This is the README for The PIKAressionist (c) 1998, 1999 Vidar Madsen - vidar@prosalg.no The PIKAressionist is free software, and may be distributed freely, provided this file is included! This program comes with no warranty, whatsoever. The author can not be held liable for any damage caused by proper or improper use of this program. --- Introduction The PIKAressionist is a plug-in for the Photo and Image Kooker Application, a.k.a. PIKA. It can be used to create natural looking painting effects and similar. It can also be run in a primitive "standalone" mode. The current version is still a bit shaky, and is to be considered beta software. I'll do some serious testing, hopefully across a few more platforms, as soon as I can. The official Web-page is http://www.prosalg.no/~vidar/pikaressionist/ and will always contain a link to the latest released version. --- Compiling / Installing To compile (hopefully): make If you want to compile for GTK-1.1 and PIKA-1.1 instead, you will have to change the two variable at the top of Makefile. Possibly you would want to edit DEFAULTPATH as well, but that's not critical. To install plug-in and accompanying files: make install The plug-in installs itself under $HOME/.pika/plug-ins/ and copies a couple of files into the directory $HOME/.pika/pikaressionist/. The subdirectories 'Brushes', 'Paper' and 'Presets' will be created during "make install", and a few files will be added; As a minimum, 'defaultbrush.pgm' and 'defaultpaper.pgm' under their respective directories. These are vanilla .PGM files, which could be edited (and created) with any decent program - like PIKA! :-) --- Standalone As of version 0.99 and later, the PIKAressionist can also be run separately from PIKA. This is primarily intended for debugging purposes, though, as it still needs PIKA libraries to compile. In your shell, type: pikaressionist somefile.ppm The image specified must be a valid PPM file. No other formats are supported, and probably never will. If you click "OK", the PPM will be replaced with the "repainted" version. If you "Cancel", nothing will be done to the file. --- File Formats The "normal" brushes are simply grayscale PGM files, which can be created with almost any program, including xv and of course PIKA. A number of brushes is included, so I guess a more in-depth explanation is not necessary. And, for those who might want to try it, PIKAressionist can also read GBR files, which is PIKA's native brush format. (You still need to copy them to the PIKAressionist's brush-directory, though. This will probably be fixed sometimes.) Version 0.99.4 introduced the concept of using "colored" brushes (although "pre-rendered" usually is more correct). The brushes' file format is a plain PPM file, but the layout is somewhat special (and kinda hard to explain); - The Red channel contains a shading map of the brush in question. Often it resembles the overall image more or less completely. - The Green channel contains a high-light map. This is a pre-defined image of the shiny parts of the brush. (Ordinary grayscale brushes have this calculated automatically with a rough emboss-ish algorithm.) - The Blue channel functions as a brush mask. When applying a brush stroke to the image, all areas colored blue in the file are first "blacked out" of the image. --- Feedback If you have any comments, criticism, ideas for improvement or new features, or if you run into problems of any sort, let me know, so that I can (try to) fix it for the next release! (And, if you find platform- dependent bugs, please try to fix them and send me a patch!) I'm also welcoming contributions in the form of brushes or textures! For this program to be valuable, it needs them... Bad! All contributions will be properly credited, of course. Good luck and happy painting! Vidar Madsen