Texturewerke 0.1

While doing textures for Shinya (the game with Khayyam/Sehle engine) I got frustrated with GIMP built-in tools and plug-ins available for texturing and decided to write my own tool Texturewerke. The initial version is now available for download from SourceForge:

• Tarball and win32 precompiled binary

At moment it can do two things:

1. Adjust the colors of one (masked) image so it matches as well as possible with another. Thus you do not have to manually adjust color curves to merge several photographs into the same texture.
2. Filter out low frequencies from image (while keeping the average intact). This can be used both for the creation of seamless textures and for removing shade gradient from uniform surfaces (like walls, doors, whiteboards...) Highpass filter supports masking (in polynome mode), so you can mask out those details whose contribution you want to ignore (like pictures on wall).

Below is one possible usage scenario of Texturewerke highpass filter.

Polynomic highpass filter with masking

We want to use the following image as a texture. Unfortunately the background color is non-uniform and adjusting it by hand is boring work

The original image - notice the non-uniform shading of the wall

We select the are that we want to have uniform color (the wall). It does not have to be precise - the filter samples few thousand points from target area and thus small regions of wrong color do not disturb the result much.
In given case I used magic want to select white and then added and subtracted few rectangles.

Target region selected

Now we turn target region into mask, bu choosing "Add Layer Mask" from Layer menu.

Target region turned into mask

Next we invoke Texturewerke plugin and select "Lowpass" filter and "Polynome" mode.

The Texturewerke dialog window

It blurs image (internally) before calculating polynome approximation. The optimal size of kernel depends on image and the number of samples used. As general rule - the more samples it uses, the smaller can be the kernel.
Next we apply filter.

Masked image after applying polynome filter

As you can see, the unmasked area has almost uniform color/bightness now.
As the last thing, we delete (or turn off layer mask).

The final image - wall color is now uniform

 And the final image has now nice uniform wall color.

There are few things to notice:

• Polynome mode tries to approximate the average color of the image by two-dimensional polynome (up to 4th degree). The approximation process guarantees the correct behavior of the polynome only inside target region - the higher is its degree the faster it goes "wild" outside. Thus if you mask out some edges of the image the results probably will not look nice for anything above quadratic (2th order).
• The unmasked area has to be at least 10% of original image
• Samples are drawn randomly from unmasked area.
• There is another highpass filter mode "blur", that subtracts blurred (lowpass) version of the same image. It does not support masking - but it may be more useful for the generation of highly uniform images (like grass and sand textures).

Have fun!