Instead of doing something useful, I spent a couple of hours playing around in MSPaint.

[capri0mni]

MSPaint has a curious quirk.

The normal bit is that when you click "Save as" and choose the .jpg format, the computer does some dithering to reduce the contrast in your image. That's normal -- that happens with the .jpg format.

The curious bit is, that once an image is in that format, it won't dither again, as long as only click "Save," but if you click "Save as" again, the MSPaint with dither over its previous ditherings, and you get whole new colors that didn't exist before.

So tonight, I deliberately played around with that. I made a custom shade of greyish blue-green, and drew a tiny flower stem on a 20 by 20 pixel square, and let the computer dither that. Then, magnified for an 800% zoom, and chose one of the new shades of green for the background, and a second new shade of green for part of the flower's leaf.

Then I made a custom shade of purple, and drew the tiny flower petals, and again, I let MSpaint do it's dithering magic.

Then, I kept selecting and pasting, magnifying each layer by differing amounts, choosing different parts to crop, and pasting again, "Saving as" a .jpg after each step.

The result is here (final image: 810x810 pxls; 47 Kb). I really like the result.

Remember, only two of those colors are ones I created deliberately. The rest is fractalicious chaos.

Comments

[scarfman]

Wow, you're more adventurous than I am.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, the good thing about this technique is that if a dithering result gives you a section of colors you don't like, you can just select a bit of colors you do like, and paste over it.

[rustyverse.livejournal.com]

Those li'l boogers created thru JPEG compression are called "artifacts" and are created because the JPEG algorithm discards data from the image that it thinks is unnecessary in exchange for a smaller file size. Depending on the level of compression, a .jpg image will decrade everytime you save it.

Usually, digital artists hate artifacts, but I think that the way that you've used it to find inspiration is way cool, actually.

Now in most graphic software there are options to increase or decrease JPEG compression with interesting results. For example, if one really ups the compression on a photo of a person, the subject of the photo will take on an older, more haggard and, sometimes, even disfigured appearance.

I don't know if MS Paint allow the user to change JPEG compression levels, tho.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

The MS Paint version that came with the last version of XP does not, in fact, allow you to choose degradation levels.

For example, if one really ups the compression on a photo of a person, the subject of the photo will take on an older, more haggard and, sometimes, even disfigured appearance.

Yes. I suppose that's also a feature well-used by television censors, to pixelate someone saying one of the seven words on TV? If not that, something similiar.

I think that the way that you've used it to find inspiration is way cool, actually.

Thank you very much. Of course, every art tool has its limitations. The trick is to pick the appropriate tool so that its weakness can be used as a strength. For example, a mural painter would throw away a sable script liner brush in a fit of frustration. And a still life painter, who wanted to paint the antennae of a luna moth, would pick it up with glee.