I'm just showing off here, I figured out how to make my palettes look fairly like marbles using the GIMP program ...


since then I've found a few tutorials, adapted them a bit and came up with some more orb shaped ideas ...







I've still got a lot to learn, but if anyone knows any cool tricks they would be happy to share that would be fantastic :)

Ooh, good idea. Let me go fire up Gimp and see if I can come up with anything.. Have you used the map object filter at all? It lets you map a layer into a sphere, box or cylinder..

wow lostmy, these are really beautiful :D i'm very impressed i have to say. the colours you've used are just so beautiful, they're like magic!

Those images are awesome! I want to make my own.

J-man wrote:

Ooh, good idea. Let me go fire up Gimp and see if I can come up with anything.. Have you used the map object filter at all? It lets you map a layer into a sphere, box or cylinder..

sounds interesting - I'll give it a go next time ! thanks :)

update - WooooHoooo!!!! thanks again that is so cool :D

Here's what the filter looks like. I took the palette image and rescaled it into a square, then applied the whirl and pinch filter and the map object filter. The shadow I added later.. :P



Edit: Oh, and I love the 3rd one you did! :D

@ J-man - that is fantastic! most impressive !!!

how do you do away with the background? (all of mine have that border and I'm stumped on how to get shot of it!)

Hm.. There should be just a blank white background to start with.. You didn't add the border? If you did, you can either delete the layer that has the border, or crop the image 1px smaller.. ;) If you didn't.. Um, I'm not sure.

gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

fun!

Oh, I wish I had GIMP. These marbles are gorgeous, lostmy.

Actually, GIMP is completely free.. you can download it from the Gimp website. http://www.gimp.org/ ;)

had to try it with a pattern...



:D

tiled then artistic>cubism, distort>polar co-ordinates (uncheck "map from top" and "to polar") finally distort>polar co-ordinates (re-check "map from top" and "to polar")

J-man wrote:

Actually, GIMP is completely free.. you can download it from the Gimp website. http://www.gimp.org/ ;)

There is also a version called GimpShop. It has a user interface that is similar to PhotoShop if you don't want to learn new nuances. I had trouble with both running on Vista but maybe that has been fixed?

I have been playing with this concept in Paint.net with similar results I will post if I come up with something I like. Too much fun in the meantime. Paint.net is also free. It runs flawlessly on Vista platforms. I haven't tried it in the draw program in Open Office. The suite is free open source also and does everything and more than Microsoft Office. It translates and writes all kinds of files including Word, Excel (although an earlier version would not run Excel macros. I haven't had reason to try since.) It is multi-platform (Apple, Windows, Unix, etc.) as well.

This is a nice portal to free, shareware, etc. graphics software:

Free Byte

lostmy... these are all beautiful!

just perf.... thanks for the info on gimpshop.... i wanted to try gimp, but got irritated & gave up, b/c i'm so use to the PS interface... i will have to try this out tonight...