Thanks for posting the files. It’s always interesting to learn how other users create effects.
One question:
What is the ‘Channel A’ specified in several of the CI effects? Is it documented? Channels B, C and D are also mysterious. I can’t see any reason to choose Channel A, but it certainly works. Is logic involved, or did you discover the effect by trial and error?
The four letter are used for storing effects results that you can later call back.
The reason I stored the second “Random Generator flitter” in “A” channel was I needed to scale it without altering the filters below it then I composite back together.
After the “Random Generator” all the filter above are loading A channel" then modify it in some way then save it back too “A” over-righting with the new version.
It’s this feature that makes Nick’s implementation of CoreImage in Intaglio so powerful.
Perhaps a more general answer is that the effects channels allow you to compute separate images for intermediate results.
Channels A-D are temporary locations you can use to create images for use later in the filter chain. For example, some filters take two or more input images. You might want to build a mask image to use as one of the inputs to such a filter. You could use several filters to create the mask and put the final result in channel A, then use other filters to create the image to mask in channel B. Finally you could combine channels A and B for the final result.
I know it’s been a while, but thanks, John, for posting your examples. I’ve just now started looking at them. I’m sure I’ll be “disassembling” your examples as I have time, to learn how you got such amazing results.