Displacement Map help, please.

In article , Mari says…

I try to apply a displacement map to an image but it does not seem to work at all. It’s as though Photoshop is refusing to open the displacement map when it is selected ton open.
I uninstalled Photoshop comletely and re-installed it in an attempt to fix this.
My boyfriend tried with the same files on his computer but it works perfectly fine on his. Does anyone have a suggestion what could be causing this for me? >.<

Thanks either way.

Mari,
Why don’t you do a short-list of exactly what you are attempting to do with the Displacement Map – just the operations you are performing? Next, let us know your system and PS ver. Usually an un-install/re-install is not necessary. If something doesn’t work the way it should, it’s usually some little operator error. It’s amazing what effects a little check-box can have on an operation.

Hunt

:

In article , Mari
says…

I try to apply a displacement map to an image but it does not seem to work at all. It’s as though Photoshop is refusing to open the displacement map when it is selected ton open.
I uninstalled Photoshop comletely and re-installed it in an attempt to fix this.
My boyfriend tried with the same files on his computer but it works perfectly fine on his. Does anyone have a suggestion what could be causing this for me? >.<

Thanks either way.

Mari,
Why don’t you do a short-list of exactly what you are attempting to do with the Displacement Map – just the operations you are performing? Next, let us know your system and PS ver. Usually an un-install/re-install is not necessary. If something doesn’t work the way it should, it’s usually some little operator error. It’s amazing what effects a little check-box can have on an operation.

Hunt

Thanks very much for replying and for being so reassuring. I admit I am rather depressed by this. ^^

Let’s see.
I have an image of a pattern and the shaded image of a piece of cloth. I want to make the pattern wrap around the cloth. So I choose one of the channels of the cloth, blur it and save it as my displacement map. The pattern image has the same size. I open it. Next is Filters > Distort > Displace. The settings are standard (Horizontal and Vertical Scale at 10%, Stretch To Fit, Repeat Edge Pixels). I press OK and am prompted to choose a displacement map. I select it, press Open and… nothing happens.

According to my boyfriend (who did the exact same and succeeded) in the History should be something like "Open" but my history is exactly the way it was before I tried to apply the filter. It’s as though it refused to open the map at all, as though it was cancelled at that point.

We were trying the same thing with the same options and I did try it with a completely new install of Photoshop, but since it is still not working, I am thinking it must be connected to my computer.

I’m using Windows XP Home, Service Pack 2, with a Pentium 4, 3GHz, 512MB RAM. The only thing I could imagine having an impact would be that only 27% of my main drive are free (which equals more than 20GB free, plus I just defragmented).

My Photoshop version is 7.0 and it’s usually running largely without problems. I think before this re-install I had it updated to 7.01 or something.

Thanks again for taking the trouble of trying to figure this out. 😀

"<Mari>" <mari-chanNOSPAMPLEASE!@IMEANIT!chello.at> wrote:

Let’s see.
I have an image of a pattern and the shaded image of a piece of cloth. I want to make the pattern wrap around the cloth. So I choose one of the channels of the cloth, blur it and save it as my displacement map. The pattern image has the same size. I open it. Next is Filters > Distort > Displace. The settings are standard (Horizontal and Vertical Scale at 10%, Stretch To Fit, Repeat Edge Pixels). I press OK and am prompted to choose a displacement map. I select it, press Open and… nothing happens.

Here’s an excellent tutorial on accomplishing this task in a somewhat different way.

http://www.russellbrown.com/body.html

Click on the link to "More tips" and look for the tip called "Liquify Alert." It’s a large download but it explains, step-by-step how to apply a pattern to a piece of cloth so that the pattern matches the folds and wrinkles of the cloth.
——————————-
Tom

Unsolicited advertisements cheerfully ignored.

Tom Thomas wrote in
news::

Here’s an excellent tutorial on accomplishing this task in a somewhat different way.

http://www.russellbrown.com/body.html

Click on the link to "More tips" and look for the tip called "Liquify Alert." It’s a large download but it explains, step-by-step how to apply a pattern to a piece of cloth so that the pattern matches the folds and wrinkles of the cloth. ——————————-
Tom

Unsolicited advertisements cheerfully ignored.

Thank you very much! For some reason I can’t find that specific tip where you sent me to but a Google search brought it up in another place.
I’ll go and look at it right away.

Still, it would be great to find out what causes this odd behaviour of the Displace filter.

<Mari> wrote:

:

In article , Mari
says…

I try to apply a displacement map to an image but it does not seem to work at all. It’s as though Photoshop is refusing to open the displacement map when it is selected ton open.
I uninstalled Photoshop comletely and re-installed it in an attempt to fix this.
My boyfriend tried with the same files on his computer but it works perfectly fine on his. Does anyone have a suggestion what could be causing this for me? >.<

Thanks either way.

Mari,
Why don’t you do a short-list of exactly what you are attempting to do with the Displacement Map – just the operations you are performing? Next, let us know your system and PS ver. Usually an un-install/re-install is not necessary. If something doesn’t work the way it should, it’s usually some little operator error. It’s amazing what effects a little check-box can have on an operation.

Hunt

Thanks very much for replying and for being so reassuring. I admit I am rather depressed by this. ^^

Let’s see.
I have an image of a pattern and the shaded image of a piece of cloth. I want to make the pattern wrap around the cloth. So I choose one of the channels of the cloth, blur it and save it as my displacement map. The pattern image has the same size. I open it. Next is Filters > Distort > Displace. The settings are standard (Horizontal and Vertical Scale at 10%, Stretch To Fit, Repeat Edge Pixels). I press OK and am prompted to choose a displacement map. I select it, press Open and… nothing happens.

According to my boyfriend (who did the exact same and succeeded) in the History should be something like "Open" but my history is exactly the way it was before I tried to apply the filter. It’s as though it refused to open the map at all, as though it was cancelled at that point.

We were trying the same thing with the same options and I did try it with a completely new install of Photoshop, but since it is still not working, I am thinking it must be connected to my computer.
I’m using Windows XP Home, Service Pack 2, with a Pentium 4, 3GHz, 512MB RAM. The only thing I could imagine having an impact would be that only 27% of my main drive are free (which equals more than 20GB free, plus I just defragmented).

My Photoshop version is 7.0 and it’s usually running largely without problems. I think before this re-install I had it updated to 7.01 or something.

Thanks again for taking the trouble of trying to figure this out. 😀

Mari,

It’s not a hardware or software issue. Displace has been working since the early days when we used sticks and mud to do our Photoshop calculations. More than likely it’s that your parameters for the displace filter are too conservative.

First, look for the obvious, such as not flattening your text layer or having the wrong layer selected, etc. Try setting the horizontal percentage to 100 percent, and the vertical to zero, and see if you get more of a result.

If that doesn’t do it, simplify. Create a new image, draw a line on it with the brush. Then create a second image and lay down a gradient – for example a horizontal gradient from left to right, or even a spiral or radial gradient and save that in a psd file as your displacement file.

Then go back to your first image, the one with the brush mark, and try different parameters. At some point, things will start working and you can displace to your hear’s content.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

"Mike Russell" wrote in
news:_aG3d.17764$:

Mari,

It’s not a hardware or software issue. Displace has been working since the early days when we used sticks and mud to do our Photoshop calculations. More than likely it’s that your parameters for the displace filter are too conservative.
First, look for the obvious, such as not flattening your text layer or having the wrong layer selected, etc. Try setting the horizontal percentage to 100 percent, and the vertical to zero, and see if you get more of a result.

If that doesn’t do it, simplify. Create a new image, draw a line on it with the brush. Then create a second image and lay down a gradient – for example a horizontal gradient from left to right, or even a spiral or radial gradient and save that in a psd file as your displacement file.

Then go back to your first image, the one with the brush mark, and try different parameters. At some point, things will start working and you can displace to your hear’s content.

Thank you for sharing these suggestions.

The thing is, my boyfriend and me tried this with the same image, the same displacement map and the same settings on two different computers. It works on his and it does not work on mine. We went as far as to send each other the files with everything finished except for applying the filter.
By myself, I also played with the settings and tried different images and maps, without the least success.
You may know that some tutorials come with sample images so one can re-enact the lesson. I did that with two different tutorials but again, nothing happened.
As well, if only my settings were inappropriate, wouldn’t at least my history show that the filter had been applied, even if the image did not look notably different?

I can’t figure this one out at all…. The process seems to get stuck (or rather, cancelled) right where I try to open the displacement map. Thus I assume it must be an issue between Photoshop and my computer.
I read that Displace has been around for a long time and that’s good to know. I just wish it worked for me too. -_-;

This is just so strange! All these suggestions and directions are very good and I follow them. I thought I might be doing something wrong but the more I try, the less it seems a matter of incompetence. But apparently no one else posted here with this problem before, or you experienced people would know about it. ^^; Maybe it IS me after all…

I’m really sorry to be such a bother.

<Mari> wrote:

"Mike Russell" wrote in
news:_aG3d.17764$:

Mari,

It’s not a hardware or software issue. Displace has been working since the early days when we used sticks and mud to do our Photoshop calculations. More than likely it’s that your parameters for the displace filter are too conservative.
First, look for the obvious, such as not flattening your text layer or having the wrong layer selected, etc. Try setting the horizontal percentage to 100 percent, and the vertical to zero, and see if you get more of a result.

If that doesn’t do it, simplify. Create a new image, draw a line on it with the brush. Then create a second image and lay down a gradient – for example a horizontal gradient from left to right, or even a spiral or radial gradient and save that in a psd file as your displacement file.

Then go back to your first image, the one with the brush mark, and try different parameters. At some point, things will start working and you can displace to your hear’s content.

Thank you for sharing these suggestions.

The thing is, my boyfriend and me tried this with the same image, the same displacement map and the same settings on two different computers. It works on his and it does not work on mine. We went as far as to send each other the files with everything finished except for applying the filter.
By myself, I also played with the settings and tried different images and maps, without the least success.
You may know that some tutorials come with sample images so one can re-enact the lesson. I did that with two different tutorials but again, nothing happened.
As well, if only my settings were inappropriate, wouldn’t at least my history show that the filter had been applied, even if the image did not look notably different?

I can’t figure this one out at all…. The process seems to get stuck (or rather, cancelled) right where I try to open the displacement map. Thus I assume it must be an issue between Photoshop and my computer.
I read that Displace has been around for a long time and that’s good to know. I just wish it worked for me too. -_-;

This is just so strange! All these suggestions and directions are very good and I follow them. I thought I might be doing something wrong but the more I try, the less it seems a matter of incompetence. But apparently no one else posted here with this problem before, or you experienced people would know about it. ^^; Maybe it IS me after all…

I’m really sorry to be such a bother.

When a plugin fails for any reason, Photoshop will refuse to run it at all until you quit and restart Photoshop. One way this could happen is if you try to filter too large an image – say a couple hundred megabytes or more.

If restarting doesn’t work, it’s unlikely, but maybe there is a problem with your copy of the displacement filter. Do a search for a file named displace.8bf, and compare it with what your boyfriend’s copy is. On my file the length is 49,152 bytes, and the mode time is 9/22/2000.

There are also a bunch of Displacement maps from Adobe. They are in a folder named Displacement Maps, in the plugins folder. besides seeing if they work, there are also some amusing effects in there you might want to try.

As far as being a bother. You’re asking a real question that you actually want the answer to, which is as appropriate as it is rare 🙂 —

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

"Mike Russell" wrote in
news:Q0K3d.17837$:

When a plugin fails for any reason, Photoshop will refuse to run it at all until you quit and restart Photoshop. One way this could happen is if you try to filter too large an image – say a couple hundred megabytes or more.

If restarting doesn’t work, it’s unlikely, but maybe there is a problem with your copy of the displacement filter. Do a search for a file named displace.8bf, and compare it with what your boyfriend’s copy is. On my file the length is 49,152 bytes, and the mode time is 9/22/2000.

There are also a bunch of Displacement maps from Adobe. They are in a folder named Displacement Maps, in the plugins folder. besides seeing if they work, there are also some amusing effects in there you might want to try.

As far as being a bother. You’re asking a real question that you actually want the answer to, which is as appropriate as it is rare 🙂
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

First off, thanks to you I have found out my mistake. 😀 But I’d like to answer to your post bit by bit anyway.

We did as you suggested, and my boyfriend actually sent me his version of the filter (though it’s the same as mine) without any effect.
By the way, our version is different from yours, apparently. It’s 53.248 bytes with a date of April 1, 2002 (I wonder if there is a deeper meaning to that…). It also says its orginal filename is Displa8B.8BF though that may or may not mean anything. I am guessing that even though it has basically always been the same they did some modifications over time. But that is not the issue, obviously. ^-^

The next thing I did was playing around with the displacement maps in the folder of the same name. And they worked! So I copied my map into that folder and it worked too! I started to copy my map and one of the original ones to various loactions on my computer to test this.
Apparently one of the FEW places displacement maps must not be stored on my computer in order to get them to work is the folder I had it in (together with my project). I am not certain on this but it seems as though the path for the displacement map must not be longer than a certain number of characters. I shall test this some more at a later point.

Anyway, thanks to your (and everyone else’s) help I can use the Displace filter now and also learned incredibly much through the tutorials I was pointed to and just by browsing this newsgroup. I can’t begin to say how happy I am~

THANK YOU! 😀

<Mari> wrote:

"Mike Russell" wrote in
news:Q0K3d.17837$:

When a plugin fails for any reason, Photoshop will refuse to run it at all until you quit and restart Photoshop. One way this could happen is if you try to filter too large an image – say a couple hundred megabytes or more.

If restarting doesn’t work, it’s unlikely, but maybe there is a problem with your copy of the displacement filter. Do a search for a file named displace.8bf, and compare it with what your boyfriend’s copy is. On my file the length is 49,152 bytes, and the mode time is 9/22/2000.

There are also a bunch of Displacement maps from Adobe. They are in a folder named Displacement Maps, in the plugins folder. besides seeing if they work, there are also some amusing effects in there you might want to try.

As far as being a bother. You’re asking a real question that you actually want the answer to, which is as appropriate as it is rare 🙂
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

First off, thanks to you I have found out my mistake. 😀 But I’d like to answer to your post bit by bit anyway.

We did as you suggested, and my boyfriend actually sent me his version of the filter (though it’s the same as mine) without any effect.
By the way, our version is different from yours, apparently. It’s 53.248 bytes with a date of April 1, 2002 (I wonder if there is a deeper meaning to that…). It also says its orginal filename is Displa8B.8BF though that may or may not mean anything. I am guessing that even though it has basically always been the same they did some modifications over time. But that is not the issue, obviously. ^-^

The next thing I did was playing around with the displacement maps in the folder of the same name. And they worked! So I copied my map into that folder and it worked too! I started to copy my map and one of the original ones to various loactions on my computer to test this.
Apparently one of the FEW places displacement maps must not be stored on my computer in order to get them to work is the folder I had it in (together with my project). I am not certain on this but it seems as though the path for the displacement map must not be longer than a certain number of characters. I shall test this some more at a later point.

Anyway, thanks to your (and everyone else’s) help I can use the Displace filter now and also learned incredibly much through the tutorials I was pointed to and just by browsing this newsgroup. I can’t begin to say how happy I am~

THANK YOU! 😀

Super! Glad it’s working.

BTW – if you want to see an unusual use of the displacement filter, for plotting a graph, check out the profile plotter action:
http://www.curvemeister.com/downloads/profileplotter/index.h tm

I’ve even used this filter to plot binary medical heartbeat EKG data. —

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net