Making Mountains in GIMP

[Karro]

'Hope This Helps' - I think!

Thanks. In all my time of sporadic forum-reading, I don't think I've ever seen that one.

EDIT:

Well, I tried to try the technique today, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and it won't work. Specifically, I can't make the Gradient Fill work. I can get a shaky-looking lasso selection that looks like it would make good mountains, I can pick mountainy foreground and background color. I can select the gradient tool and change the settings. But when I click in the selection, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

[RobA]

Thanks. In all my time of sporadic forum-reading, I don't think I've ever seen that one.

EDIT:

Well, I tried to try the technique today, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and it won't work. Specifically, I can't make the Gradient Fill work. I can get a shaky-looking lasso selection that looks like it would make good mountains, I can pick mountainy foreground and background color. I can select the gradient tool and change the settings. But when I click in the selection, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

Did you watch the video? That should make it real clear and might point out what I am doing but not explaining

-Rob A>

[Karro]

Did you watch the video? That should make it real clear and might point out what I am doing but not explaining

-Rob A>

Yeah, I watched it earlier, but when I went to try the technique, I didn't have 'net access, and I couldn't remember what I was doing wrong.

Then... suddenly, sitting here trying again, I remembered!

I can't just CLICK and have the gradient fill in. I have to CLICK and DRAG. I'm not sure if the amount of drag changes the nature of the gradient or not... about to test that now.

Thanks again!

EDIT: it looks like the length and direction of the drag has no discernible effect on the appearance of the gradient.

[ravells]

Rob, for the life of me, I can't get that initial angular gradient fill you acheived. I'm not using Gimp, but photoshop and it's angular gradient gets me a result like this:

[waldronate]

What Photoshop calls an angular gradient is exactly that: a gradient where the intensity represents the angle around the center point. It's basically the other half of the 2D polar coordinate representation (radial gradient is the first).

What GIMP is calling an "angular gradient" is what image processing folks would call an EDM (Euclidean distance metric) filter. It returns the distance from the edge of the shape.

There are plugins for Photoshop that will do what GIMP does, but the ones that I could find all seem to be part of expensive image processing plugin suites.

Wilbur will do this sort of thing (draw your selection, then use Select>>Modify>>Distance to calculate the gradient and Select>>Save Selection to save it as an image), but if you're going to involve an external tool you might as well just use GIMP.

[ravells]

Thanks a million Waldronate. This is an incredibly useful tool. I tried to replicate it using Drawplus (a Xara type vector drawing proggie) and posted a request on their BB, but no dice so far except for an approximate fix by making a smaller contour of the object and then feathering the result.

[RobA]

Yep. Like Waldronate says.

In Gimp, what photoshop calls angular is called COnical (and there are two.. your example would be asymmetrical. There si also symmetrical, which uses the gradient over 180 degrees and its mirror on the other half).

I was clear in one or two places, then started to shorthand. The fill for the mountains was "Shaped (Angular)" There is also "Shaped (Spherical)" and "Shaped (Dimpled)". ALl three of these have the gradient painted perpendicular to the selection outline.

A way that mmight work to manually do it in PS (at least in greyscale) would be to determine the maximum distance across the selection (perpendicular) call it D. Start with a black background, set paint to white with an opacity of 1.

Shrink the selection by (D/255) and fill the selection... repeat until no selection left....

Try it as an action....
-Rob A>