black) and added 13 Core Image effects with no errors… I added all of the blur effects, playing with the settings after adding each one. I then moved on to “Color Adjustment” and added all of the effects from this list, tweaking settings in each as I added them.
According to Activity Monitor, after doing all of that Intaglio is using about 280 Megabytes of memory, so I don’t seem to be taxing it that badly yet.
The Intaglio manual is very good, but the section about CI and channels would benefit from a few more examples.
Have you tried iMaginator? The QuickTime movie tutorials on the site show how to create effects with CI filters.
It’s also worth investigating the other apps that support CI effects.—Lineform, Pixelmator, ImageTricks and others. If you discover a good effect, write down the settings and recreate it in Intaglio.
Thank you, IanB, for pointing me towards a specific document which provides superb examples of what the effects can do. Much of that document remains to be studied.
Pablosan, thank you for your help, and for replicating my trial runs. I was using Intaglio 2.9.7 in OS 10.5 (on an iMac). I have downloaded a fresh copy of Intaglio, and straightaway tried a “motion blur”. Yes, it now works, though in an unexpected way, since it fills the whole window with the color of the stroke of the object to which it is being applied. (For example, a red-filled rectangle with a black edge applies a motion blur to the red, but fills the rest of the window with black!)
All may not be exactly as I expect it to be, but at least that astonishing memory alert does not appear.
I have been reading on other forums (primarily the ZBrush forum) that Core Image has a few… er, warts, shall we say. I saw the same results as you described when attempting to apply “Motion Blur” to a solid rectangle. At any rate, when it comes to Core Image, it may not be Intaglio’s problem. It could very well be a bug in Apple’s Core Image libraries.
I do know that Motion Blur worked fine on a photograph when I played with it in “Core Image Fun House”. In fact, it was quite impressive. The picture ended up looking like a single frame capture from a high-action film. I’m guessing that applying the effect to a more complicated image produces better results.
I drew an oblong shape with a coloured fill, added Motion Blur and the background was filled with the fill colour. To remove the unwanted background colour, change the Stroke colour to white, or another colour.
The all-over background effect doesn’t happen with other CI apps (Chocoflop, PixelMator, Lineform).
Does this also apply to the gradient effect too, as this tool keeps
freezing Intaglio. I keep getting that command telling me that I am
out of memory (despite I am using a MBP2 with 3 gigs of RAM), every
time I apply this tool. The only way out is to use force quit.
BTW, this tool worked fine in Tiger. I am on Leopard 10.5.1 here.
On 31 Jan 2008, at 17:29, Pablosan wrote:
I have been reading on other forums (primarily the ZBrush forum)
that Core Image has a few… er, warts, shall we say. I saw the same
results as you described when attempting to apply “Motion Blur” to a
solid rectangle. At any rate, when it comes to Core Image, it may
not be Intaglio’s problem. It could very well be a bug in Apple’s
Core Image libraries.
I do know that Motion Blur worked fine on a photograph when I played
with it in “Core Image Fun House”. In fact, it was quite impressive.
The picture ended up looking like a single frame capture from a high-
action film. I’m guessing that applying the effect to a more
complicated image produces better results.
FWIW, I’ve just tried the gradient tool in another application, and it
worked fine.
I suspect then that this is the fault of Intaglio?
On 3 Feb 2008, at 11:15, Tom Fenn wrote:
Does this also apply to the gradient effect too, as this tool keeps
freezing Intaglio. I keep getting that command telling me that I am
out of memory (despite I am using a MBP2 with 3 gigs of RAM), every
time I apply this tool. The only way out is to use force quit.
BTW, this tool worked fine in Tiger. I am on Leopard 10.5.1 here.
On 31 Jan 2008, at 17:29, Pablosan wrote:
I have been reading on other forums (primarily the ZBrush forum)
that Core Image has a few… er, warts, shall we say. I saw the same
results as you described when attempting to apply “Motion Blur” to a
solid rectangle. At any rate, when it comes to Core Image, it may
not be Intaglio’s problem. It could very well be a bug in Apple’s
Core Image libraries.
I do know that Motion Blur worked fine on a photograph when I played
with it in “Core Image Fun House”. In fact, it was quite impressive.
The picture ended up looking like a single frame capture from a high-
action film. I’m guessing that applying the effect to a more
complicated image produces better results.
Gradient filters work for me running Leopard on a MBP. One thing I’ve found that can affect how effects perform is how some of these effects are clipped. Some filters (such as these) are unbounded (i.e., they don’t create an image of a specific size). Intaglio arbitrarily limits the size of these to something larger than the document but you may have better luck if you include a crop filter at the end of the filter chain or set the graphic’s effects crop rectangle from the effects action (i.e., gear) menu.