Re: [CinePaint] Looking for a feature useful to smooth timelapse sequences - grading

Bob Friesenhahn <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.video.cinepaint.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, John Arrowwood wrote:
>
> Obviously, I know about ImageMagick.  I was using it.  Unfortunately,
> using the histogram normalization doesn't quite work, because it does
> some truncation.  And because the histogram curve is not guaranteed to
> be exactly where it needs to be from frame to frame.  Mind you, it got
> it closer.  But it also had undesirable side-effects.

Right.  Histogram normalization is like pounding a tack with a large 
hammer. It maximally expands the contrast so that the images look 
sharper on a computer display.  It is useless for inter-frame use and 
not usually what you want for film images.

> As much trouble as I'm having just communicating what it is I'm trying
> to do, can you see why I am having trouble searching for a tool that
> does it?  I don't know, maybe you would call it inter-frame exposure
> or levels smoothing or something like that...

It seems like what you need is a tool that analyzes the image minimum, 
maximum, and mean, for each image over a sequence of images. Then it 
would compute a correction value for each image.  Maybe it would 
smooth the computed values using a filter function (across frames) in 
order to allow gradual changes over time.  ImageMagick's -level option 
can then be used to adjust each image's parameters.  The -level option 
works similar to Photoshop's "Adjust Levels" dialog.

This sort of work is likely very time consuming and the results are 
dependent on the nature of the images and what is intended.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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