ART OF ANAMORPHOSIS Software
ART OF ANAMORPHOSIS Anamorph Me! is a free, small software application that can read images in the most common formats (e.g. JPEG, BMP) and carry out a range of anamorphic transformations on them - including oblique, cylindical mirror and conical mirror. It will eventually offer support for digital cameras and web cams. I'm developing this software myself using Visual C++ and it'll take some time for it to evolve into something professional-looking. Please note that this software runs in Microsoft Windows operating systems (95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP) only.
With apologies to Leonardo, here are some sample output images:
(Source image of Mona Lisa is courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive - www.artchive.com.)
To download the software, simply click on the following link:
and follow the directions given in the README file:
The User's Guide (PDF format, 1160 Kbytes):
If you do download and use the software, I'd appreciate an email (to phillip.kent@gmail.com) so I can keep track of who is using it.
Technical information: Anamorph Me! is written using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 and is based on the C++ class library paintlib (www.paintlib.de) and its sample application piclook.
Anamorph Me! is made freely available for non-commercial purposes only. It is provided "as is" and is not warranted to be suitable for any particular purpose. For commercial use, please contact me via phillip.kent@gmail.com.
Anamorph Me! is copyright © Phillip Kent, 2001.
Anamorph Me! offers only limited manipulation functions for images. For standard operations such as cropping, changing brightness, contrast and colours, and advanced printing, you'll need an image manipulation package. Assuming that you don't have, and don't want to buy, commercial software (such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop), take a looking at the following, which are completely free (for non-commercial uses).
IrfanView is a basic image editor for Windows computers, but with a lot of smart features, and it has the advantage of being a small installation file (about 700KB). Download from www.irfanview.com .
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a fully-featured image manipulation package (similar in scope to Photoshop) which is freely-distributed, and open-source. It is written by an off-the-wall bunch of people, and consequently has a fun, off-the-wall feel to it. The installation files are pretty large (10 MB for Windows), however.
A huge number of transformation algorithms are implemented in The GIMP. Two of these, which are located in the Filter > Distorts menu, are directly relevant to anamorphosis: "Conical Anamorphose" (an implementation of the mirror-conical transformation) and "Polar Coords" (with which you can do approximate mirror-cylindrical transformations, and also do inverse transformations from polar to rectangular coordinates).
The GIMP runs best on Linux, but there is a Windows version under development. This is flagged as a prerelease, but apart from the absence of help pages it works extremely well.
This web site is developed by Phillip Kent