Aquatint assists you in creating images that go with Apple's Aqua
user interface appearance. The glossy, liquid appearance of Aqua looks
great, but it places a burden on users and software developers who are
not trained artists, since such images are not easy to make. With
Aquatint, you'll effortlessly produce your own custom Aqua icons and
images.
The process is very simple. You start out with a stencil, typically
just a black filled shape. For example, here's the man behind the Stick
Software logo. His name is Dave:
Dave is rather large here, because the Aquatinting process works best
when it can reduce the size of the original image during the process. A
4x reduction is best; a 2x reduction, as we'll do here, is usually
sufficient. So suppose we wanted to make an Aqua-style icon out of
Dave:
Here's
a first pass, using the built-in preset in Aquatint for a standard blue
Aqua look. Presets exist for all of the standard appearances in Aqua
(blue or graphite, highlighted or unhighlighted, and so on), so cranking
out a set of appearances for a widget is as easy as a click and a save
for each appearance.
This
image has had its saturation turned off, for a liquid mercury
appearance. To enhance this effect, the "margin" was increased on the
image to make it more "curvy" (compare the chest area with the previous
example), and the contrast was cranked up.
This
image combines the two examples above. A little bit of variation in
the color has been introduced as well, and the shadow was modified in
several ways. The darkness and diffusiveness of the shadow can be
controlled, as well as the shadow's position relative to the tinted
image. You can use Aquatint just to make shadows, too.
This
is Dave on gummi worms. This illustrates the "rainbow" effect that
Aquatint can apply to your images. It is very customizable in terms of
the colors used and how they vary over your image; this is but one
example. The variation in color in the previous image was achieved with
a subtler rainbow effect.
This
is a very different image, achieved through a much narrower "margin" to
produce a flat, embossed look, combined with high contrast to make a
black outline. A subtle rainbow effect is used here to produce slight
color variations in one hand and one foot. A stronger shadow behind
Dave enhances the sense of flatness.
As these examples show, a virtually infinite variety of images can be
made with Aquatint from just one silhouette. Furthermore, all of these
examples don't even begin to touch on Aquatint's capabilities with more
complex "stencils" that include variation in hue, saturation and
brightness. Aquatint's own icon was made using Aquatint, as were the
appearances for the "circular slider" widget that you can see in the
screen shot below. The possibilities are endless.
None of these images were retouched in any way. In fact, they have
suffered in quality somewhat due to being converted to GIFs. By the
way, Aquatint always produces images with transparency; the shadow shown
here is a real shadow, and these images would look great on any
background. Since the web doesn't really support TIFF, though (some
browsers do, but most don't), we're limited here to 256-color GIFs. So
they've been put on white backgrounds with a frame so they still look
nice.
Predictably enough (it
is a Stick Software product, after all),
Aquatint has a whole slew of controls to let you tweak the details of
the image. Here's a reduced snapshot of its document window (click
here for a full-size version):
Don't worry, there's a manual that explains what all those controls do.
(For the HTML version, which is about 50K plus about 450K of images
that get downloaded, click
here; for the 348K PDF version which can be used off-line, click
here.)
Please note that Aquatint 1.1 requires
OS X 10.3 to run.
Aquatint is shareware (which means we rely on you to pay for it if you
use it). It costs $15 for non-commercial uses, $50 for commercial uses
(defined as using it to produce art for any for-profit purpose). Feel
free to try it out for a little while before paying, but please don't
forget that it is ultimately your responsibility to pay for it. For
details on how we handle registrations, see our main
registration page. Thanks!
We'll leave you with an image generated by
Fracture,
a fractal screensaver by Stick Software, which we aquatinted to add a
glossy look to it. This is an unretouched final image from Aquatint.
This
is a very basic style for the foot; plain black, with a light shadow
for depth. As you can see, the size of the feet is adjustable.
The engine from Aquatint
is part of BigFoot, so you can easily get Aquatinted feet like these.
These two examples show how you can vary the depth of the shadow cast by
the feet, also.
Other
styles of foot are provided; dress shoes for those fancy occasions, for
example. Both of these images are using the Aquatint engine, too.
For
less formal outings, sneakers are provided. The first image shows
another style of colorizing, with solid black outlines around
translucent colored interiors.
These images show off some of the more sophisticated effects BigFoot has to offer: transparency, and rainbowing.
And you can make your own!
