Dr.Oste

Images can be manipulated in quite the variety of ways. Ranging from basic color editing, to different effects or complete transformations, it’s only up to you and the type of application you use for the task. In this regard, Dr.Oste comes with the means to apply the cool Droste effect to any of your pictures.

Once installed, the application can be launched, so think of a few pictures to experiment on. The Droste effect is the recursive rotation and spiral of an image within itself. Apart from simply applying this effect, the application also gives you a bit of control over the operation, in an effortless process of dragging a few sliders around.

The visual design is clean, letting individuals of all levels of experience get the hang of things in a jiffy. Most of the space is the interactive preview area, with an additional side panel where all parameters are configured. Unfortunately, you can’t drag a picture over the main window to get it ready, but the browse dialog isn’t that difficult to use anyway.

You’re able to work on various image files of formats like BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, PBM, PGM, PPM, TIFF, XBM, and XPM. After loading is done, you might notice that none of the sliders, direction, or zoom controls work. This is because the Droste effect first needs to be applied, so you get a better real time view of changes.

It takes about a second for the effect to be applied, and this is simply done by selecting a custom region on the picture to start from. When done, there’s the possibility to move the center, zoom in or out, set number of spirals, or change the intensity of several spiral related settings. You can apply reflection on one, or both axis.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Dr.Oste is a straightforward image editing application with which to apply the Droste effect to any of your pictures. The algorithm cleverly blends the image with multiple iterations of itself in a continuous spiral you can customize, and preview in real time.