trying to uniformly "scatter" pixels

[Benjamin_Rosen@adobeforums.com]

I need to uniformaly scatter pixels from a defined shape. More specifically, I have letters (the word "scattered" fyi) which I need to, letter by letter, scatter more and more. I went through filters, but came up empty handed. Did I miss something?

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

Try Illustrator and make a scatter brush or symbol then bring that back into Photoshop if necessary. It's a piece of cake in AI CS or 10.

[JasonSmith@adobeforums.com]

....or.

Convert your type to a path. with your brush tool, select one of the scatter brushes, and set the spacing to 68% or so - you should get a pretty good idea in the brushes palette preview.

Then in the paths palette, click on the contextual menu on the right, go to stroke>path with airbrush selected.

If this feature request </cgi-bin/webx?13@@.2ccfcd31/1> were a reality, you could do it with a layer style and edit as needed...

[Benjamin_Rosen@adobeforums.com]

thanks!

but to clarify a bit... I need each letter to successively "scatter" to greater extents. And I don't mean within a clearly defined path; I mean, the pixels must expand further and further away from the letter source, so that by the final leter, it is a large "cloud" of pixels.

[jonf@adobeforums.com]

I'd manually increase the size of each letter before applying the brushstrokes. Also, Brush Stroke>Spatter filter can be used to some effect, depending on the size of the characters. But this is tough to get the exact look. I had to do this on a project once and eventually I gave up and just faked most of it. I'd love to learn of an easy filter effect to accomplish it.

[JasonSmith@adobeforums.com]

I dont think you'll find any one filter to do this - it sounds like you could mix what has been suggested, along with some masking to get the gradual fade you're looking for.

[Benjamin_Rosen@adobeforums.com]

Figured it out...displacement maps...the mezzo one... ahhh

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

I misunderstood entirely. Sorry!

[Todie@adobeforums.com]

Try progressive amounts of blur on layers set to "dissolve" also.

[jonf@adobeforums.com]

Todie's method is good, but is there a way to changed the size of the pixels? That was the limitation I ran into when I needed to do this.

I did not know about the displacement map. Very cool. The broken edges aren't quite "pixels" like I wanted, but I can fix this by using the pixelate>mosaic filter, and deleting the middle values. Beautiful. I wish I'd found this a year and a half ago!

[Toby_Thain@adobeforums.com]

Can we see a pic of the results? I'm curious :-)

[jonf@adobeforums.com]

Try this link to the test file I was working on.

<http://www.hotaccent.com/scatter.jpg>

Some of the middle values went back into it when I knocked it back down to 72 ppi, but you get the idea.

[edit: for some reason you seem to get a "do not have permission" error when clicking the link. I don't have time to figure this out right now. If you go to the home page <http://www.hotaccent.com>, then add /scatter.jpg to the URL, it should show the file.]

[Todie@adobeforums.com]

I guess you got it by now : )
(lower the resolution to control the pixel size)

[jonf@adobeforums.com]

I used the displacement filter + pixelate method for the one posted. But your way works great. In my original project the scattering text was on an illustration that included photographic elements as well, so it didn't occur to me to just lower the dpi to get the effect I wanted. But now I realize I could just flatten the text in it's own file and paste it into the final 300 dpi PS image. Duh. Live and learn.