ggboy

ggboy simulates the retro aesthetic of low resolution ordered image dithering cameras.

This project is for fun. It creates outputs solely based on artistic merits (what looks good to my eye) My attempt at implementing ordered dithering is not precise. This project is not an exact technical replication of anything

ggboy is built upon the ggplot2 and magick R packages for plotting and image processing.

• Images are resized and cropped (centrally by default) to have pixel dimensions of width = 128 and height = 112
• A 16 pixel frame border is applied to all sides, meaning the final image will have width = 160 and height = 144
• By default a blank (solid colour) 16 pixel frame is used - but any image can be used to create a frame with image_to_frame() (see examples below)
• Final output images will consist of a maximum of 4 colours
• There are options to set the amount of dithering, resize filters and colour palette used
• There is an experimental function for creating gifs ggboy_gif() (see example below)
• There is also a helper function for saving ggboy outputs at the correct size ggboy_save()

library(ggboy)

• Read an example image

img <- "https://sipi.usc.edu/database/preview/misc/house.png"

• Output using ggboy() default values

ggboy(img)

Modify dithering ‘spread’

• An attempt at controlling the amount of dithering dither_spread
• Set to 0 for no dithering (default = 0.25)

purrr::walk(
  .x = c(0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3), 
  .f = ~print(ggboy(img, dither_spread = .x)))

Modify colour palette

• Change colour palette with the palette argument
• Specify any 4 colour palette ordered from dark to light (or light to dark to invert the image)

purrr::walk(
  .x = list(
    c("#000000", "#4D4D4D", "#999999", "#E6E6E6"),
    c("#000000", "#4D4D4D", "#999999", "#E6E6E6") |> rev(),
    c("#405010", "#708028", "#A0A840", "#D0D058"),
    c("#0D0887", "#9C179E", "#ED7953", "#F0F921")),
  .f = ~print(ggboy(img, palette = .x)))

Extension frames

• You can extend ggboy by using any image as a frame with the image_to_frame() function (or by creating the frame data yourself)
• If the chosen image is not already the correct dimensions (160 pixels wide x 144 pixels high), image_to_frame() will scale and crop the image first
  • The outer 16 pixels of the provided image can then be used as the frame by passing the output to the frame_data argument of ggboy()
  • No dithering is applied to the frame image
• Below are some examples using images as frames

ggboy(
  img = img,
  frame_data = image_to_frame("https://i.imgur.com/lq58kIb.png"))

ggboy(
  img = img,
  frame_data = image_to_frame("https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Game_Boy_Camera.png"))

ggboy(
  img = img,
  frame_data = image_to_frame("https://channard.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/gb-camera-rahmen-16.jpg"))

ggboy(
  img = img,
  frame_data = image_to_frame("https://i.imgur.com/SxTRr.jpg"))

Manual frame text

• Below is an example of using the {magick} package to create a frame with user-defined text

library(magick)
ggboy(
  img,
  frame_data = 
    image_to_frame(
      image_read(matrix(rep("black", 160*144), ncol = 160)) |>
        image_annotate("Your text here", "north", color = "white", size = 15, weight = 700) |>
        image_annotate("...AND HERE!", "south", color = "white", size = 13, style = "italic", location = "+0+1")))

Animated GIFs

• There is an experimental, slow and janky attempt at creating animated gifs with the ggboy_gif() function

ggboy_gif(
  gif = "https://media.tenor.com/l4PitD9s0cEAAAAM/mind-blown.gif", 
  scale = 2,
  first_n = 50,
  fps = 10,
  frame_data = image_to_frame("https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Game_Boy_Camera.png"))