i dont know if this is of any interest to you, dd

i played a bit with your new version of the plug-in

one thing that does not work very well from my experience is using preset curves
you can always get much better results for shaped bevels or chrome effects when you custom tweak the curve by hand
there are so many factors, like used colour, font or bevelsize/depth that influence the outcome

the same thing for your special bevel for smaller sizes idea
i think you can get a good looking bevel on a small image, when you tweak the highlight/shadow by hand
there is always this sweet spot between to blurry and jagged, that is different with each case
this is really one of these things were human intution is still superior to automatition

Oh for sure - sometimes, things are best done by hand. In fact I've been doing most bevels these days by simply drawing with an airbrush, using pressure sensitivity and the selection as a stencil...

However, automation has its place. Particularly, when you want easily repeatable results. Plugins are just tools, and you can use them to automate steps which would be tedious to do by hand over and over. That's why my approach to writing plugins is to give the user as many variables and adjustments as possible, make every step as adjustable as possible... even if this makes the plugin a bit more complex and "scary" to new users, it ends up being much more useful in the long run.

I've spent some time tweaking the algorithms for the gloss (chrome) and shape curves, and I think they work much better now - but I haven't published this version yet, so you're going to have to wait for a bit to see how well it measures up

Molly, the font is New Yorker.

Thank you Carlos. I did find one but it isn't the same as yours.

The font is free.

Welcome, Molly. You work very fast.

lol, just on things I like, not so fast when it comes to dusting and vacuuming.

The things I dislike, I do quickly to get rid of them asap.

All right, I think I've nailed the algorithms now. I think they're the best they can be for now, short of actually writing a "real" bevel plugin with a "real" programming language... that's still a goal that I'll look into some day, but for now, my knowledge of C is not quite enough to tackle that goal.

Anyway, the updated version is available at the registry, I don't have an account on GIMP scripts so I probably can't update it there... maybe someone will do it for me again

http://registry.gimp.org/node/25199

The main improvements are the shape curves and gloss. They're totally rewritten, now the shape curves should produce more natural and better results. A thing to note - the shape curve adjustment is now on a smaller scale, from -64 to 64 (used to be -128 to 128), so take that in account if you have some standard values you've memorized and use.

Gloss no longer darkens the "non-beveled" parts of the bevel, it's tweaked so that it should keep areas that are #808080 at #808080. It should also provide somewhat nicer looking results.

Finally, the default values are slightly changed - the default depth is now at 10, instead of 20 - I figured a lower setting helps with making the shape contours more as they should be. It's still adjustable of course. Also default post-blur is now at 1.0 instead of 3.0. This produces sharper results - since the other parts of the algorithm are improved, there's no longer need to cover up errors/artifacts with blurs

Anyway, enjoy



Again all feedback is welcome, if you find out any corner cases or bugs where things don't work, don't hesitate to let me know!

I would really like this script, but I can't download it from the gimp registry.

I don't know what exactly is the problem - it should be downloadable through this link:

http://registry.gimp.org/files/bevel2_3.py

But if that for some reason doesn't work for you, try this:

1.53 doesn't show up in Gimp 2.6

Thanks DD. When I hoover over to the link, it doesn't give me an option to download the script. When I click on the link itself, all I get is the actual script code.

which folder is the file placed in after it's downloaded.

That is a plug-in so it goes in your user plug-ins folder should have a .py extension, are you using windows or Linux?

Thanks Molly. I'm using Windows. Now my other question is after gimp is loaded & open, where can I locate the plugin?

k, I use Linux but sometimes the windows have a file with .exe plus the py one, if so put them both in unless someone comes along and tells you something different.