I was always fascinated by some of the professional seamless textures. Making few by my own for Photo-Brush and CompactDraw (a vector/bitmap editor) I realized that to create a great looking seamless textures is not easy task. It is easy if I want to generate an artificial one. (There are many Texture generators out on Internet) The question is why we want to create artificial textures if there are so many natural ones around us. I remember creating one seamless texture from digital photo about 20 minutes or more in PhotoShop.
For my new project I needed to create hundreds of seamless textures and again I wanted to use real life textures, sand, grass, ground, marble etc. That was the day when I decided to adjust the code in Photo-Brush and create a powerful bitmap image editor which naturally works with seamless textures.
That's how PhotoSEAM project was born.
I reused the already great graphic user interface from Photo-Brush, but I changed each function code to be capable of working exclusively in seamless mode and added some PhotoSEAM specific code.
Just run the PhotoSEAM, click new and create a tile of 200 x 200 size. Now draw anywhere on the screen and you will see the whole idea. While it looks simple, all the other retouch, tools, effects and clone functions work the same way - seamless on the image.
This makes creating the seamless textures from ANY digital photo very easy and enjoyable job.
You can finally create real seamless photo textures in just minutes.
R. Voska (Oscar)
Ottawa, Canada
Fall 2000
Graphics, photography and visual art was always my hobby. I remember when I got my first computer ATARI 128, instead of playing games I was always trying to squeeze something out of the build-in basic. And it always ended up in displaying of something...
My first PC gave me the ability to learn Borland Turbo Pascal and as far as I remember I was always doing something in graphics. My first bigger project was a simple, but powerful GUI Windows-like environment library in Turbo pascal for DOS. It had windows, mouse support and various controls I had to draw from scratch. I spent almost 2 years on it - just learning and pushing things I could do. During that period I also developed a designer for it - a GUI for creating GUI's which I could use to build a programs. It was build with the library and it created a code which the library then could use. So kind of recursive work. After I finished the library and the designer I did only one demo program with it (OFS - Optical Fiber Simulator) And the DOS was gone forever... I think this is where my passion for the MMB (Multimedia Builder) idea started.
With Windows I started to learn C++. I never learn C before so I was kind of new kid in the block.
All the time I was using different 60 and 35 mm cameras for taking pictures of the nature and people around me. I was also developing my own Black and White pictures.
With affordable scanners and later with digital cameras my passion for photography even increased. I could take picture and manipulate it like never before, adding or removing colors, effects , blur or sharpen. From the very first days I always liked image editing programs from all programs at all. I could spend hours of painting, image editing and combining all together.
Finally after all that years I got the opportunity to write my first own image editing software named Photo-Brush. This was like returning back to the dark room with my old pictures. I was thinking what I would like to have in simple yet powerful image editing application (my new dark room).