yes! I was able to change the logo.raw file using tony's method. I like tony's logo editor because when I paste my image in, it automatically finds the right color shades and sizes it to fit.

I did use emRAWerter and have had some trouble getting the right attributes in. When I paste in a color picture, it keeps all the color unlike tony's program. I know emRAWerter is in it's early stages, but if we can get it to automatically lower the colors to 4 and have the right pixels size it would be more helpful to everyone. Does the escher.raw file have to stay at 60kb? I've uploaded 110kb files and 10kb files and it ends up just freezing the player to the point where I have to reflash it with 2.07b and hijack again. I'll try it again and see what I get. What imaging software are people using to make their files?

Uh, Who's Geddy Lee? Is that a UK thing?

Hi,

emRAWerter is not in it's early stages!

I have no intention on including the things you mention in emRAWerter, unless there is a huge demand for it. My time is sparse, and there are so many software packages out there that are excellent at both resizing and color reduction (some with dithering as well).

All you need is PaintShop Pro (shareware) or try looking at http://graphicssoft.about.com/library/products/aatp_freephotoed_w.htm for some recommendations on some freeware ones.

No matter, you need knowledge and a FTP client as well

I'm sorry that your empeg freezes up on you. What did you do?

The escher.raw is RLE encoded. All the other .raw files are not.

Regarding size, I do not think there is a limit. I took Toby's PROLUX logo and put in a 512 x 512 bitmap. Using the RLE compression it was only 9kb afterwards. No problems on the empeg.

Regarding limits Toby is the only one who knows. But my (educated?) guess would be that the bitmap should be no less than 128 x 32 pixels and no more than 64kb in size.

If you have a problem file that I can examine, you can send it to me if you wish.

Hope I helped.

Does the escher.raw file have to stay at 60kb?

I don't know if the file size is an issue, I think it's more likely to be the X and Y dimensions of the image. What I would do is to copy the image from RAWerter to the clipboard and paste that image into your paint program. Then, look at its dimensions (I think it was 480x471 or something) and create a new image of the same dimensions or paste your image into the old one before copying and pasting it into RAWerter.

Remember that the "logo.raw" file must be plain, but the "escher.raw" file must be RLE-compressed, so choose the appropriate options when saving the file.

What imaging software are people using to make their files?

I'm using Paint Shop Pro. I have a palette file which allows me to apply the "empeg gray shades pallete" to the image. (I created this palette by pasting an image from my logo editor into PaintShop Pro, reducing it to 4 colors, and saving off that palette.) This allows me to get the image looking exactly right before pasting it back into RAWerter.

Who's Geddy Lee? Is that a UK thing?

Canada thing, actually. Geddy Lee is the vocalist and bass guitarist for the band Rush.

Hi,

Just a quick comment:

Size doesn't matter (in this case). At least it does not have to be the exact same dimensions as the original escher.raw

Your idea of using the color-levels from your LogoEditor is nice, but my software doesn't care. It just tries to evaluate the available color levels in the bitmap.

I tried converting a picture of the empeg motherboard to .RAW format, but it looked terrible on the empeg, because the pixels are so large.

Hi,

Just a quick comment:

Size doesn't matter (in this case). At least it does not have to be the exact same dimensions as the original escher.raw

Your idea of using the color-levels from your LogoEditor is nice, but my software doesn't care. It just tries to evaluate the available color levels in the bitmap.

I tried converting a picture of the empeg motherboard to .RAW format, but it looked terrible on the empeg, because the pixels are so large.

YES!!!! I got a new image pan working!!!! Sorry about saying it's in it's early stages, I guess I just needed a little more guidance. It's easy for me to do now. I was able to use paint shop pro and did the exact thing that tony was instructing, including going to the color's menu and creating a new palette with 4 colors. I then pasted my image in to psp, copied it, pasted in to emRAWerter, save, compress, upload. I'm happy!

Thanks Tony & Lars & everyone else for your help!

For anyone who wants a picture of a SuperCharged Toyota 4Runner for their Image Pan Visual, I have added the file attachment in this post.

Your idea of using the color-levels from your LogoEditor is nice, but my software doesn't care. It just tries to evaluate the available color levels in the bitmap.

Right. I knew that.

I prefer, though, to preview my work on the PC screen, and perform adjustments to it, so that I know how it's going to look on the player before I send it. If I send it a pure grayscale image, I have no control over the cutoff points. If I do the color reduction in PSP first, I can see how it will look and then I can change things to make it look better.

You know, I just realized I'm sitting here staring at an MC Escher calendar right here on my wall. I could scan all of the images and turn them into Image Pan format. That way, if you wanted, you could follow a "theme" in your image pan visuals while still customizing it.

Anyone interested?

By the way, for anyone interested in using the RAWerter to save logo images, you can (in Internet Explorer) right-click on any logo at the logo site and hit "copy", then hit "paste" to paste it into the RAWwerter application.

Is there a FAQ in the works for this? (honestly, I'm a bit confused)

this program is absolutely brilliant, I love it, I've got my aphex twin head scrolling around the screen right now.

one thing I found on paint shop pro, here's the steps I go through to make a 4-color greyscale image for RAWerter.
actuall I'll just go through the entire process for people to read.

fire up paint shop pro.
load up your image, first I go to the colors menu, then select "Grey scale".
next go to the colors menu and select "Decrease Color Depths" >> "X Colors" or you can use shift+cntrl+6
this will bring up a new window to select your color options
here is what I selected...
Number of colors: 4
either optimized median cut or standard/web-safe will look fine
in the reduction method select "error diffusion" default is nearest color, then in the options part select "reduce color bleeding"

this will make for a very nice image, selecting the "nearest color" method will make the colors pretty blocky for the image, but the diffusion looks nice, try it both ways and you'll see what I'm talking about.

ok now that you've reduced the colors, make sure your tool is the "arrow" tool, then right click on the image, and select "copy", then fire up emRAWerter and select the "paste" button. Next select "Save RAW" it will ask for the filename, I give mine a "custom_file.raw" that way they all start with "custom" after it is saved what I did was connect to the empeg via hyperterminal and get to the shell, then issue the command "rw" to make it read/write.

then fire up my ftp client, and connect to the empeg, change dir's to the /empeg/lib/visuals directory, and I placed all my custom images in there. now you can close your ftp client.

now within the shell, save off your escher.raw to another filename escher.raw.real seems appropriate. now whenever I want to change logo's I simply have to drop to the shell and copy whatever image I want to use, to escher.raw, then exit out of the shell. and image pan will use the new image.

perhaps on the riocar.org site we could have a repository for all the new image pan images, much like we currently do for the boot logos.

thanks for the great tool
eli

Number of colors: 4 either optimized median cut or standard/web-safe will look fine

This is the step where I do it differently, and I'll explain why:

Color reducing to a median or standard palette assume equidistant shades. Even color reducing to the Windows palette makes the same assumption. And on your computer screen, these will be fine.

However, on the car player, the shades of color are not equidistant. The two shades of gray are very close to each other in brightness, and they are very far from black in actual perceived brightness on the screen.

Sure, if you paste your optimized-median-cut image into LogoEdit or RAWerter, it will work. But when PaintShop Pro color-reduced it, it was choosing its reduction cutoff points based on different grayscale values than the player displays. So the image on the player is not optimized as well as it could have been if you'd used a custom palette. Here is an example of what I mean:



I admit, the difference between the two images is subtle. Whether or not you prefer one image over the other isn't the point. My point is that doing a straight evenly-spaced color reduction doesn't choose the values at the optimum points for the player's screen.

I'm still working on getting the "perfect" values for the palette, but for now, you can find the values I'm using for the logo editor's palette in its .INI file. You can use these values in a custom PaintShop Pro palette if you like.

Now class, what's the difference? Anyone? ... Anyone? ... Bueller?

I think you'd better find some different examples Tony. In the case of the shot you included, the nearest-pick looks a little better than the empeg optimized one. Anyone else from an Amiga background involving a bit of graphics would also know exactly what you're talking about. I'm sure we can find something where the difference is immediately visible. It would probably be better to show the effects on a logo or something with a simpler flat layout (instead of the continuous tone image you started with).

There are more algorithms to do colour reduction and image resampling than you can shake a stick at. It's a shame that none of the big-boy programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro come standard with a larger variety. I used to have a number of excellent image processors on the Amiga that would make short work of this type of conversion.

Bruno

Tony (or anyone),

The only program I have is Adobe Photodeluxe v3.0 Home Edition. Do you know if there are any addons that I can locate (or other freeware/shareware progs) that will allow more sophisticated greyscale conversion like you were just showing. My program will convert to 256 colors of grey, but will not allow more sophisticated adjustments. Thanks!

I was pretty sure PhotoDeluxe could do it. What you're looking for is INDEX, not Grayscale. In Photoshop I would generally choose MODE->Grayscale and then MODE->RGB and then MODE->INDEX

PShop won't allow you to use the Index selector when you're already in grayscale (which itself is an 8bit index mode).

Anyway, take a look as I believe PhotoDeluxe should have at least those basic modes of Photoshop. Of course you might also want to try PhotoshopElements which was released last year. It's a very cut down PShop - I'm not sure if it replaced PhotoDeluxe in their lineup.

Bruno

Hybrid8...yep, you were correct. It does have an index option and then I was able to customize the four shades I needed. I appreciate your help!

I think you'd better find some different examples Tony. In the case of the shot you included, the nearest-pick looks a little better than the empeg optimized one.

And like I said, the important point wasn't which one looked better, but that the two used different indices to derive their cutoff points.

Personally, I preferred the empeg-optimized one for various reasons, including things like the details in Cameron's jersey were more visible, the expression on Ferris' face is more clear, etc. But those are simply subjective judgements and have nothing to do with the discussion.

And if you're dithering, it becomes even more critical, by the way, because the shade of each dither dot becomes more important.

Turns out that one doesn't need to scan anything to locate escher pictures. There's an escher web site with a bunch of great images, just aching to be turned into image pan visuals. How about this one?

edit: Crap, didn't check the file size before uploading it. It came out to bigger than 100k. Sorry. If you want to make your own, go to http://www.worldofescher.com. Enjoy!

You know, I just realized I'm sitting here staring at an MC Escher calendar right here on my wall. I could scan all of the images and turn them into Image Pan format.

Are these pictures public domain? Do you need permission to copy and distribute them?

Hope I haven't rained on anybody's parade here...

tanstaafl.

I'm sure the photographs in the calendar aren't. Of course, who's to say where you obtained a scan of the escher prints in the first place...

Bruno

The Escher copyright owners are very particular about where the images are used I heard.

Calvin

In Photoshop it is a pain in the neck. It is dead easy to reduce to two colours - but getting 4 is tricky. Even though you can grab the palette from escher.raw, for example, it doesn't seem to want to reduce to those 4. Have to get Photodeluxe, I guess.

The Escher copyright owners are very particular about where the images are used I heard.

Well, let's see. The image on my wall right now is 64 years old. I don't know enough about copyright law to know whether that places it into public domain or not, but I have to say that a low-rez scan for the player screen couldn't possibly upset them.

Anyway, all of the escher images can be grabbed directly from the web at http://www.worldofescher.com/ for anyone who is interested.

In Photoshop it is a pain in the neck. It is dead easy to reduce to two colours - but getting 4 is tricky.

Yeah, I know what you mean. This is one of the reasons I stick with Paint Shop Pro, as it's much better suited to doing indexed-color reduction. Doing things like Quake1/2 textures is nearly impossible in Photoshop.

I never understood this. I don't see why Adobe has to make indexed work so difficult. And it literally becomes a problem where I work, because our art department likes Photoshop. Every time we ask for a 16-color Windows icon, we get something that uses something other than the 16 Windows Palette colors.

It doesn't make any difference whether a particular case upsets them or not. If they fail to enforce their copyright, even for just one minor infraction, they stand the chance of losing it altogether.

If they fail to enforce their copyright, even for just one minor infraction, they stand the chance of losing it altogether.

I was under the impression that this statement applied to Trademarks, but not necessarily copyrights.

Hmmm. Just went wandering through Title 17, and I didn't see a reference to required enforcement at all. Seems you may be right. I'm batting .000 lately.

Off-topically, it's interesting to note that a registered copyright must exist before an infringement suit is brought, even if the registration occurred well after the fact, even just before the suit, even though a non-registered copyright holds no fewer direct civil benefits.

I believe the largest collection of Escher artwork is the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. The owner of the gallery used to be the distributor for Escher, and after his death, re-purchased many of Escher's works -- especially since as a dealer he knew who he sold the works to. I've been in the back room and have held some of those original works in my hands. :-D Call them and find out what their opinion is.

Calvin

Ditto... that gallery is amazing. I got to check some out close up. Precision to the nth degree. I had a severe fascination with Escher the whole of my teen years, and i flipped when i found out that gallery was half a mile from my apartment. It's a must see for Escher freaks =]

That's a nice neighorhood you live in, I wish I could afford to live there! :-D

Calvin