There's quite a lot of new stuff to announce - if you don't feel like reading all this, just scroll down for screenshot links :)
"Tile Clones" dialog improvements:
- The new Color tab allows you to change, randomize, or alternate the hue, saturation, and lightness of the tile color per row or per column. You can also set the initial color of the tiles to which these alterations will apply. Changing color works only if the clones' original (or some parts of it, if the original is a group) has unset fill or stroke (use the Fill&Stroke dialog to unset paint).
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.42-CVS-tiles-color.png Note the new HSL color sliders (replacing the old HSV).
- The new Tracing tab allows you to trace the drawing under the tiling. You can set it to pick color, opacity, or any or the RGB or HLS channels in the area covered by each tile; then optionally randomize, invert, or gamma-correct the picked value; and finally apply that value to the tile's probability of presence, size, color, or opacity (or any combinations of these). This makes it possible to do an infinite amount of effects on drawings (both vector drawings and imported bitmaps), such as tesselated mosaics, "impressionist paint", geometric grids, color separation lattices, and more. You can also easily control the extent and the density of your tiling by preparing a temporary shape and tracing opacity-to-presence over it, or you can "paint over" a stroke with a pattern or randomized scattering.
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.42-CVS-trace-color.png
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.42-CVS-trace-objects.png If the original tile is a group, you can unset paint on some objects on the group while others (e.g. highlights or shadows) will retain their original colors, unaffected by trace coloring.
- The new Unclump button attempts to reduce local unevenness in distribution of the tiles. When you unclump a tiling, each tile tries to move to a point equidistant from its closest neighbors. If a single unclumping is not enough, you can press Unclump repeatedly, trying to achieve a balance between eliminating small-scale clumps and preserving large-scale features of the tiling. Unclumping works equally well on both randomized and regular tilings, changing them both into a characteristic texture which appears random, but not blindly random - very similar to what a human would produce if asked to evenly fill a space with random dots. As a result, properly unclumped dot tilings remind of hand-made engravings.
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.42-CVS-tiles-unclump.png Notice how the contrast and detailedness of the dot pattern improve as you apply unclumping repeatedly (top right) - even though unclumping is unaware of the background image that was traced by the tiling, it seems to bring out more image details that were "hidden" in the random scattering. You can also apply unclumping to regular tilings, converting them from "newspaper print" to "old engraving" (bottom right).
- On all tabs, controls have been rearranged into a table-like layout for more convenient access. Separate controls are added for alternating values per row or per column, as well as for randomizing each value separately (e.g. now you can randomize only the horizontal shifts but not vertical).
- The new Exponent values on the Shift tab allow you to make rows or columns to exponentially converge (for values less than 1) or diverge (for values greater than 1). The default of 1 creates rows and columns spaced evenly.
- The upper limits for scales and shifts are increased (from 100% to 1000% of tile size), and the precision of the input fields is higher.
- There's a mini-statusbar at the bottom of dialog which shows the number of tiled clones of the selected object.