tint

I’ve decided it would be worthwhile to develop a Photoshop plugin for Tint. While adding nicer GUI features and tools such as a desaturation brush to the standalone program would be useful, it does feel like reinventing the wheel, and an enormous wheel at that. Obviously I could quickly find myself adding a bunch of standard features already available in the most simple of image editors, let alone top of the line products like Photoshop!

The plugin should facilitate a wealth of options above and beyond the simple monochrome and colour mixing currently available. Hue changes, progressive desaturation, object recognition and image segmentation will all become a possibility. Combined with this will hopefully be some improvements to the clustering algorithm that underlies Tint, in particular focusing on improved spatial clustering.

In theory at least, the plugin should also be compatible with Paint Shop Pro and the Gimp under Windows. A specialised Gimp plugin for Unix machines is a future possibility. The idea will be to design the plugin in such a way that a standalone Tint program is still available, albeit without the further possibilities that Photoshop and other editors can provide. This will ensure that users without these commercial packages are not excluded.

I’d like to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions regarding Tint so far, and for the small number of donations that have been received to help with the hosting of the site. It truly is fantastic to have had such a response, and it has motivated me to spend some more time in developing the idea. A few rough calculations across the many software download sites where Tint is now available gives well over 50 000 downloads in the relatively short time it’s been available.

Future donations will be put towards the purchase of Photoshop and Visual Studio (required by the Photoshop SDK for developing plugins), as well as hardware upgrades to support these. Any donations, however large or small, are much appreciated to help with these substantial costs. To donate, click the “Make a donation” button on the Tint page, or visit the SourceForge page and click the “Donate” link there.

Early days yet, but I’ll keep everyone posted on how this development progresses!

Forums are now available, particularly for discussion of Tint, but anything goes really. This should better facilitate feature requests, bug reports, support and so forth, rather than relying only on comments to my posts (like this one…). Please feel free to contribute!

I’ll pretty up the style at some point to match the rest of the site, but for now the most important thing is that the functionality is there.

I’ve set up SourceForge projects for tint, dysii and fmrii, initially to handle file releases. This should relieve some of the bandwidth drain on this site. I’m considering moving Subversion repositories onto SourceForge also, to facilitate collaboration on some of this work in future.

Tint version 1.0.1 has been released, with a few small improvements based on user feedback so far. The following changes have been made:

• Added scrollbar to mixer frame.
• Changed “Clusters” and “Passes” on options page of wizard to “Colour groups” and “Quality”.
• Updated README.txt file requirements and tips.