The silver halide film grain has an unique look that introduces some texture in smooth image areas, where digital imagery may look synthetic and too clean. Emulating this effect in digital photography cannot be done by simply adding gaussian or poissonian noise to the image, since silver halide grain has varying shapes and sizes. There are two techniques to do it : overlaying an image of natural grain sampled on scanned negatives, on top of the digital image (typically using soft-light or hard-light blend modes ), synthesizing grain from an a-priori model and the image content. Lire la suite →
The core basics of design are to know for whom you design, that is who are the users of your solution, what they expect and what they need. It is also necessary to assess if the actual user of your product is the one you designed it for in the first place, that is, who is missing from your user base, to avoid the survivor bias .
This is unfortunately overlooked in FLOSS and it is often not well regarded to collect user data. Lire la suite →
In image processing, retouchers may want to apply a saturation boost on specific hues only. Typically, uniform saturation corrections follow a basic linear transfer function $sat_{out} = gain \cdot sat_{in}$, where $gain$ is a real positive constant. To target specific hues, we simply rewrite $sat_{out}(hue) = gain(hue) \cdot sat_{in}$ where $gain$ is then a function. The most common way to declare $gain$ is to provide users with 8 discrete saturation nodes for 8 evenly-spaced hues, and interpolate smoothly between nodes. Lire la suite →
The saturation control of pretty much all image processing software is an unfortunate misnomer, to say the least. It actually controls either the chroma in Ych-like spaces (computed from CIE Yxy 1931, Yuv or YCbCr spaces), or some remote idea of saturation as used by HSL spaces, which are essentially a polar rewriting of RGB coordinates (usually expressed in sRGB space).
The “saturation” as defined by the HSL space has been proven times and times again to hold no perceptual meaning and finds its origin into the first GUI of limited computers doing integer arithmetic. Lire la suite →
I’m a responsible web designer, and as such, since WordPress (finally) accepts media uploads of image/webp MIME type and since all web browsers newer than september 2020 (even Apple Safari \o/) can display it, I have been moving my photos library to WebP . After all, when you create content, the least you can do is to also provide the smoothest user experience around it.
WebP falls close to magical: lookie those file weights ! Lire la suite →
This page is inspired by the Munsell book of color. It aims at showing the sRGB gamut volume (all the visible colors that can be encoded as sRGB triplets), projected into a perceptually uniform lightness/chroma space (using JzAzBz color space1), and sliced across hue planes. The sRGB space is the lowest common denominator of all general-audience screens, and is deemed fit to choose colors for GUI, logos and drawings that should sit correctly on any display. Lire la suite →
The Laplacian operator $\Delta u$ is the divergence of the gradient, that is the sum of the second-order partial derivatives $\nabla^2 u$ of a multivariate function, which represents the local curvature of this function. This operator is widely used for edge-detection1, as well as in partial-differential equations (Poisson, etc.), and other problems of machine-learning minimisation. For numerical applications in orthogonal graphs, sampled only at integer coordinates (like pixels in an image), a discrete Laplacian has to be used, and several approaches are available, that will be detailed hereafter. Lire la suite →
Following my work on the filmic tonemapping, several users have reported issues with very saturated blue areas (stage spotlights, bright skies) and red areas. The grail of image processing is being able to affect colors and brightness independantly. The big conundrum of tonemapping is raising luminance without affecting perceptual colors, and, by color, we mean hue and saturation/chroma. The problem is, once you lifted the luminance, you need to correct the saturation too, because it will look oversaturated. Lire la suite →
Darktable is an open-source software for raw photographs management and processing developped since 2009 for Linux desktops. Since then, it has been ported on Mac OS and Windows 7, 8, 10. After having used it for 7 years, I begun to develop in it 3 months ago. This article shows my work and results to improve the HDR-scenes handling in darktable, in a fashion that allows better color preservation for portrait photography. Lire la suite →
