Digital darkroom is a digital attempt to achieve optical effects and beyond. Some early work was done at the Bell Lab. (Where else?) (G.J. Holzmann, Beyond Photography - The Digital Darkroom, Prentice Hall, 1988. This book is also remarkable that one may find the faces of Unix gurus in various forms of transformation. )
The technique is sinfully simple. One has two bit maps: the source one is usually a digitized version of an analog photograph; the destination one is yet to be found by some transformation applied to the source one. The job is to find the transformation that will do the digital simulation of optical lenses - in the darkroom or on the field.
Some of the results are shown here. The mapping does have its own version of pit-falls. One of them is the over magnification of a single pixel. It happens when an area of the destination bit map happens to take its color values from one pixel of the source map. (Or a few close by pixels from the source map.) The effect may be seen here in the fish eye example. A 32-bit color hardware could minimize the distraction. This distraction is not without its particular charm in that one expects a digital picture to have such outlook and it seems to further validate loudly that 'This is digital!'
Those filters seen here are taken from the above mentioned book. Some filters developed at Villanova include a funny mirrow effect that simulates the ones often seen in the carnival activities. This system has been a popular crowd pleaser during Departmental public activities. It was implemented on Sun Sparc 1+ systems.
R
A Clown's Original Picture. His Mirror Image.
The Venetian blind effect. As seen through a Fish's eye.
Just hit by Mike Tyson. Obliterated but still recognizable.
soong@monet.vill.edu Sept 18, 1995.
