Last Instinct

This was my first big campaign when I started working at Basilicon in 2007. Jeep had a collaboration together with the wildlife park Kolmården where Jeep sponsored a terrain driving track. We made the campaign site and also the booking system, which my boss Anders Ekström put lots of energy into.

I directed the art and programmed most of the flash interaction and the implementation in HTML. I worked together with David Andersson in designing all the sub sections. The main design was formed as an old map with a little Jeep as mouse pointer. The little car was actually the hardest part to get to work correctly.

The technical solution for the window was really cool, since most of the campaigns back then used rather annoying popup-windows. This was made as a layer with transparency and shadows in flash instead. This wasn’t really possible before that point, since Safari on Mac had terrible and very buggy support for this. Fortunately, Firefox had just gotten better support for it. The web support have really developed a lot on Mac in the three years since then!

I found some amazing colorful wallpapers in a theme pack for Windows 7 called Surreal Territory by Chuck Anderson of NoPattern. He has really done a lot of great colorful designs! I got a bit inspired to make something similar. So I took one of my photos from Skanör last weekend and made a truly colorful sparkling sunset! Feel free to download it as a wallpaper or something. =)

The first version of my Color channel colorizer Pixel Bender filter for Flash and Photoshop had some problems with the balancing to preserve detail in the pixture. I decided to take care of this problem and changed the balancing to regular normalization, which normalizes all channels together. I tried this when I was making the previous version, but couldn’t get it to work properly. The solution was to not include the alpha channel in the normalization. Therefore I made an extra separate normalization only for the alpha channel.

I also added so that the normalization works when color values are too low, not only when they are too high, as in the previous version.

After a bit of testing I realized that I mostly wanted to have resuts that did have some normalization, but not full, since this could make the colors a bit dull. To solve this I added the option to set in percent how much normalization to use in the filter, and the result was great. Setting the normalization to 50% preserves both a lot of details and some of the sharp colors.

ChannelColorizer by Klas Lundberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Sweden.
Feel free to contact me if you want it for commercial use.

I had an idea for a (probably) very cool graphic effect for Flash using colorized dots. My intention was to make it so it could be used for images, animations, videos or whatever. To do this effect I realized that I needed a way to change colors of the graphics in an easy and precise way. Since I’ve worked a lot with the Pixel Bender Toolkit lately, it came natural to make a pixel bender filter for this task.

The filter is made to change each original RGB channel of an image into a different color, defined by the user. The filter also has support for the transparency in the alpha channel (RGBA format). However, it is a rather abstract thing to understand the effects of changing the transparency in to color or vice versa, so I will leave it for you to experiment with if you really need it.

The above image is filtered using the color transformation in the diagram. You can see how the colors differ from the original image to the right.

The filter can be used with two settings, balanced or unbalanced. The default setting is unbalanced which sets the channels to the specific colors exactly. This causes the the colors to go outside the boundaries of the RGB color space when the colors get to intense. The effect is that the colors get cut off at a specific point, when they can’t get anymore intense. The balanced setting corrects this and normalizes the color so that all details gets preserved and nothing is cutoff. This sounds good right? Well, the negative effect is that the colors no longer is the exact colors you specified and sometimes the colors get very dull or desaturated. The filter is now updated and the colors are now correct all the time.

Here is an example of the two sides of the balancing with an rather extreme color setting. The picture on the left shows the original image. The picture in the middle has an unbalanced color setting. Here you can see that the image matches the colors but some intense colors in the flower gets too intense and loses detail. When turning on the balancing in the right picture, the detail comes back, but the colors no longer match the color setting. Read about the updated normalization.

The filter can be used in a lot of ways for a lot of purposes and I bet you can find more uses of it:

• Changing each channel to a different color
• Mapping the colors to a specific color theme or scheme
• Changing the image to black and white (or decolorize/desaturate)
• Changing the image to black and white with a specific color tone or tint (sepia for example)
• Creating a color weighted black and white image
• Colorizing an image to a specific RGB color
• Extracting a specific color channel

The filter is primarily made for use with Flash, but works fine with Photoshop as well. To use it in Photoshop you need to install the Pixel Bender plugin for Photoshop CS4 and copy the Kernel file to the Pixel Bender folder of Photoshop. If you want to use it in Flash or Flex, Lee Brimelow has made some good tutorials on how to get started with Pixel Bender and Flash.

ChannelColorizer by Klas Lundberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Sweden.
Feel free to contact me if you want it for commercial use.