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.

The Combinator Backdrop Toolkit is not affiliated with Propellerhead Software.
Use at your own risk.

Created by Captain Hastings at the kaustic laboratories. Feedback is welcome and possible by sending an email to combinator_toolkit at the kaustic.net domain.