Category: General

Flickr HDR:

The image is woefully over-compressed, with halos merging into random splodges. It is not unlike a large number of images posted on Flickr. It exhibits what some call the ‘HDR look’, and which I call a horrible set of unnecessary artifacts. It is highly unnatural and highlights the dangers of using Photomatix unless you know what you are doing. Please understand that HDR is not a style that you can either like or dislike. High dynamic range imaging has nothing to do with artistic freedom. What you see here is an artifact of the software that you choose to use, in combination with the parameters you choose to abuse.

I really enjoy a lot of pictures that have the “HDR look” he’s talking about.  But when I make them myself, I enjoy them less because I know the procedure to get that look using my software of choice (QTPFSGui) and it tends to come out looking the same, picture after picture.  (QTPFSGui is extremely versatile; it actually allows you to use Rinehard’s preferred techniques instead of the traditionally “HDR-y” looking ones.  Two of Rinehard’s algorithms are available in the latest versions of it.)

Lately I’ve been using exposure fusion instead of doing HDR strictly speaking, because it is more naturalistic, while still kind of interesting.

Reading Rinehard’s piece makes me want to do two things:

• use his algorithms to make naturalistic cool HDRs he’d approve of
• use the other algorithms to make wack artificial HDRs he’d hate

In approximately equal measures.

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

—John Cole, on seeing Republican thought processes articulated by Non-Joe the Non-Plumber, Michelle Malkin, and right-wing blogger Instapundit.

I’m really happy for my kids, who’ve lived their whole lives in these dark years. We can stop cursing the darkness — we’ve lit a candle; let’s pass the flame around and light the place up.

There’re folks out there, see, who talk about the competent people and the incompetent people, with the intimation that they are amongst the former, and that they can help guide you to be one too so that you, like them, can enjoy your competence and laugh at the incompetents. Often they claim to represent the few true heirs of the Good Old Days, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

There are a lot of them in programming. The most well known, to me, is Paul Graham, a Lisp hacker who happened to sell his company to Yahoo in the middle of the first Net bubble and make millions of dollars. There is (well, was — it disappeared but appears to be cached for the moment, right here –) a wonderful parody blog, supposedly written by a dedicated Paul Graham fan, called “Lisp at Light Speed!” which illustrates the dynamic created by this kind of thing. The author of Lisp At Light Speed is absolutely convinced of the superiority of Lisp and the genius of Graham, and says the stupidest damn things ever (but many of them are only obviously stupid if you know a bit of Lisp — I know just enough to get some of the jokes).

Anyway, I just discovered one of these people outside of programming: John Kricfalusi.

In an interview conducted years ago with Tasha Robinson of the Onion, we learned that he considered himself and Ralph Bashki to be basically the only “professonal” animators working today — the heirs of a tradition of professional animation from the early to mid twentieth century. He considers basically every other animator to be ripping him off, badly. (I suppose they are ripping him off in a way — via Ren and Stimpy, he is singlehandedly responsible for the fact that children’s cartoons today consider detailed depictions of boogers to be actual comedy. Thanks, John K. Thanks a lot.)

I recently discovered he has a blog called John K Stuff, where he will teach you how to be awesome and professional like him, via secret techniques such as the “ball and tube” construction methods which you will find in every single how-to-draw comics and cartoons book ever made, of which there are about eighty thousand in my local Barnes & Noble alone. Oh, and drawing characters with big eyes, because they are more “appealing.” I kid you not, those are his secret techniques.

Encouraging you to learn how to copy images by older animators via shape construction, he says:

This won’t be easy at first, but the more you do it, the sooner it will all make sense and you will start to gain skill and confidence.

Then you can crap on the folks who refuse to learn anything traditionally and still can’t draw anything remotely professional or appealing. They will be so jealous of you. And you’ll get the better job.

That’s what it’s all about! He puts it so bluntly. But that is the attraction it offers. A secret path to greatness.

I hate this because I am a total sucker for it. I could easily be Bruce, the Lisp at Light Speed! author, or one of the eager young space cadets in the comments section of the John K Stuff blog, thanking him for dropping his nuggets of big-eyed, ball-and-tube-constructed wisdom on us all. In fact, I am indeed currently getting suckered by John K Stuff, I’m all ready to try some drawings taking his advice on Good Construction and Appealing Characters.

I hate it, I say again, because I’m a total sucker for it.

Why can’t I have the independence to believe in what I’m doing, and my ability to do it? Why do I have to look for gurus to give me the secrets?

In the comments to this blog post by Sten K Anderson, which addresses this phenomenon from another perspective (with respect to Joel Spolsky, who’s another Paul Grahamy type), a commenter named Chris Williams says:

“You will look back at what you’ve written in ten years and laugh at your naivety. Stop worrying so much about what other people might think, they’re all faking it anyway – even your ‘heroes’. Also, check your spelling.”

That might be the best guru advice you can possibly get.

There’s now a nice, interactive graphical interface for the “enfuse” exposure fusion tool. It’s called ImageFuser.

Exposure fusion has similar effects to creating an HDR image and tonemapping it, but it works directly from the series of normal images and creates another normal image — there’s no actual HDR image created at any point. Also the final image is created entirely using pixels from the original image series, so the effect is naturalistic — none of the surreal colors or funky halos that you get in some of the more exotic HDR jobs.

It’s got a built-in automagical image alignment tool too, so if your shots are slightly off it can shuffle them together for you.

I grabbed a stack of nine images I’d taken of the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis back in August… I used three of them, I think, 3 stops apart, to create this beastie via exposure fusion. I’d done an HDR of it before, and that was pretty sweet, but this is much more naturalistic looking.

While I’m at it, here’s a more recent, winter scene, of a snowy parking lot. This was 7 shots, 2 stops apart.

(apparently I happened to catch the Death Star in this shot, accidentally)

Anyway, ImageFuser kicks butt. The only thing I’d add to it would be a means of aligning the images by hand, for those occasions where the automatic alignment fails to do its thing right.