The Combinator is a device found in the software application Reason, a music production instrument by Propellerhead Software.
Reason renders its GUI in 16-bit colour to limit resource useage. JPEG backdrop images used with the Combinator are normally 24-bit and therefore - in some cases - artefacts may become visible due to the colour reduction.
The Combinator Backdrop Toolkit consists of two Adobe Photoshop® compatible plug-ins that convert the colours in an image to 15-bits (5 bits / channel). One plug-in simply converts a colour to its nearest 15-bit neighbour, the other applies a rough noise dither which makes colour transitions smoother. The effect is similar to converting an image to 8-bit for GIF exporting.
By applying one of these filters before exporting to JPEG, colours are already reduced when importing them as a backdrop for the Combinator (yet some colour shifts may still be possible).
Colour reduction may not at all be visible to the eye, it is possible that there is little difference between the original image and as it is filtered or displayed in Reason. But there might as well be occasions that the difference is apparent, in which case this toolkit may come to the rescue...
|
|
original 24-bit image
15-bit image
dithered 15-bit image
|
Version:
Currently the plug-ins are available for Windows only...
Download:
CombinatorBackdropToolkit.zip
Installing:
Extract in the "Plug-Ins" folder of the preferred image application, typically found in the "Program Files" folder on yer C drive.
|
