Wednesday, December 24, 2003

so last night i decided i should start working on artwork for the true data 12" & i started tinkering with databent images (specifically editing photoshop files in sound forge). most of my experiments resulted in pure noise but i did discover one nice trick (you can see some results in the new animated gif on the right side of the screen).

by carefully editing the RGB information in the image you can create an odd vertical "skipping" effect. in order to do this, you must use the "open" function, not "open as" because that will reinterpret the data. the trick is to leave the header untouched, then when opening the program will prompt that there are errors in the file. this means the program is very picky that you don't corrupt the wrong data. pretty much you can only jumble/process the data within each individual RGB channel. the amount of data in each section must remain the same, & it generally didn't like me cutting/pasting blocks from one section to the other, either.

unfortunately the images seem to skip at specific points, & in a shorter image there are only 3-4 "rows" total. furthermore the program seems to be picky about what images it will even open after they've been run through soundforge. i had no trouble editing a 640x480 snapshot (in psd format of course), but when i tried to edit my wrist brace devil horns, i kept getting an "unexpected end-of-file" error... i had to make a new image, with two copies of the brace image next to each other (on separate layers) to get it to work.

i need to experiment with more different images, as well as other image types (tiff, etc), to see if i can learn more.

of course, this doesn't do me much good so far for designing my label (which will be one-color)

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