Digital Light & Color

on other programs? In other words, can the work and brainpower other PWP users put into developing some processing procedure that they have have found useful be shared with the rest of us by simply uploading the .wfl files to some site where others can just download them and give them a try and maybe tweak them a bit? It seems that a lot of the power of PWP that is being used by the more experienced users could be given to those of us who are less experienced if this was possible and encouraged.

The short answer might be "no," but the reason I ask is that I looked at Bob Walker's tutorial on the workflow he uses in embedding his logo on his pix and wished I could just download that .wfl sequence of actions rather than trying to reproduce each and every step accurately on my own.

It is my hope that at some point in the future, workflow processing will become more and more like a plug-in or a macro. It could become a true widget-based image processing programming language, with a few significant enhancements. To a limited extent, it already is, but I am often frustrated trying to find meaningful (that is, non-trivial) workflow examples.

I can easily post the workflow files I created to do the "copyright workflow" (http://www.pbase.com/rwalkernm/pwpcrwfl), but they are 13MB each, because they include the fixed masks that are used to imprint the copyright text on the image. I have 4 such workflows -- all for fixed-aspect-ratio (3:2) images (so that masks will match up). One workflow for lower-left-landscape orientation, one for lower-left-portrait, and one each for inserting text in lower right (landscape/portrait) instead.

I am pretty sure you do not want my workflows, because you do not want my logo on your pictures, so you have to build your own masks. My logo is a fixed part of the masks imbedded in the workflow. But, if you want, I can send you (and anyone else who wants one) any of them using yousendit.com -- all my web space is at its quota at the moment, and I'm feeling cheap.

You have given me the idea to write up in more detail what I would like to see as workflow enhancements. For example, we need multiple widget inputs (so that masks can be created on the fly, and so we can use the composite transform) and we need to be able to define a "wiring diagram" that illustrates how the output of some widgets feeds into the input(s) of another. That's a separate topic for discussion -- anyone interested??

Bob Walker

Thanks, Bob. The .wfl files I have (very simple ones) don't include masks and are quite small, so I didn't realize that specific masks were embedded in your workflow files. I imagined wrongly that the Workflow would just fail or pop up a requester unless appropriate masks were open. The Workflows are a great addition to PWP, and it would be great if they could be turned into a means for PWP users to easily share their techniques with one another.

Bob

Would be definately a interesting thing to discuss about improvements of Workflow.

Rather than hijack this thread, I will start a new one with observations about the current workflow capability of PWP. I wrote a little white paper (pdf) describing in detail what I'd like to be able to do. See the new thread.

The principal enhancements that would add the most to workflows is the ability (1) to route the output of widgets to more than one new widget, (2) the ability to specify a "wiring diagram" describing the process flow of a workflow, (3) the ability to accept a computed mask as a widget input, and (4) all the non-trivial programming Jonathan and Kiril might have to tackle to accomplish (1), (2) and (3).

Bob Walker