Posts Tagged ‘Photoshop’
Amateur Photo Displays a Full Day’s Worth of Celestial Splendor
Photographer shoots and assembles an entire day of skies
With his DSLR camera on a tripod, Kotsiopoulos snapped a photo every 15 minutes while the sun was in the sky. An astrosolar filter softened the sun’s glow, but he removed it for a more dramatic image when the sun was near its highest point. For the night image, he took 500 consecutive 90-second exposures. To make the little planet, Kotsiopoulos took 25 horizon shots during a 360-degree pan of the landscape. He stitched the image together using Photoshop, Startrails and PTGui image software, but Kotsiopoulos relied on some low-tech help, too: An alarm clock kept him awake for the nighttime part of the shoot.
New Software Uses Probability Algorithm to Assemble Jigsaw Puzzles at Record Speed
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has set a new world record for a jigsaw-puzzle-solving computer algorithm. The software solved a 400-piece puzzle in three minutes,
The software can handle any image, even photographs of outdoor scenes. The previous record was 320 pieces, set by a Danish team in 2008, but that software could only solve simple puzzles with clear shapes and limited colors.
The new software is adept at finding image pieces that blend well, so its inventor, MIT grad student hopes it could improve photo-editing programs like Photoshop. It could make Photoshopped images look more realistic, for instance.
To train the software, Cho and his colleagues chopped 5-megabyte pictures into 400 squares. The computer analyzed the predominant colors and referenced a database of existing images to roughly arrange the pieces. It uses the same common-sense approach a person would -- lots of blue pieces could indicate sky, for instance, and a mixture of blue, gray and green could indicate a landscape with sky, buildings and grass.
From there, the computer's work gets more complex. It examines the pixel color values along the boundaries of each piece, and uses a probabilistic approach to find similar values on pieces that look alike, stitching the images back together.
It's much harder to do this with squares than with traditional jigsaw pieces, but as Cho and his colleagues write in a paper about the findings, that's a good thing.
"This is a good framework for analyzing structural regularities in natural images since it requires us to focus on the image content to solve the puzzle,"
Cho and his team will present their work at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in San Francisco next month.
Video: Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill is Magical
Don't like that tree there? Just circle it, and Photoshop does the rest. Gone.
The tool can also do instant-fixes where users manually erase image artifacts or clean up areas in photos, such as removing divots from grass. Bryan O'Neil Hughes, a Photoshop project manager, narrates a demo that walks would-be users through cleaning up several images:
A lens flare covering two different objects -- such as part of a woman's dress and a bench -- proves no problem for the content-aware fill feature. Just circling the area and hitting the delete key prompts Photoshop to fill in each area with the appropriate color and texture, matching the surroundings perfectly.
Even those ugly-edge panorama images stitched together from different photos can become one smooth rectangular image. Content-aware fill's algorithms fill out the formerly nonexistent part of the panorama photo with the appropriate ground, sky and cloud patterns. Perhaps our inner dying artiste might feebly protest this assault on image authenticity, but our inner Photochopper has already begun salivating like Pavlov's dogs.