Kaleidoscope

In the post on April 18, 2013, entitled "Screen Savers," I wrote: "Corel Painter (a wonderful software program for the more artistic amongst us) has a kaleidoscope plug-in. It is the only program I know that has one. You tell it how large an area in pixels you want to make it and then place it over a photograph and move it around until you see something you really like and then hit enter to close the deal. It is such a fascinating plug-in. It is downright addictive and I have to stay away from it because I could easily spend hours fooling with it. I'll have to make an example that I can show in a future post so you can see what I am talking about. It is just very, very cool."

I took the above image of a geranium into Corel Painter to illustrate this kaleidoscopic effect for you. Below are five examples of simply randomly moving this "tool" over different areas of the opening image.

It may actually be an improvement over a analog kaleidoscope in that you can change images and get an entirely different color set and shapes whereas with a true kaleidoscope you are limited to the pieces that are in the end and things can begin to look the same after awhile.

Sometimes parts are identifiable and other times they are just completely weird.  In another part of the program, you can create patterns based on the results. 

I could have produced a thousand of these things out of this one image and none of them would look exactly like another. Like I said, it can be addictive.

Images with a lot of detail and strong colors produce better looking results. I wouldn't buy the program just for this one tool, but it certainly adds some fun to the program.