Portfolio Things

Original ladybug

After loseNBits (7 I think?)               

After messing with colors - this is pretty much what I was going for

Original ferris wheel

Colored! Using negation for one or two color channels a section

Different color arrangement

Map

Today I made a simple map by combining several images. Here's what the final product looks like, so far at least:

And here's the base images I used, for comparison:

I resized all of the images because I didn't feel like dealing with size differences in JES. To make the background, I blended the last two images together. The land was made by replacing pixels with a low enough intensity with pixels from the grass texture, then rotating it. I added the background to the land by replacing pixels with a high enough intensity with the background pixels and pixels with a slightly lower intensity with lightened background pixels (the lighter blue edge around the island is intentional). I think I might add a compass rose or something to this later, since it looks a little plain right now.

Response to "What Colour are your bits?"

I think the author made an interesting analogy about bits and Colour. Colour is an intangible property that only exists in the minds of people who care about it, such as lawyers. In the computer science world, Colour simply cannot exist. If two files are exactly the same, there is no way to trace the Colour of where it came from or if it is legal.

What I got from the article is that the main reasons Colour, or rather the lack of it, is important is because it matters to the law. Lawyers care about where bits come from and whether they were gained legally. Computers and computer scientists realize that this information can't actually exist, and it can't really be tracked because metadata attached to files can be changed. I think maybe it would be better for lawyers to focus only on the actual illegal transfer of files, rather than the files themselves. When two files contain the same bits, it's just not possible to determine if it came from a legal source.

Also, I haven't finished reading it yet, but Skala posted a follow-up article here if anyone is interested.

Photomosaics

It is difficult to look back on something in retrospect and decide how obvious it was at the time. "Nonobviousness" seems like a far too subjective and difficult to determine way to decide whether something should be patentable. What seems like an original, genius idea to one person may be glaringly obvious to another, or may even have already been previously recognized by others.

I think that photomosaics are not nearly nonobvious enough to be patent-worthy. Regular tile mosaics have been around for a long time, and I'm sure people have made mosaics with patterned or textured tiles rather than a single color. It seems like it would be a pretty easy leap from that to making mosaics out of pictures, and then to making software to automate the process. In addition, the concept had already been used by Joseph Francis several years before Robert Silvers patented it. So even if it had been nonobvious before it had ever been used before, Silvers could have seen photomosaics and then written his own software.

I'll freely admit I don't know very much about patents and copyright, but I think it would have been better for Silvers to copyright his particular program rather than patenting the idea of a photomosaic.

Project Plan

For my project, I want to combine several images to create a new scene. I think I want to take a fairly empty landscape to use as the background and add mountains, a castle, dead trees, and a stormy red sky to create a spooky night scene. To accomplish this, I would have to either find a way to remove the background from the pictures of the castle and trees in JES or in Photoshop, and then combine elements of each image and use image filters to make them look better together and fit the mood more. 

The background image I would use would provide a backdrop for the more important elements of the image I would make. I don’t think that very much of it would be visible in the final product, probably just some of the grass. I would alter this image to be much darker and probably a bit desaturated. 

For the castle, I would first get rid of some of the edges by cropping it. Then I could either try to use JES or Photoshop to greenscreen the background, so I could place the castle in grassy background image. I’m going to try to use JES to greenscreen it first, because the sky is fairly distinct from the rest of the image. One thing I could try instead of greenscreening would be to blend pixels that are close enough to the sky color, so that the picture might fit into the background better. This would probably get the windows and some of the trim on the castle too, but that would be okay because it would just make them darker and I’ll want to do that to this image anyway. The green shouldn’t be too hard to remove, since it is fairly different from everything I would want to keep. The castle would go on the right side of the background picture, roughly in the middle vertically. 

The mountains would go on the left of the background picture, with the right edge of the mountains hidden by the castle. I would crop this image so that it would stop at a little lower than the tops of the shortest trees. The trees would get desaturated and darkened, and blended into the background. The sky would be greenscreened. I think I would probably make the mountains a lot darker so that it looks like they are farther off in the distance and more part of the background than a major focus.

 

Originally I also wanted to include an erupting volcano, just because I liked the idea of trying to blend it with the mountains in a way that would look decent. Now I think it wouldn’t really look very good with what I’m trying to do, or it would look like it was just added randomly. If I did use it, I would scale it so that the volcano part could overlap and cover a mountain peak. For the sky, I would probably try to blend it at the edges and hope that it would be close enough to the look of sky I want that the edges won’t stand out. 

For the sky, I don’t really think I would need to edit it very much. Since it would be behind the mountains and castle, I could probably just crop out the parts with the trees and drop it in to replace the sky of the background. 

I would probably use at least one dead tree to add atmosphere and cover up places where the images don’t blend well. The main thing I would need to do for the trees would be to cut out the background with greenscreening. At least for this image, it would probably be difficult to do with JES. If I wanted to use this image for more than one tree, I could use mirroring and scaling to make it look less repetitive.

Project Idea!

I think what I want to do for my project is to combine several images and edit them to create a scene. Here's some of the images I'm thinking about using right now:

Basically, what I would try to achieve is to create a scene with a castle in front of mountains and an erupting volcano, under a stormy reddish sky. It will be dark enough that imperfections in putting the images together shouldn't be too noticeable. I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to take what I need out of each picture or change it so it fits. For the castle, for instance, the sky is light enough and different enough from the rest of the picture that I should be able to use an if statement to exclude it. The green grass and bushes can be changed to a dark grey to fit into the background. 

Oh, and here's something I made in lab yesterday that I thought looked kinda cool:

Response to Carr

Nicholas Carr raises an interesting point about the future of book publishing. Digital media is extremely easy to change in relation to printed material in that it is much faster and cheaper. However, I don't really think there is much potential benefit from this in comparison with the potential harm. In addition, the ebook is not a great leap from accessing content on the internet, with the major difference being that it is more easily downloadable. 

The major difference from printed books is that changes can be made quickly and frequently. It seems like readers would be irritated with frequently updating books because it can be a notable time investment to read a book and then find out it would have a major update the next week. For nonfiction books, it is important to fix incorrect information. However, it is possible that the ability to quickly and easily fix these errors would lead to the authors being sloppy in the first place. Information that is subject to change at any time with new research would probably be better suited to being on a website for reference rather than in a book.

Monday, Week 2

I messed around with a few more filters, but didn't really accomplish much. I made one that reduces an image to just black and white areas depending on the intensity of the pixels and one that also includes several shades of grey. It looks like this could be useful for a posterization effect. I also started looking around for images to use for the project. I think what I'm going to do for it will depend on if I can get edge detection to work or not. 

Black and white

With grey

Week 1

Last week and a bit over the weekend, I experimented with writing some of my own image filters. The first one I tried was desaturation, which worked pretty well. It worked by checking which RGB value was highest and decreasing the other two. I modified it to produce saturation and greyscale filters as well.  The saturation filter I altered so that it would take input of the picture and a multiplier, which meant it was more versatile because I could use negative numbers to get desaturation.

Desaturation

Saturation

Greyscale

I also experimented with a few other effects, including negation. I also tried increasing contrast, but it looked kinda weird. So far it's been pretty fun messing around with trying to get things to work. One thing I want to try is edge detection. I haven't really decided what I want to do for the project yet.

Increased Contrast

Negation