This is a quick-start guide meant to get you started with Chromatron.
When you are in Chromatron, you can also get contextual help for almost all words or elements you see. Whenever your mouse cursor shows a question mark you can click and a popup will appear with explanations.
Creating starts from clicking the empty creation with the tiny plus sign at the top of the gallery. This will bring you to a fresh creation page with an empty canvas you are going to fill with your art.
There are various controls that influence your creation. You can change them at any time before you order, in any order you like. And you can save and continue working on your creation later.
The default settings should work out of the box for creating a medium-sized painting with medium resolution and balanced palette.
It all starts with uploading any image you like. Click the image icon and choose a file from your computer, or when on mobile, you can also choose to take a picture with your camera.
This is where you choose an algorithm for turning your image into something that can be painted with the robot. PenPixel is chosen by default. Read more about what PenPixel does here.
You can also change the resolution of the image for PenPixel here and define the pixel fill ratio. This is where the fun starts.
You can alter the appearance of your image through a number of basic but powerful modifiers. Among these are the standard brightness, contrast and saturation controls you probably know from basic image editing, and also ways to alter the colors (hues) in your image. Go wild, you can't hurt anyone here.
The preview on the right will show you the effects of the modifiers and other choices on-the-fly.
This is where we think about the production for a moment. Choices in the execution are integral part of art creation after all.
There are different sort of pens/brushes that can be chosen, each with their own palette of colors that are available for the inks/paints the tool can be used with. Tools have a specific (range of) diameter, so that also impacts how the image is reconstructed.
Selecting a palette can have a drastic impact on the final outcome. Especially if the palette is not well balanced. That's not a bug, it's a feature! The effects a palette has can be exploited to turn your image into something really wild, or monochrome, or smooth, or posterized. If you select any of the "Custom" palettes you can add/remove colors as you wish. Just play around and explore the effects!
Read more about the effects of the palette here.
On to choosing the surface you want your art to be painted on. There are different types of paper you can choose from. Soon we will also add canvases and other types of materials.
The type of size defines how image size and surface size are related to each other. You can either choose to use the image size you specified above and add a margin around it, or set the total dimensions of the surface here and have Chromatron resize the image to fit on the surface. Or select custom to control image and surface size independently.
Whenever you see the save button, there are some unsaved changes. Click it to be sure nothing gets lost. Saving also enables the next step, generating.
Always generate the creation in order to see the full effect of all the choices you have made. This will run the chosen method/algorithm and generate all the data necessary for production. It will also render a truthful preview of your creation in a simulation of the printing process. Generate as often as you like, checking the final result is an integral part of the creation process.
Generating will also calculate and show a production price. Move your mouse over it to see in detail how the price is calculated. All settings have an impact on production, some more (like size obviously), some less. You can balance your budget and artistic ambition as you wish.