140827-01 - bokeh

Ultra Fractal monthly Challenges Redux! Vol. 43What are these UF challenges?
How do challenges work and how can I participate?
Can I help promoting the challenges in some way?
What if I have an idea for a future challenge?
You can find all this information and more in the Ultra Fractal challenges FAQ, which is also part of our very first UF challenge, the one for February 2011.
If you already know the rules, then you're good to go - read on for this month's challenge!
Previous editions:
You can find all of the previous challenges in this journal. Please keep in mind that the challenge rules changed after the 26th edition!

Now we can go on with the last challenge's results, and then I will introduce this month's challenge to you all.
Here is the

so. bokeh. this was a tough nut to crack. >.<

I knew what I wanted to do -- get some dots going, blur the edges a little, scatter them about, layer them up, colour them all pretty-like, profit -- but this proved much easier said than done.

for one, /blur the edges a little/ is apparently like asking for blood from a stone. UF5 suppo-o-osedly has a number of convolution filters(*) available, Gaussian Blur being one of them, but I could find no way to make them work. I'll try to post a journal in the next day or two chronicling that; it's entirely likely the frustration is my fault and not a shortcoming in the program.

I /did/ find a way to 'soften edges' but as it was a colouring algorithm and not a mapping, it vanished the second I applied a mapping over it. I'll mention that in my journal, too -- it's a neat effect I was unaware of before this challenge.

then there was the issue of the dots. 'Dots' in mt.uxf was entirely too regular for me. what I ended up finding, instead, was 'Spots' in dmj.uxf which was deliciously scattered and much closer to bokeh to my eyes.

I'd considered trying to fake some depth-of-field and including something in-focus to contrast the bokeh against, but after wrestling two days straight with this, I'm gonna leave it as-is and call this a partial success.

*flop*

params are here: sta.sh/02ar9q0xhv3s

*: Convolution filters are things like Gaussian Blur and Sharpen (in Photoshop terms). I didn't know there was an umbrella term for these things. (insert The More You Know rainbow here)