ArtyFilter-Tool

 

Do you want to give your photos or albums a certain atmosphere? Then you could use jAlbums new "ArtyFilter" that can be added to jAlbum as a plugin. It includes 8 different filters that you can apply to your photos to give them an artistic style.

 

The ArtyFilters use a variety of different techniques to give your images a unique expression. The palette of techniques include overlays, border masks, color tints, brightness and contrast adjustment and textures. Enough talking. If an image speaks a thousand words, then an album should speak ten thousand words :-), so here's a sample album that demonstrates the different effects:

 

Usage

To apply the artistic filters to individual images from within jAlbum's edit panel, just install the plugin and restart jAlbum, then "Edit" an image within jAlbum and click the Arty icon (a flower).

To apply an effect to all images of an album, you can open jAlbum's Advanced album settings->User variables and specify the filters like this sample shows:

filter1 | class=net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.DaisyFilter

 

The names of each filter are as follows:

net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.SunflowerFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.RainflowerFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.LilyFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.PinkFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.TulipFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.ThistleFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.SnowdropFilter
net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.DaisyFilter

Here you actually have the ability to specify several filters to be applied in sequence, so you can enter two user variables, like this:

filter1 | class=net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.DaisyFilter 
filter2 | class=net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.SnowdropFilter

Usage from within skins

This tool includes a component that shows the eight effects on a sample image at a time. It's integrated in the plugin and skin developers can actually embed it in their skin setting panels too. The whole Arty tool can also be bundled with a skin (just put it inside the "lib" folder of your skin).

All filters implements the JAFilter interface so it behaves like any of jAlbum's classic image filters. Here's a short code sample that shows how a skin can include the selector component of the artistic filters. So the user can choose the atmosphere of his album. You can pass a BufferedImage if you want the selector to use your own sample image.

In onload.bsh: 

 import net.jalbum.filters.arty.*;
 import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
 import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
 import java.io.File;
 
 ControlPanel ui = new ControlPanel() {
 	BufferedImage bi;
 	ArtySelector arty;
 	try {
 	   	bi = ImageIO.read(new File("/Users/sarah/Pictures/pink_small.jpg"));
 	   	arty = new ArtySelector(bi);
 	} catch (IOException ex) {
 		System.out.println("Image not found. Sample image used.");
 	  	arty = new ArtySelector();
 	}
 	
 	{
 		add("br", arty);
 	}
 }
           	
 window.setSkinUI(ui);

 In init.bsh:

 import net.jalbum.filters.arty.*;
 
 Effect fl = Effect.valueOf(arty);
 engine.addFilter(fl.getFilter()); 

If you as skin developer want to decide which filter should be used then you just have to write in init.bsh:

 import net.jalbum.filters.arty.effects.*;
 
 engine.addFilter(new PinkFilter());

Download

 To add the ArtyFilter tool to jAlbum, just download it to your computer, then double click it or drop it onto jAlbum to have it installed.

 

If you want to see what I really done or improve the ArtyFilters, you can download the source code.