July 2009 Archives

You can digitally paint not just in Corel Painter but in Adobe Photoshop as well. Some people do amazing work painting in Photoshop. Here is a very basic video on the mechanics of actually blending from color A to color B using a Wacom tablet.

This is not necessarily the best way to work, and I am far from the best, most skilled painter, but this is how I work. Your feedback and improvements are welcome.

Topics in this clip include smudging, Gaussian blur, Wacom pen-pressure opacity, and color blending, but not color theory or color mixing, or speedpainting / art instruction -- that's beyond the scope of this.

I think that annoying skipping in the video is from the interaction between CS4 and my screencasting software. I need to investigate further.

Pussycat Theatre / Pussycat Cinema, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

A study of the vintage graphics and typography of the now closed Pussycat Cinemas. I used Adobe Illustrator to make vector art. I couldn't find a font for the lettering along the bottom of the illustration. I assume the letter forms were custom designed. They might form the basis for a new display font.

Wouldn't mind having it as a T-shirt, either.

Background article: When Cathouses Ruled California

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I'm working on a virtual 3D version in Maxwell for another entry in my Nothing is Real but the Girl series. I'll derive a Maya / Maxwell model of the sign from the Adobe Illustrator curves in the artwork at the top of this page.

I mulled over some of the conclusions I came to in the previous post about film being binary. I'm mainly just looking for a Photoshop recipe that approximates the idea of the grain using off-the-rack filters.

NOTE:

These are not finished 'recipes' for digital film grain. They are not meant to look good at this stage. They are 'amped up' for the purpose of discussion, and for getting a good, close look.

Stochastic halftones have a nice random distribution of points.

Using the Crystallize filter makes them clump into irregular shards that seem to resemble film grain at some magnifications.

The reticulation filter has a nice organic look. I applied it to middle gray, then hard mixed it with a black and white photo and blurred the results.

The Crystallize filter makes some nice chunky 'silver halide crystals,' but the reticulation filter seems worth a closer look, as well.

The trick is to get the scales and strengths right. For color I'll do each channel separately and combine them RGB additive style or CMY multiplicative / subtractive style. Not sure it matters which.

UPDATE 10/21/2009

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 public beta promises a

• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want

I think film grain is binary. Why do I think that? I learned it here:
Photo Utopia: Clumps and Chumps (or why film isn't binary)

The author meant to have the opposite effect, but after I read his explanation for why film is not binary, I formed a differnt impression.

I have been thinking a lot about film grain recently. I'm interested in mimicking its look in the digital domain.

I don't like the usual 'soft light or overlay some gray-centered noise' approach to making digital film grain, because I feel it doesn't really model what film grain actually is. That technique does not cause edge breakup, for example.

So What Exactly is Going On?

I needed to know if film grain got more or less gray (true analog), larger and smaller (like a traditional halftone, but with jittered cell placement), or denser and sparser (like a stochastic frequency-modulated halftone. In researching my questions I learned that this is apparently a point of some contention.

After mulling it over for a while, I decided I would go with this guy:
Clumps and Chumps or Why Bumble Bees Can't Fly and not just because he knows about bumble bee wing vortex shedding, although that did give me some added confidence :D

So here is how I think it goes, based on what I've read here on teh internets.

I think after development it's little black crystals of reasonably similar size that scatter and overlap. The more light a region gets, the more numerous the crystals become.

I think a negative image (or 3 color separations combined as here) would make a good start. Maybe stochastic halftones would form a good basis. Could the halftone be 'crystallized' using, maybe, the median filter? I wasn't thrilled with the results, but another method for crystallizing the halftone might be good.

I saw a quote on one of the preceding links from a Kodak scientist who flat out said film is analog, but Kodak needs to hold to the line that film is superior to digital, so I don't put that much weight on that statement. (Film is superior to digital in many ways, btw, and what's motivating me in this post is my desire to make digital seem to be more filmic). Plus at the right scale an FM screen will seem analog.

That same link concludes (ironically) with this quote:

So next time some 'expert' spouts off about bumblebees and how grain is binary tell them it's about "the energy of an electron being raised into the conduction band from the valence band"

I say 'ironic' because in quantum mechanics there is no continuous analog scale. Things are quantized. There are only certain bands at certain energy levels. There's the Valence Band. There's the Conduction Band. (And in between there's the Gap Band) That's why it's called Quantum Mechanics.

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In my next post I'm going to propose a recipe for digital grain. No guarantee that it will be the best. Feedback welcome.

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UPDATE 7/15/2009

I got this illustration from the photo.net argument thread. I'm adding in as a partial response to the first comment below about film grain being crystals vs filaments. If I follow it, (at least some) crystals (somehow) look like filaments at the right magnification. I'm including this filament idea mainly because as of my posting of this blog item it was the strongest argument I could find for film being analog. I still think of film grain as being composed of random areas of black or clear crystals.

Comments referring to the "Gurney-Mott development model" (causing the silver speck to grow like a traditional AM halftone?) or "plate disc theory" (not seeing this on Google) are new information for me. Thank you for that. I'll investigate further.

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THE GOAL

I should add that I don't particularly care whether film is one thing or another. My goal is to get an understanding of whatever it is - a mental model - that will help me come up with some sort of recipe for trying to copy it in something like Photoshop. And if it turns out that existing recipes for faking grain are as good as it gets, then so be it. But I want to take a closer look.

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UPDATE

I'm looking at this page (reprinted from an old Kodak source) discussing latent images and the Gurney-Mott Theory, and it looks to be a pretty good explanation.

Here's what I read:

• The dark spots on the negative are metallic silver. They are essentially opaque. This suggests two states: dark and clear.

• The numbers of dark spots on a grain increases with exposure, but the number of grains doesn't increase. This suggests something like an FM screen.

• The dark spots tend to cluster at favored formation points on the grains. This means the dark regions grow with exposure, more like an AM halftone with jittered placement of halftone cells.

So I think after reading this material that we are talking about a 'binary' state black/white process that functions like an analog process (like a newspaper halftone), especially at the scales at which we use it.

If you are willing to call a traditional newspaper halftone an analog process, since those dots can be any size and don't take discreet size change steps, (and I see that traditional halftoning is indeed considered analog) then I guess I have changed my mind.

I still consider film to be akin to a halftone, but over the course of this posting my opinion of halftones has changed. If a black circle can be any size on a white field then I'm comfortable saying that the area of the black circle is an analog function. But is the 'gray' analog? There is no gray. But I guess the perceived gray is analog, continuously variable, too.

Okay. Fine grained film, like coarse newspaper ads, is analog.

Although this guy has taken a patent out on the notion of space-filling curves (like the filaments in the photo at the top of this blog?) as a form of digital, not analog halftone. If the coils can be arbitrarily dense then shouldn't his process be considered a form of analog halftone?

...Now how best to simulate artificial 'film' grain in a digitally-originated image?

Crackle Pattern 04, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

I've started a flickr set dedicated to various crackle paint textures.

The one pictured is Golden brand Gel Mediums Crackle Paste over Golden brand Black Gesso over an Ampersand Hardbord.

I used the side with the faintly printed logo thinking you'd never see it. Somehow the ink from the logo leeched up through the gesso and crackle paste to the point where it was clearly legible. I guess I should have also sealed the Hardboard with a primer, as the manufacturer advises. (Or just use the pristine side, although I had planned to be frugal and use both sides of every $5 board I bought.)

I had to use the Photoshop Black and White filter to pull yellow out. Even though the logo seepage pattern looked black, pulling yellow out made the logo invisible. It also made the image black and white, but that could be considered more of a feature than a bug.

If it looks a little gray, it's because I didn't clip anything to white. You can always make parts of it white later. You can't really undo that once you've done it.

UPDATE

I documented the retouching process. It ended up being fairly interesting. I used the Black and White adjustment layer, and LAB color

I recently upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite CS4 Production Premium and I started getting this error message every time I opened Photoshop:

Owl Orphanage - photoshop.exe Entry Point Not Found...

The problem turned out to be connected to image file formats or filters or plugins I passed along from Photoshop CS3. When I got rid of them all, the problem went away. Now I have to reintroduce the ones I still care about and see who the troublemaker is...

More info from others with similar issues here: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/373471

Colorize inked art for comic books and digital paintings by putting the line art into a layer mask. You get lots of control over ink color, paper color, and the line art itself, this way.

You can even throw in blend modes if you wish.

UPDATE 7/8/09

In addition to the Layer Mask method described in the video above, a 2-color Photoshop gradient map also makes a good method for certain types of art. And a 3-color gradient map can be even better, because it gives subtle control over the hues of the edge tones.

Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

Back in 1995 I was sitting in the courtyard of the Cat & Fiddle restaurant on a warm evening in Hollywood, immediately adjacent to my office at RGA/LA (now Imaginary Forces) thinking about the Umberto Eco book, The Name of the Rose. I was reflecting on how Eco had created a Medieval Sherlock Holmes, and I was wondering how the Sherlock Holmes story benefited from such a change of venue. As I let my mind wander I asked myself what other stories could be similarly transplanted. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Medieval... James Bond.

My mind started to race. I knew a fair amount about the history of technology from courses in college, and from an excellent series created by James Burke that I saw as a teenager back in '78 called Connections... What if I took James Bond and set him not in Medieval times, but in the Renaissance? Then I could make Leonardo da Vinci his 'Q' and supply him with all kinds of high tech 15th Century spy gear.

I couldn't believe it. It was so obvious, and yet no one had already done it.

We think of Bond as 'evergreen,' but he was languishing a bit then. Critics wondered if he had a future. I thought this might be a great way to re-imagine not the franchise, but the surrounding genre. There have been a lot of alternative spy stories since then, but in '95 they weren't so prevalent as they are today.

The 500th anniversary of Columbus's trip of 1492 had just past a few years back. The Renaissance was in the air. Women were wearing wrought iron cross jewelry. Bands like Enigma were paving the way to Clockpunk by combining medieval and Renaissance music with modern beats. The unofficial soundtrack in my mind to this film as I wrote it was the 1994 Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen - particularly the song, Praise For The Mother (O Virga AC Diadema) In 1996 Renaissance Magazine was formed. A Renaissance-themed furniture store called Leonardo's opened on the 3rd Street promenade.

For me Steampunk, or more specifically in my case, Clockpunk, was a reaction to the 80's.

If you looked at the colors on the magazine covers on newsstands, they all seemed to warm up and lighten up almost simultaneously after 1989 ended. It was as if people we ready to let go of dark futures, and blues and blacks and silvers, and embrace sunny warm gold and brass and wood.

I thought selling this script would be a no brainer. But I never did sell it.

I had offers to sell the pitch, but I was holding out for a screenplay sale. I had a fair amount of access from my work in the visual effects industry, and the script got optioned here and there. One thing I did get from it was an offer to write and direct an animated CG feature based on a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. More on that here.

I have seen pop culture catch up to this story, and I don't see any reason to sit on it anymore. I discussed it a bit on the Da Vinci Automata web site, but with this post today I am making the script itself public.

At the head of this post is a link to a pdf. The screenplay at that link is the original version of Fury. The plot is as follows:

A Renaissance-era superspy, equipped with the latest 15th Century high tech espionage gear courtesy of a young Leonardo da Vinci, must stop a madman who has inadvertently stumbled across germ theory centuries early and realizes he can hold cities for ransom by threatening them with the return of the Plague.

Post 9/11 I felt the need to rewrite the script and tone down some of the Venetian / Ottoman, Christian / Muslim conflict.

In a later draft (not presented above), the villain, the first mafia don, is inventing the concept of organized crime when he discovers an ancient and highly destructive Chinese magnetically-powered rail gun called by various names throughout history, but most famously called 'The Horn of the Ram,' when it brought down the walls of Jericho. The Bible mistranslates it as Joshua blowing a ram's horn to bring down the walls.

I also added the military group The 10 of War, headed by Machiavelli. (In addition to Machiavelli's own writing, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene was a great resource.) The villain's 'woman' in the revised screenplay is Lucrezia Borgia.

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Fury ©1995 Joseph A. Francis & Norma M. Jenckes
Full screenplay in pdf format here

SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

VECTORMAN (1997) showbizdata.com

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In 1996 I was commissioned to write a screenplay for a CG animated feature film starring a Sega Genesis videogame character called Vectorman. I tried to be faithful to the game's material, but at the same time treat it in a fairly serious way - finding plausible explanations for some of the more fanciful aspects of the game, like winged fire extinguishers. It actually had a little bit of a WALL-E thing going on.

I was also attached to direct the film. Had it gone into production I believe it would have been the world's second CG film - after Toy Story.

How did I get a gig like that? Partially because of my work on ID4. But largely because of my first screenplay, a 1995 work that independently invented Clockpunk, and, I guess, Plaguepunk, too.

I mainly posting about Vectorman now as a way of segueing into my next post, which will address the Clockpunk thing in some detail.

In the meantime... ; )

Destructoid - Daily irrelevance: VectorMan was going to be a movie once

Vectorman fans: Did you know there was a movie in the works?

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SEGA'S "VECTORMAN" SET TO MORPH ONTO THE SILVER SCREEN

Sega of America is the arm of Tokyo, Japan-based Sega Enterprises Ltd. responsible for the development, marketing and distribution of Sega videogame systems and videogames in the Americas. Sega Enterprises Ltd. is a nearly $3.6 billion company known as the industry leader in interactive digital entertainment media, and is the only company that offers entertainment experiences both inside and outside the home. Sega of America's World Wide Web site is located at (http://www.sega.com).