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Repligator 4.0:
An Omoly That's Useful
By David Fiedler
Sure cure for the visual blahs
Repligator's main purpose in life is to quickly let you cycle through
wildly different graphic interpretations of a starting image. The author,
Owen Ransen, calls this an Image Idea Sequence. Every time you
press that F7 key, you're running a different program on the image, which
Ransen calls an Object Xform (for transform). Here's a list of them, though
it's totally inadequate because it only uses words (you'll just have to
try Repligator out yourself,
won't you):
Banya · Bubbles · Clouds · Explosion · Fallen Leaves ·
Fallen Letters · Flowers · Haaisi · Ivy · Liquid Energy · Mad Painter
· Marilyn Warhol · Mist · Mosaic · Net · Old Film · OpArt · Pearls on
Silk · Paul Klee · Phases · Primitive Art · Relief Map · Stardust · Swarms
· Tekno Frag · Text · WEB fading · Wood
For each Xform, you can adjust some of the parameters as well as the
amount and type of the way the program's output is mixed with the original
image. In fact, the closest analogy to this whole process is audio mixing,
where you play with an effects processor and tweak parameters and the
output until everything sounds like what you want. And working this way
can be lots faster than going into a graphics program and twiddling, because
Repligator does most of the work for you.
Just to spice up the page, here are a few more samples of what Repligator
can do, this time using the WebDeveloper.com logo. It took about 2 minutes
to go through more than 50 variations and select these.
Deconstruction...
Definitely looks like a Web to me!
Pop Art?
This one might just be too classy for the Web!
Heavy Metal.
Pearls before...? Oh, never mind.
What was the name of the browser we used before Netscape?
You Get the Idea...
Repligator (I keep calling it Webligator, and maybe they should too...the
name's not taken, hint, hint) is a dandy little program that can quickly
give you lots of good visual ideas, if not finished images. At the very
least, it can remind you of things you might be able to do with all your
fancy graphics programs, generally in an hour or two. And for $39, its
logo should be in the dictionary next to "no-brainer"!
This article was first published in January, 1999.
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