Drag and Drop browser seps

[DDSol]

Hello everyone. I've been so busy I don't even know what people are talking about these days.

In any case, all this business has led to me finally producing Seps! Okay, the package you get is a little meager. Also, not having an account is a little annoying as well. You can never reuse settings you used yesterday (unless you left your browser open).

Browser Color Seps here

Okay. Just to make sure we all understand that this is an Alpha version. Still. Yes, it's true, it would be nice if you yourself could decide on what the ink opacity is and/or how much dot gain you're expecting. And you can't. Also, these values are a bit fidgeted. You can't adjust them and I didn't spend much time on them, so this means they're bound to not be so great. Now, you could mess with curves yourself if you like, or you could see what these default settings look like on a shirt.

There's a lot more to be said, but I added a nifty feedback thingy so you can spill the beans on what you love and what you hate. This in turn gives me the opportunity to fix what is hated first and to enhance what is loved afterwards. That in turn gives you the tools you want, the way you want them.

Please do not get too attached to things being in certain locations. Everything is still subject to change! That may not seem so bad now, with the UI being very ... uh... lame. But when I go to move things to a new home, you may miss it being where I dumped it for lack of a better temporary place.

That said, in recap, art->seps->shirts! Now in a snap.

Awesome.

[Sbrem]

Just tried one, check my feedback...

Steve

[DDSol]

Yes, I saw you left me feedback as well. That was bad, indeed. Here's the thing, though: It can use any inks you toss in there. And to make that work better, I added an "ink optimizer", which pre-selects inks for you. However, this process sometimes chokes, giving you a green when what it really needs is a black. Maybe it combined a black and a dark green and decided it was "close enough" (some error is allowed to save a screen when it's a minor color change).

However this may mess up your seps, you can easily correct them by tossing a black ink in the mix. As a matter of fact, you can use any number of inks of any color you like. The system does not try to decide on how many inks you want or what those inks should be. It only tries to help by pre-selecting some inks.

So this means that that ugly picture you saw was just one way to do it. If you think your black is too green you can always change it.

But there's no manual yet, so you can't be expected to know how to work this system .

[DDSol]

I just want to point out that:

The pre-selected colors can be way off. The ink optimizer doesn't work very well yet. This does not mean the seps are bad. It just means the colors it chooses automatically are sub-optimal, especially for images with only a few hues.

Luckily, you are free to change, add and delete any colors you want. You can also reorder them to any order you like to print in.

Note that the button to download your seps is located in the top-left corner.

[Sbrem]

I just want to point out that:

The pre-selected colors can be way off. The ink optimizer doesn't work very well yet. This does not mean the seps are bad. It just means the colors it chooses automatically are sub-optimal, especially for images with only a few hues.

Luckily, you are free to change, add and delete any colors you want. You can also reorder them to any order you like to print in.

Note that the button to download your seps is located in the top-left corner.

I opened my original in PS, sampled the black, and found the RGB values at 15,15,15, instead of 0,0,0, so maybe that had a little something to do with it... I'll download the seps and check them when I get the chance. Pretty buried going into the holiday break...

Steve

[AdvancedArtist]

Han I hate to tell you this but your math is way off, I mean HUGE off and you have strange lines floating around in even simple separations. Why did you release this like this?

[DDSol]

It says Alpha quite clearly. It's not 'release'. It's just that anyone who feels like giving it a whirl is allowed to. It's free. It's quick. If it works for you then you just saved yourself hours of work or many dollars to outsource it.

But my math isn't off, AFAIK.

I don't know if the lines you speak of are in the final seps you download, or on screen. (I figured it out, see 2 posts ahead)

The lines on screen are actually... well, it's details. It has to do with angles! Not colors. Also you might be using the wrong ink colors (I dunno). (see 2 posts ahead)

The lines on the downloaded seps... I haven't seen them (I have now), but I would not be surprised if there's issues. It's hot off the press and I'm sure there's a bug or 2 to be ironed out.

So, it's not a release. It doesn't run on a webserver. It runs on my home PC. The final version will run in the cloud.

[DDSol]

I just realized that you may have JUST ran stuff... I'm right now working on adding slots for the white base and the shirt (so you can change the shirt color). This messes with the "production" version in that some things are shared between my dev and production system (notably, the engine backend is shared).

So, it's in flux right now. I should have it working correctly (and better) shortly.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience. The final production version will run completely separately, so I can make any modifications on my end without messing with people's seps.

[DDSol]

Hey Tom, I think the strange lines you're referring to is from the 4 color bar image you uploaded.
Unfortunately, the GPU will only accept images with a width and height that are a power of 2, such as 256 or 2048. If your image is 1700px wide, I have to scale it to something else, say 2048. This introduces a dilemma: I can scale with nearest neighbor, which would prevent any blurring but would introduce aliasing, or I can scale with interpolation/anti aliasing.

For screen printing, it's really best to not do any anti-aliasing (a little known fact). Interpolation introduces intermediate colors that aren't found in the original art. In your bar image, the yellow and magenta border gets interpolated to pale red ((rgb(255,255,0)+rgb(255,0,255))/2=rgb(255,127,127), which is pale red). As such, it uses red ink to represent it.

I decided on the smoother version because the browser does all the seps in real-time. This means that the image is scaled to the final size and then separated. This in turn means that if interpolation were to be totally off, downscaling would mean dropping pixels. You can't draw 500 original pixels into a 10px space, so something needs to go. You can interpolate, by mixing the colors of every 50 pixels together and put them in 1 (x10), OR you can literally throw out pixels that don't fit. Their color is lost forever. If you have a thing horizontal line, for instance, it may completely disappear, depending on the zoom and pan position of the view. This flickering and disappearing of art is not acceptable. Therefore interpolation is used to generate the on-screen image, which is then separated. The original color is therefore lost.

In most cases this is not an issue. Sharp lines are less common in the type of art we separate with gradient/halftone seps. And where they still exist, they will indeed be blurred and may be represented with a different ink (gray on a black/white sharp border or red on a yellow/magenta sharp border, for instance).

This is unfortunate indeed. I also cannot solve it because the original image may not fit in the browser, considering that in screen printing we often work with huge images indeed. Therefore it's impossible to have the browser separate First and Then scale (although I may do this on the down-scaled/browserified image in the future to at least lessen the effect and make zooming more consistent).

HOWEVER: These issues are only cosmetic issues! They only affect the view in the browser, which is limited due to the browser's weaknesses. I have no such weaknesses on the server and the downloaded seps will not include these anomalies.

So, in retrospect, the math isn't off. It's only perfectly separating a slightly blurred image. Note that the smoothing factor is much higher in the small previews than the large center image due it it being down-scaled vastly, which means more pixels get crammed into 1 and therefore there's more mixing.

I have not found any example of in my test art that was as ugly as the image you uploaded. But I have mainly been testing with gradient-type images. Thanks for the pointer. If people have these issues often, I'll have to devise some sort of solution to this issue. I can't have them think their seps will turn out like crap when they in fact totally won't.

[DDSol]

NEW: Change shirt color and a separate slot for the white base (which you can now turn on and off just like the colors).
ALSO: Improved dragging, and use right-click to select a single sep instantly.
Try it here.

[DDSol]

I see people uploading art that has "flat" spot colors a lot. That's fine but there are a few things to consider:

The "ink optimizer", the thing that pre-picks colors, chokes on these. It can't handle the low dimensionality (not enough colors). It can also not handle the high concentration of color (lots of red and white and nothing  else, for instance).
Sorry about that. It needs a lot of work to be able to deal with all these issues.

It seemed to me to be a better idea to first make sure you could download some seps.

However, even though it may be confusing to know that the colors it selects may at times be downright redicilous, do not let that fool you into thinking the separation system is malfunctioning. It isn't. It's the ink optimizer only that chokes.

The system is meant for art that would be very hard to separate by hand. Simple spot colors were therefore not tested well as they are not a priority right now. However, in the future, there will be full support for them.

Nonetheless, if your art is sharp it will do an awesome job even now. It does require you to change the colors around yourself manually. Do not expect the colors it selects to be optimal.

There are certainly a number of issues that require solving:

• If the system accepts png files, I should accept them all. Currently the system is limited to non-interlaced pngs only
• If it rejects png files because they are the wrong type, it should tell you and instead it silently stops working while the "liading..." screen is up. Not very nice.
• It should accept many graphics formats
• It should allow you to choose between flat spot seps, sim process with Rosettes or with Flamanco
• It should allow you to log in and out and store your favorite settings
• It should provide warnings on such things as low art resolution, moire, areas of color shifts, etc
• It should provide a file with the seps that at minimum contains a list of color swatches so you can see what those weird color names really mean
• It should of course suggest the right colors in every situation and even allow you to automatically improve your color selection to get more accurate seps
• Sliders and knobs and buttons for tweaking whatever you want to tweak
• Image adjustment such as making black really black or enhancing contrast, changing gamma, etc
• Many, many more issues

I am aware of these things. Please know that this is an Alpha Test. Some of the items in this list are crucial and others may be optional. They are not available because you are using an unfinished product.

However, this unfinished product can produce some awesome seps. It requires you to:

• Supply high resolution art that is not anti aliased or blurry in any way. Do not start with a jpg.
• Not take the first color suggestion to mean the limit of possibilities. You are free to add, remove or change colors.
• Click that download button
• Optionally tweak the seps a little for dot gain or some such. Can't guarantee the quality of the curves yet. Some testing should be done before I can make guarantees.

Really, that's all there's to it. You can have your seps in 2 minutes every time. They will be of colors you pick.

So, rest assured that I'm working on adding all the relevant features, but also be aware that 95% of the real power  is already at your fingertips. It requires a tutorial maybe, sure, but it's a surprisingly short tutorial. Just arrange the colors you want to print with in the order you want to print them. That's it. That's a fairly short tutorial, I think.

Note that the system should never be allowed to have empty seps. If you see them (and you may very well), delete them. It's nonsense. I apologise for the confusing nonsense colors.

A quick note on color editing:
Any sep can be moved to another location or the trash bin, by dragging it. There's no trash bin unless you're dragging. So that may be confusing. You can change a color by double-clicking. You'll get a color selection dialog and in this dialog you can also select from a list of inks. The inks are ordered by how close they match the color selected to the left. This allows for quick searching of the color list by color, but it hinders if you want to pick a specific PMS, for instance. I'll fix that as well. You can also change the shirt color the same way. Lastly, to add a color, click the big + in the ink splash. That's all there's to it. I think that'll do for a quick how-to.

I hope this helps.

[AdvancedArtist]

Han look at your posts...  Color is not that complicated man. I promise you its just not as complicated as you have made it out to be. I know of open source free access web based apps that can run circles around you right now. Things that have evolved rapidly in only the last several months that can walk all over anything we have worked with relating to color before. My best advise.. do not put all your eggs in on basket. 4 years and 60K lines of code.. I know of open source projects with over a dozen color science PHDs working on them that have compressed the most difficult aspects of color science into simple scripting languages that are processed thru shaders. The color game is over, actually it was a long time ago.

[DDSol]

Hey Tom, I honestly don't know what to do with your PHD statements. You refer to projects and such with shaders and "simple scripts". These things are very much meaningless to me. You point at vagueness. I've heard you say things like "the math is perfect". Just because 2+2 is 4, that doesn't mean anything, but the math is perfect. The main point therefore is not that the math is perfect, but that it's meaningless. You speak of apps that run in circles, which also is highly meaningless to me. Shaders are meaningless. They are not a secret, they are not special, or complicated, or magic. Simple scripting languages don't get processed through shaders and shaders are not written in scripting languages. They are compiled. Shaders do not process scripts, they process pixels. It is very clear to me that you do not know what you're talking about and that you use lots of big words you don't understand in order to come of as knowledgeable.

Therefore, I suggest you stick to your pack of PHDs and haggle with them over how long it would take for you to copy my system. It is certainly telling that you have never uttered a word about WebGL until you found it used in my system. I want to cautiously point out that it is not WebGL that provides the magic for my system, it is instead the math itself, the pure math, the kind that means the same thing on paper as it does written in a script or a shader or on subway walls. And you couldn't write a batch file if your life depended on it. I'd be surprised if you even know what a batch file is.

I'm saddened and disappointed in myself that I allow myself to be dragged into this tit-for-tat conversation. I think it would be best to leave your claim with you, so that you may make the whole world believe that you are the God of the Color Game. Just leave me out of it. You should really stop with the flame wars and instead focus on trying to reverse engineer what I did, because I'm moving fairly quick with it. That 'color game' that you say is over may very well be, and this means you'll have some catching up to do. I saw you had some "color rendering issues", but the math is perfect. It's the browser that "can't render it". Well, it does a bang-up job for me, so I doubt it's the browser.

Lastly, may I warn you that my 4 years of development weren't me sitting around flailing in ignorance, they were me building a sophisticated piece of software. I am very capable in the software world. I am more capable than the people you hire even if they have PHDs, I'm quite sure of that. Not that I'm so great, but I have a passion for this stuff. Nobody is paying me anything. I do it because I really, really want to. And there's a difference between doing what you want and doing what you're paid to do. This difference is passion. I never set out to copy anyone. I set out to fix Wilflex EasyArt, because it hurt when I saw it. It made my eyes bleed when I saw the results. And I had seps to produce. I could scarcely believe that such a lousy job was done on these sep systems, so I built my own. I am hereby sharing. It's not second rate. It's not built to make a quick buck. I built it for me.

May I note that you have my Skype? Instead of telling me this stuff in a public forum and putting your dirty laundry out there, you can simply talk to me directly. This public smear campaign, frankly, is beneath us. I also believe it to be tiresome to others to have to read these mud slinging contests. Then again, I believe it is your intention to make me look bad, which means you're not communicating with me at all, but instead with all the others on this forum. So it would do you little good to say these things to me directly. You have nothing to say to me to begin with. You just want to tell everyone that you know someone that has a PHD and that they therefore will produce better seps and that I am 'old hat'.

I'm certainly not the first you've dragged into one of your little wars. Still, I am ashamed that I am not mature enough to let it be. Strong feelings of being wronged well up in me when you use your slick (but meaningless) name-dropping and underhanded stabs. These feelings are powerful, but I should know better anyway. I wish to apologize to everyone whose stomach turns having to read through this crap.

Tom, please, I wish you all the luck with your endeavors, honest or otherwise. Go and build your empire, but leave me out of it. This is such a waste of time and energy.

[TCT]

Wow you two seem rather passionate about this. Granted it is pretty sweet, I thought I would maybe break the tension a bit...
While it is clear you both know quite a bit about art and colors, I hate to break it to you but a customer of mine turned me on to a great graphics program you both may like-

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPP6lFHg_1E&feature=youtube_gdata_player
(Someone please insert the video for me, and then tell me how to do it!)

[DDSol]

Granted, that is a totally awesome video of a totally awesome program. But the MS Machine is a little big and you can't expect me to compete with them... Word is probably the most awesome software ever written. I don't think it's fair to throw that in my face like that.


I hear Word also does cool things like dynamic arrows and even thought bubbles! Really, trying to compete with such a powerhouse is a David and Goliath type deal.