Sparkles

I first released this one just before Christmas 2003. It has lots of quirks and limitations, but can be quite useful nevertheless. If you want a serious, industrial-strength starmaker that can cope with high-resolution images, take a look at Quasar! If you're happy with small stars on web-resolution images, then give this one a try.

Sparkles

Installation   Unlike the other xero plugins, this one uses a configuration file called default.spk, which must be present in the same directory as the filter itself. To install the plugin, copy both sparkles.8bf and default.spk to you host's plugins directory. If the filter reports that the configuration file is missing when you run it, please make sure that the default.spk file is in the same directory!
 
Controls    
 
Main colour   Click this button to select the main colour to be used.
 
Highlight colour   If the 'use highlight' checkbox is ticked, certain parts of each sparkle will be coloured with this colour rather than the main colour. The parts affected are those defined to be the brightest for each sparkle.
 
Sparkle style   This drop-down list offers a selection of sparkle shapes; the list is in ascending order of size (approximately, anyway). The shapes are defined in the default.spk file, in plain-text format. Those of an adventurous nature may wish to experiment with this file, adding custom sparkle shapes - but back up the original first! The filter may crash (possibly taking your host program with it) if you make an error in the format. For the record, the file contains, for each shape:
  • The name to appear in the drop-down list - no spaces allowed!
  • The size in pixels. Each shape is assumed to be square, and this is the length of each edge.
  • The shape data.
The last line of the file must contain three asterisks as an end marker. If you take a look at the file supplied, this horribly brief description will probably make some sort of sense; if it doesn't, don't mess with it!
 
Distribution   This drop-down list controls the way that sparkles are distributed across the image. Choose from: Uniform (all over); Edges (sparkles follow edges); Brightness (sparkles are confined to areas of similar brightness - right-click the preview to select a brightness-level, and use the 'Target' and 'Tolerance' sliders to fine-tune); Gradients (six different types).
 
Density   Controls the number of sparkles.
 
Vary brightness   Controls the amount by which the brightness of sparkles is randomly varied.
 
Vary colour   Controls the amount by which the colour of sparkles is randomly varied.
 
Target   Only applies when using the 'brightness' distribution method, and sets the target brightness.
 
Tolerance   Only applies when using the 'brightness' distribution method, and sets the tolerance (a sparkle will be applied only if the brightness of the image at that point is within tolerance of the target brightness).
 
Use highlight   Check this box to apply the highlight colour to the brightest pixels.
 
Transparent   Check this box to make the image transparent. This only works on layers - you can use it to apply sparkles to a selected area of the image while simultaneously removing the image itself.
 
Antialias   When this checkbox is ticked, sparkles will be blended smoothly into the image.