For Icon Builder I needed a quick and easy way to load an existing icon image that already has a drop shadow or a glow border so I can remove the alpha background.

The Display Large Image function reads the pixel data, draws the RGB image in the middle to the rasterport. When it finds black pixels of the drop shadow it performs alpha blending. When it finds the colored pixels of the glow border it also does Alpha Blending. This can be made into a new function that filters out the drop shadow and glow border and only draws the RGB image. That's quick and easy! Just read the rasterport to get RGB data.

I'm working on writing the PDF for the Detect Contour Algorithm. This is the helper function to write the chaincode data to a text file. All together I spent about 4 hours on this function alone trying to get it to work correctly. It works well now. ;-)

It's been only about a month now that I've been working on Icon Builder. It's usually about this time that I get into the weeds with a project. I'm really getting into the nuts and bolts of Icon Builder and I'm making good progress this far. I'll probably spend another two months on developing Icon Builder till done.

The PDF document describing Detect Contour and source code is ready. I'll post it all later today.

The Gaussian Blur Algorithm is also working. I'm adding HSL code also.

Here is the Detect Contour PDF as well as the log file showing the output and the chaincode text file for the Games Icon.

I'll post the source code for it in a few days. :-)

Although the Detect Contour Algorithm is finished and it's working very well development on Icon Builder continues.

This week I'll focus on the Gaussian Blur Algorithm for the "blur effect". It's working already but it's not perfect. The outer color band of the glow border is too light. Some post processing is needed to adjust the saturation using Hue, Saturation, Luminance (HSL) to make it visible.

Next week I'll focus on Change Glow Tint that uses HSL to do a Hue Rotation to change the tint of an existing glow border to neon green, neon blue, neon red, orange and purple. Only the glow border tint changes. The RGB image in the middle remains unchanged.

In the screenshot the image on the left has a glow border produced in Icon Builder using the "blur effect". I adjusted the saturation of the outer band manually. I'm working on the computer code to do the same thing. The image on the right has a glow border produced in Photoshop using the "blur effect". I'm satisfied that the images are very similar. :-)

I'm getting a little bit closer to the desired result.

The glow border on the left is produced by Icon Builder. The glow border on the right is produced by Photoshop CS4.