My Three Screens...

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

How irritating - glad you found a way round it.

I updated my post a tad, after you'd posted... mostly grammar and sentence-flow.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I, on the other hand, just took a picture of this past weekend and narrowed it down to the (almost) right aspect. It might not look as sharp but most of the time the background is covered anyway...

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

That's quite lovely.  Especially if you're mostly interested in nature, such as butterflies.  Which I happily admit, have their place.

The photos I used were of lovely ladies I'd collected over the years of having internet access... nothing distasteful, of course.  

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Update:  Today, with much less fuss, I created a new background, using 6 photos instead of 3.   And just for grins, I used the Fotografix program, which was much-much easier to use than the far more complex Artweaver.

And I re-discovered layers-- as I would paste each cropped photo into the collage, it automatically created a new layer, which made moving, adjusting the photo a snap-- although I could not locate in settings the "preserve aspect ratio" and once I got the thing to full size, I see a couple of my pics are slightly out-of-true (aspect ratio was not preserved-- I was doing it by eye, and the whole thing was necessarily shrunk to a working size).

Since, once again, I was using the channel of open the photo into venerable M$ Paint (which can handle single photos well enough, if all you want to do is resize and/or crop-- I was just cropping).  Then copy and paste into Fotografix image, which generates a new layer.  You can merge the layers if you wish, once you've positioned the pic, but I didn't bother-- I may re-compose it later.  (And fix the two that are out-of-true).

I think I'll experiment with resizing in paint first, which is a bit more clumsy but aspect ratio is preserved-- you key-in the new pixels in either width or height, and check the "preserve aspect ratio" and it just works.   Then I could crop out just what I wanted.

But I wanted to see how Fotographix compared to Artweaver, and it is much-much simpler and easier to use-- akin to the 16 year old paint engine, only with horsepower.

Since I was using paint as the pathway anyway.... I may experiment with opening into a separate file within Fotographics-- it ought to be able to handle that well enough, then cropping-resizing within it.  

Doesn't matter either way, though-- and it lets me simply close the paint window once the copy operation is done.

I'm quite happy with the results (apart from the slight aspect ratio errors), and yes-- I remembered to start with an all-black layer-- the bottom one, as it turns out.  All the new ones automatically have transparent backgrounds.

This one was a simple 2 and 2 and 2 layout, with separate 'spaces' for each monitor (which I'm still getting a feel for-- one of the photos is ever so slightly onto the center screen).  I think I'll experiment with far more complex layout, with many layers, and overlapping pictures-- there appears to be a way to move the various layers around, such that I can choose which picture is dominant.   But there would be no way to do the clever "over and under" effect¹, unless I clipped-out a part of the picture manually.   Oh well, it's fun to play with.


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_{¹  Back in the day, in college, I took a course in media design.  This was back in the primitive days when computers were large clunky things that knew nothing of graphics, and barely understood text-based screens.  So if you wished to create a montage or collage, you had to do it with scissors, glue and a boat-load of magazine photos. The original activity from which "cut-and-paste" gets its literal meaning.   I found I really enjoyed making compositions this way, usually to some theme or other, but occasionally just enjoying the randomness of fitting the "sweet-spot" of each randomly-selected picture into what was already there.  Then we'd laminate the whole thing.  I always got top-marks on these, I dunno why-- they were fun, but not remotely deep.  Or hard to do for that matter.  The most difficult was getting a large and wide enough range of magazines so the photographs were not all of a kind.  And to eliminate the commercialism-- I always strove to hide that.  Maybe that was what the teacher was looking for--he was kind of fussy.  But talented as hell.... hmmm.}

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Update:

I continue to play with the Fotographix/Paint engine.   I have found that having each photo in a separate layer has opened up endless possibilities... and I continue to tweak my collage, several hundred faces now.

I'm thinking of utilizing a feature of Win7:  you can shuffle the background photos over a schedule, either in order, or randomized.  If I re-did the thing into several hundred separate photos, each one adding yet another layer?  Over time, the backdrop would gradually add in photographs until the complete set was visible... then, with some creative re-naming, it could gradually remove one photo at a time until the plain black background was there, then start again....

... if I have several duplicates of the full-set?  It would appear to pause at the final picture for longer than the build/take-down phases.

I wonder how hard it would be to create a screen saver from this sequence?  I've seen several, but none span 3 monitors very well (or at all).   It'd be kinda cool to have the "screen saver" be the actual background being assembled...

Anyone have any experience with programming Windoze screen savers?   Is it hard?  What sort of engine do you need?

....