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3. Basics of PhotoLine / 3.4 The Color Editor

### 3.4.3 The Texture-Dialog

The subdialog for editing texture colors can be used to modify the selected texture:

One thing has to be mentioned before explaining the dialog: creating textures is quite complicated. There are complete books discussing this topic, therefore a detailed explanation is to large for this manual. At this place it is only possible to give a short introduction, but - in combination with own experiments - it can lead to appealing results.

In PhotoLine a texture can consist of several texture parts. New allows to create a new texture part and Delete removes one. Every texture part is a 2-dimensional function. The results of the textures parts are added twice according to the settings of Intensity, Use For Texture and Use for Emboss. The first result is used to calculate the colors in the texture, the second one to lighten the texture by a light source.

Every texture part consists of three parts:

- a function generating random values, which can be controlled in the area Noise.
- a function, which uses the random values as input and which can be controlled in the area Function.
- a post-correction

Most complicated are the settings in the area Noise. There are four ways to create random numbers. None always generates the "random" number 0. The three remaining procedures are depending on the value Detail. Basically it can be said that low Detail-values are creating slow, smooth transitions in the texture, while high values are creating quick, hard changes. Start X and Start Y allow to modify the Detail-value of the x- or y-direction. For example: if Detail is 4 and Start X is 2, the x-direction uses a detail value of 8. This way it is possible to create fast changes in the x-direction, but slow ones in y.

The random-Kind Noise is the simplest random function and doesn‘t depend on any other values. It is different to Fractal and Turbulence. Both are superimpositions of several Noise-functions. In doing so every superimposition has a raised Detail-value. The number of superimpositions is given by Steps. If Steps is 1, the result will be identical to Noise. Frequency defines the increase of the detail value of every step. Amplitude controls, how much every superimposition influences the result. A value of 200% means that the temporary result has a weight of 200%, the superimposition therefore has a weight of 50%.

Function allows to modify result of the calculations above even further. Kind defines a function, which should be used with every noise value. The function Noise means, that the random value will not be modified. Every other function allows to modify the strength of the noise value with the value f. Oscillations controls, how often the function is executed in the texture area. If the current function is Brick, with an oscillations value of 2 the result will contain twice as much bricks as with the value 1. If Repetition is larger than 1, the texture colors will repeat several times in the value range. The result can be seen best, if Repetition is changed on an existing texture.

At last the values of a texture part can be modified with Bias and Gain. if Bias is smaller than 0.5, the texture part creates mostly small values, if it is larger than 0.5, it creates mostly large values. It is similar with Gain: if it is smaller than 0.5, mostly small and large values are created. If Gain is larger than 0.5, mostly middle values are created.