It’s a bit retro and possibly cheesy but I like the graphic feel of dot and line screened images creating a halftone.
Screening a photo is the process of reducing the resolution of an image into printable pixels or dots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone Newspapers and magazines use a fine screen to print a series of colors onto a page. In my case I chose to screen only a luma value image. You can vary the contrast and the size of the dots. In my case I also created 3 types of screen.
Errr… What about going to the UV/Image Editor and selecting “Viewer Node” as image? From there you can save the current backdrop of the Compositing node tree. The feature is available in 2.65. (Don’t know or remember about previous versions.)
Agreed, I use the viewer node to generate images for textures: just use viewer node as output in image editor, then F3 over image editor window and save image to file.
Which is what I finally did, but why can’t I just add different images to the render buffers? Problem is that you cannot have multiple versions of the render result up showing alternate slots. But sure save/load/display works too.
Make sure you select a different slot before you render and then close your render window or just render again. You can have up to 8 renders and you can change from one to another using J.
You can also make two uv editor windows and load each render (=slot) on one of them.
More often than not, however, I find myself going to the compositor and using the mix–>difference node or the split viewer node to see what actually changes between renders. Depending on the context, I tend to trust that more than just looking at the renders!
The great thing about Blender is that you don’t just rely on pre-made effects, you can create your own.
And if you take the time to grasp the underlying concepts and experiment a bit, boy doesn’t that unleash creativity or what?
I suppose I will have to do a tut and put it up on the blog? I wonder if the nodes preset addon will turn it into a button click effect, be handy for applying it multiple times.