7 replies to this topic

[TheNut]

I can't believe I even developed this. It's been sitting on my hard drive collecting cyber dust! The sad part is I made this because I do this sort of thing frequently, and what happens? Yeah, I forget about it :angry: I just spent a ½ hour in PSP resizing about a couple dozen high resolution images for one of my projects. Grrr...

Anyways, here's another community contribution of mine. Thumb Creator is a program designed to resize images, or if you want you could also convert between formats. It's very quick and easy to use. Just select the format and any options associated with it, then drag and drop the images into the program. It will automatically process each file and saves the new results in the program folder. Very handy tool for creating thumbnails of photos in your online photo album too.

Resolution Options
Deselecting any option will force the image to the specified width and height.

Auto Width Aspect Ratio: Images will be resized according to the height specified. The width will be adjusted according to the image aspect ratio.

Auto Height Aspect Ratio: Images will be resized according to the width specified. The height will be adjusted according to the image aspect ratio.

Auto Fit: Finds the smallest side and resizes to that size, adjusting the other side based on the aspect ratio. Handy for when you want to force your portrait/landscape photos into a certain ratio.

Sharpen: Simple sharpen filter to apply on images
Blur: Simple blur filter to apply on images

Enjoy.

Screenshot:


Download:
http://www.nutty.ca/...humbCreator.zip

[monjardin]

I like straight forward utilities that do one thing well. That's a nice interface for the task; it requires very few clicks. I did noticed that it doesn't create or alter a file if it is in the same directory as the executable. There is no message to indicate the behavior. You shouldn't worry about changing that, but it goes to show why businesses are often reluctant to give away old software: people might expect support. ;)

Thanks for posting it!

[TheNut]

The reason I didn't want to overwrite files was because I feared one day I might have done something stupid like put all my photos in there and accidentally reduce their size, with no way of recovering it. The program will create a copy though. It will add the word "copy" to the end of the file name. This is sort of a safety net to prevent those kind of accidents.

[Abelius]

Interesting nifty program, reminds me a bit of the Irfanview batch funtion... Thanks for sharing! :)

[eddie]

Just an interesting idea, even though it seems like this was a quick one-off project..

Might be a neat idea to retrofit it with a lua interpreter, and rewrite the filters as a lua script. Would be neat if you could have pluggable filters that you can twiddle with and what not. Just a thought. :)

[TheNut]

You're right, adding LUA scripting would be handy, and so it was done =) I updated the download, so feel free to experiment with it.

New features:

Resolution Options
Keep Original Size: Images will not be resized. Useful for when you want to convert between file formats.

Filters
Custom: Any LUA scripts (files that end with the extension .lua) in the program folder will be loaded into the combo box. If you select a script, it will be used during the filtering process. If the combo box is empty, no lua script will be executed.

[monjardin]

Now that's prompt service! Thanks for the update. :)

[TheNut]

Sorry to raise the dead here, but I've made improvements to the program that I think some people here can benefit from. Still no website for it yet =)

The latest version now supports:
1) Stretching
- Images can be forced to a certain size

2) Multiple LUA filter execution
- Now you can apply filters on top of filters

3) More filters
Glow effects, lighting, refraction, curves, etc...


I learned two things from this.
1) LUA performance
Declare variables globally in LUA (ie: outside function calls). The performance and memory usage difference is astronomical. There's also a significant boost in performance when modifying variables/structures by reference rather than returning a new object in a function. Basically think like a C developer and you'll be fine.

2) Image Manipulation
I never really gave much thought to how stuff like this works. Usually I focus more on vertices and textures, but never improving the final result. Now I'm seeing such a larger picture to things and and how such techniques can be ported over to a GPU for real time post-processing effects. And not just your run of the mill bloom effects, but DOF, noise, image morphing, enhanced shadows and highlights, adjust saturation, etc... I know most of this isn't new, quite a few games do have some post-processing every now and then. It's just something I never really got knee deep in the water over.


Here are just some samples of what the application can now do. In the future I would like to offset the CPU calculations over to the GPU and have a real-time preview of the results. It's really exciting stuff!

I also encourage anyone interested in doing more with GPU processing to have a look at CPU based algorithms and work on writing software to manipulate images. It really opens up your mind. Feel free to dissect the LUA scripts and learn not only about scripting, but the algorithms I developed within.


Animations:
You can create and save images in sequence via a function call from a LUA script.

You are getting tiered, very tiered... =)

Basic Manipulations
Curves, Lights, Blending, Glowing, Refraction, etc...
Normal Image


Curves


Refraction


Lights