The ‘what if’ Stripe Senario Experiment

Working with Photoshop I’ve worked out a way with the help of "The Woven Pixel" to develop a what-if striping/ikat senario tool based on colours in a an image. No doubt I’m not the first to do this, but I still found it exciting!

Essentially a photo is coverted to indexed colour using a set number of colours. Here I’ve used 20, but I then combined similar colours and ended up with 16 colours in total. I extended the canvas at the bottom of the image with a black background and added little chips of colour that occur in the newly indexed image (I also created a custom colour table and swatches along the way so I can re-use this colour palette).

I then converted the image back to RGB. This is important. Now using the magic wand tool I can just select any colour chip and the same colours in the image will be selected – instantly!

I then copied the background layer and cut out the image part leaving the colour chips. You will need to uncheck the original background layer’s visability too.

I then drew a stripe pattern with multiple rectangles* and filled them with the colour chip selection. Now I had two layers- the original background and its copy with the stripe pattern on top all in the one file.

To experiment and change the colour stripes I selected a colour, made a new layer, then changed the colour of the fill.

This is just a basic idea of the process as it takes a bit of familiarity and perserverence with Photoshop to build up skills

I’ve had a little play with the Gimp and it seems to have the capabilities for doing this in a basic way, although I haven’t worked out how to set up your own colour table in it.

*A very hand tool in Photoshop is the Fixed Size option on the selection tool (the Gimp has this). You can instantly draw up stripes to exact sizes on your canvas.