ChromaPlas - creative uses of an old-skool demo plasma effect, by Andrei Ellman

This image is a collage of six screenshots from my demo/screensaver ChromaPlas. It can be found on the depot at the following URL:
http://www.allegro.cc/depot/project.php?_id=1048

ChromaPlas is a demo / screensaver that takes the old-skool demo plasma-effect and applies the plasma to various channels of images in different colour-spaces. The result is a psychedelic looking swirl that resembles the image. Chromaplas has many settings giving you the ultimate in tweaking power.

The firtst image (top-left) is just the plasma by itself. This is the easiest way to just visualise what a plasma is. It's just a series of values from 0 to 255. All it is doing is affecting the greyscale value of the pixel on the screen.

The second image (top-right) is a bit like the first image, but now, we have applied a colour look-up table (palette) to the plasma. We have given the plasma some funky colours.

We can do more interesting things with plasma. In the third image (middle-left), we've broken an image of the desktop down into it's three separate channels in HLS space - Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. The plasma has been applied to the Hue Channel by adding and subtracting the plasma-values. The ability of ChromaPlas to use the desktop as the source-image makes it an excellent screensaver. If you stare at the desktop too long, you may think that something is happening to your monitor or your head before you remember that it's just a screensaver.

As well as the Desktop image, we can use any picture we want as the source-image. The fourth image (middle-right) is having it's Saturation-channel affected by the plasma. Note the grey streak accross the person's face means that a part of the plasma with low values has passed over that part of the image, which means the colours are becoming more monochrome. Parts of the image affected by high plasma-values become more colourful.

ChromaPlas has a built-in image. The hue changes depending on what angular position it is relative to the centre. The saturation decreases as the distance from the centre increases. This image has smooth Hue and Saturation gradients making it good for playing around with plasmas. In the fifth image (bottom-left), we see the built in image having both it's Hue and Lightness channels affected. The lighter areas have the hue shifted in one direction, and the darker areas have the hue shifted in the other direction.

The effect in the sixth image currently is not available in the current release of ChromaPlas, but will appear in future releases. Here, I am using the 256-colours rainbow of the Atari 8-bit computers to colour the plasma. It should be nostalgic for users of the Atari 8-bit computers.

The sourcecode of ChromaPlas is available for download, meaning you can compile it for any platform which Allegro has been ported to. There are also pre-built binaries available for DOS and Windows. However, so far, only the Windows version is a screensaver.


AE.

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