Contour Lines

Contour Lines draws every picture as the contour lines of its own brightness, like a topographic map of the image. Every line is a clean hairline at any distance, and together they trace the forms of the picture.

How it works

A waiting picture shows only a few of its levels, as thin grey lines. When it becomes the active one, a soft wave crosses it: behind the wave the missing levels appear, every line thickens and takes the picture's colour, until the lines meet and close into the solid picture. Leaving runs it back to lines. In Lift mode the cursor raises the contours near it into a soft relief, using the picture's own brightness as height.

Settings

• Levels: how many contour levels cover the brightness range. More gives a fine survey map, fewer gives broad bands.
• Sparse: a waiting picture shows every n-th level.
• Line width: the width of a waiting picture's lines.
• Smoothing: how much the picture is softened before the lines are drawn. Higher gives rounder, calmer contours.
• Lift: the height of the cursor's relief.
• Change time, Wave and Slant: the speed, softness and angle of the change wave.
• Layout, Dim and Depth: where the pictures sit and how the waiting ones fade.

Use it for

Architecture and landscape portfolios, maps, data stories and graphic editorial. A single picture in the same style is the Contour image; the stacked-card version of the idea is Terraces.