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Looking for a way to do this- any ideas?


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rumisongSep 18, 2007 4:46pm
I would love your help on this ...



Im thinking there must be a program that can take an irregular shape, and create a proportionately representative shape that keeps the square dimensions of the original shape ... in other words the main island of Great Britain here would still be a proportionate 88,782 square miles - but it would be squared off into a representative rectangular block, given the average width and length of the actual land mass ...

Im wondering if there might even be something in photoshop, or another graphics program for just this sort of thing? ...

on my own, I would have no idea where to start with getting the average width and length of the shape ... I would love to be able to add in shapes too, like to have a "block" that would include Northern Ireland and Ireland as well, once they were added in ...

Also, can anyone tell me what this sort of operation is called? - there would be a mathematical term for it, right? something from geometry, yes?

thanks for any thoughts you may have here ...

seriousputtyOct 16, 2007 9:51pm
Hmmmm.. if I wanted to do this, I'd probably just write a Python script, but if you want to do it with Photoshop, then you'd need some way of getting the area of that region. A simple way is to count the pixels in it.


I don't know if this will work, but try filling the island all one colour, then viewing the image's histogram. The histogram is a graph of how many pixels of each colour there are, and if the graph has a scale, you should be able to read the count off of it.

If it doesn't have a scale, you could try guessing how big the rectangle would be, drawing that rectangle in a different colour, and then viewing the histogram which should show you a comparison of the number of island pixels to the number of rectangle pixels. Then adjust till you get it dead on.

That's all I can think of. :)

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rumisongNov 14, 2007 6:12pm
thanks for the thought - Ill check out the histogram angle - that'll give me part of it - but I really didnt want to just "guess" at the proportions of the rectangle - I wanted there to be a mathematical "reason" for those proportions ...

thanks again ...


Looking for a way to do this- any ideas?

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