Fun with the Droste effect
Via this Digg post, I found this awesome image manipulation tool called MathMap, and a Flickr group of photos using Escher’s Droste effect.
Mathmap has been around for a while, as a plug-in for GIMP and more recently as a standalone program for Mac OS X.
If you want to get a better idea of what Mathmap is all about, check out this brief video presentation by Mark Probst, the developer.
I’m surprised I hadn’t stumbled across MathMap before, as it is very similar in spirit to my (now ancient) image manipulation programs Pixel Magic and QTS, but much, much nicer. It has a richer language and more interactive interface. I look forward to playing with it.
Probably one reason I haven’t encountered MathMap before is I’ve never been an active GIMP user, having been spoiled with free copies of Photoshop as long as it’s been around. Photoshop is horribly expensive though, and I think I’ll be giving GIMP a closer look again in the coming weeks. My daughter needs some powerful image processing software, and I’m not inclined to pony up to Adobe…
