Wednesday, January 12, 2005

The Rasterbator

[click to enlarge]

The Rasterbator is a web service that creates gigantic rasterized [1] images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into cool looking posters up to 65 feet long!! To get to the site, click on the title of this article above.

To check The Rasterbator out , I uploaded a drawing I published here a while ago:

http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2004/12/jack-drawing-faces-no-467.html

The image I put on this page is page 38 of 375, or 1/375th of the rasterbated image!

First, I upload the image. I select the size I want, and they process it. In a couple of minutes, I download a PDF of the new image. Printing it in the large scale format will take 375 pages of 8 1/2 x 11" paper.

This slick software creates gigantic half-toned images [2] like a massive painting by Roy Lichtenstein with Ben-Day dots (they give you an option to scale the size of the dots). This site would be great for making large scale posters. . .without going to Kinkos [tm]. They write on their web site about releasing a free GPL version sometimes in the future. This had to be a fun application to create.

/jack

[1] Rasterizing converts images into a bitmap form for display or printing. Vector graphics, and vector and outline fonts have to be be rasterized to print or display them.
[2] If you look closely at newspaper photos, they are done in half tones, using dots to represent the blacks and whites (and greys by the way your eyes blend them).
It's all circles. You can see a half-toned photograph here: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/278/2473/640/jb.jpg
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2 comments:

Jason Newkirk said...

the rasterbator is f'n awesome. Great stuff. ~j

Anonymous said...

This is totally awesome. I did an amazing face.