Photo Blend

[Oscar]

This is split from the previous topic, and it is about upcoming Photo Blend software.

...on a good note during my sickness I managed to cook up a new software, sort of fever inspired photo mash-up one that I call Photo Blend. I did it the trusty Remote Desktop way, laying in my bed with a laptop, but working in fact on my new i7 in office. It worked perfect.
The new software uses a very novel way of blending objects from one photo with other photos (a high frequency (details) are blended different way than low frequency (gradients)). I told you it was fever inspired.
The very interesting thing is that it automatically matches the colors of objects from various photos, you simply paint an imprecise mask over an object (like a person) and that objects will appear on the other photo, blended with the same matching colors and without obvious edges. Another novel thing is that the mask is indefinitely tied with the object, so you can at any time adjust it. There are other things like clones, Knock-Out masks etc....

[anecessaryevil]

You, Oscar, are a bad bad man.
I already own too many of your programs. And now you come up with another.
Sigh...

[Oscar]

We will see about that It could be easily a "what the heck?" moment.

I certainly think there is something in the Photo Blend, it gives you lot of slack in terms of colors of the images and the mask you use to isolate the images.
I am going to introduce this tool a little here, it will also help me to sort of wrap my mind around it by trying to explain its strength.

Here is a little example, no artistic intend, I just grabbed few pics from my test images to put something together.

Here are three pics, they are all different cameras (Out of curiosity: the palms are Canon S10 from 1999, the horse is D200 and the St. Michel monastery is Canon sd900) and all different colors and practically different everything.

michel1a.jpg (80.88 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

With various tools (that Photo Blend has); like painting, color selection, magic wand or curve drawing I got to make those masks:

michel1b.jpg (78.7 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

Now if I would combine those in Photoshop or other, I will get this:

michel1.jpg (179.88 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

This is very obvious Paste job, nothing fits together.

The same exact files and mask merged in my Photo Blend without doing anything else:

michel2.jpg (204.49 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

It automatically adjust the objects colors to the background (in this case the 1999 Canon S10 image) and also gives you a lot of slack with a bad mask job.

[Oscar]

The interface is sort of two sided. There is the composition mode (left panel) and the source mode (right panel).

In the "composition" mode the the editing is more of an vector package, you move things around, resize them, rotate and change some params, all are non-destructive:

pbinterface1.jpg (188.72 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

If you double click on any object you get to the "source" mode where you can adjust the mask, draw/erase etc. This editing type is of a photo package (drawing, erasing, using magic wand, color selection etc...)

pbinterface2.jpg (202.32 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

[Oscar]

Here is the same horse against a different backdrop to illustrate how Photo Blend "fixes" imprecise mask job.

The top shows the detail in normal mode (photoshop) and this is far too familiar look of bad masking job on thin hair.
The bottom is the exact mask with PhotoBlend without doing anything else. It certainly forgive a lot of things. The hair is now fully isolated from its original background in a sort of magical way.

horsey.jpg (460.21 KiB) Viewed 15714 times

The first idea and also why I describe this in DAP forum is that this could be an ideal tool to create composition for original DAP images without messing too much with masks, selections and color corrections in photoshop.

[Oscar]

Here I exchanged the backdrop and this sample also show another cool thing called Knock Out mask. Every object can have an knock out mask which interacts with backdrop and allows us to simply put the object behind any object that is on the backdrop itself - like the buss - without changing the object mask - so we can actually move the monastery around and it will still be behind the bus, even though the bus is on the backdrop.

horsey2.jpg (231.56 KiB) Viewed 15712 times

I hope it does explain why I think there is something novel about the Photo Blend.
There are tons of other usage, for example very simple way of exchanging faces, even with backdrop being a painting and a normal photograph.

[Rachel]

I have a ton of photos that I don't use in Dap to create new artistic images for one reason or another. This new tool may allow me to modify those images in unique or classical ways so they are more suitable for using in creating art. I look forward, along with everyone, to trying out the newest tool in our arsenal.

[Rocambole]

Except for the horse's lack of shadow everything looks realistic and I can hardly wait to buy PhotoBlend!

[mhwarner]

Fantastic Oscar!

Any idea when it might be available (at least for beta testing) and what sort of price range you will be charging for the product? Definitely something I'd be interested in.

[anecessaryevil]

One of my first thoughts when you revealed this, Oscar, was that it would make a great beginning for some very creative DAP work.
So I had to try your image.

horsey2_DAP_Book.jpg (241.87 KiB) Viewed 15745 times

I tweaked the horse shadow after the fact but I think it should have been done pre-dap and possibly pre-blend.