Experimental Project ... This Afternoon's Fun...

[Lin Evans]

Some precision masks built in Photoshop, used in PTE along with chroma-key extraction. Love this software..... Look for a little surprise out the window to the right side of the fireplace at about 2 minutes 19 seconds....

Just a little background on the technique to get the effect. I've had the question of why so long (3:59) and there are several reasons. Beginning with the fireplace: To get the fire behind the the wrought iron doors required a crop of the fireplace taken into Photoshop. Everywhere "iron" appeared was carefully painted black and everywhere there was a "hole" to see into the fireplace was painted white then this mask was saved as a jpg to be used over the original photo in PTE. Likewise for the window on the right. Another crop was made including all areas where the subject was to appear. The tree trunks, delicate iron detail on the wrought iron decorative flower stand, the wood framework on the window, etc., were painted black while the areas designated for the subject to appear were painted white. This mask was then saved also as a jpg and used in PTE for the subject mask. The masks had to be sized and precisely fitted over the corresponding areas of the photo and the 500% view helped to perfectly fit them. Of course I "could" have used the full sized image for the mask by just selecting the area of interest, inversing the selection, painting all the inverse black with the bucket tool then doing the delicate painting on only the pre-selected area, but in the interest of saving some file size (only a tiny bit) I used the crops and fitted them which was simple with the 500% view.

The longer run time allows the viewer to not only enjoy the popping, crackling of the fire and general ambiance, but also allows the viewer to see the tea-cups, the cookies (biscuits for the Brits among us) and room details as well ponder the mask details for those who have done this type of technique. The chroma key extraction was done carefully to minimize green splash over then the result converted to greyscale in PTE to further eradicate any "green splash." The subject, being black, was completely amenable to the conversion with no deleterious side-effects. The extraction was then sized and positioned for best effect. In all, lots of work but the result is, I believe, realistic which was the intent.

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/room4pc.zip

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/room4mac.zip

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/room4b.zip (a slightly modified version for Ken when he returns from today's family party)

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/room4bmac.zip (modified MacIntosh version) "B" for "Bark" - LOL

Note: Press right arrow key once at beginning of slide for "short version" (2 Minutes)

About 47 meg

Lin

[Bert]

Hi Lin,

Very realistic and relaxing, loved to see the bear walking by.

Bert

[JudyKay]

Very cool. I tried to make a realistic campfire a while back and it turned out poor to mediocre. Can you share some tips? Maybe a project?

[Lin Evans]

Hi Judy,

There are at least two ways to approach this - one if you have software such as ParticleIllusion and the other if you don't. Let's assume you don't so the first thing you need is a video clip of a real campfire. You can take it with your video camera or find one on the web to experiment with. I'll make a little show for you and post the PTE file and the exe and a brief explanation of how to proceed. It's fairly straightforward so before I put it together I'll outline the way I would proceed. Get the basic image you want to use such as people sitting around a campfire. Take the image into Photoshop or your favorite editor and clone out the fire. Create a mask(s) to contain the campfire to the area you want and the approximate size, place the image in PTE and choose the mask(s) you have created and put the campfire inside. Size the video and decide whether you want the fire sounds or not. If you want to use the waveform, mute the video and place the video in as the sound track. Adjust accordingly.. I'll get back with a sample shortly...

Below are links to a quick and dirty sample. For the record, it's far easier to create a nice fire inside a fireplace than a campfire with a photo of people. A fireplace is a closed space unit with a more or less regular defined boundary so that your mask is fairly easy to create. Just take your image containing the fireplace into your editor and paint the area you wish to confine the fire to with white and save the image as a jpg with the name xxxxmask.jpg. The open campfire is much more difficult because you will have black or other colors in your video which and the video itself will have a rectangular shape. This makes the creation of the mask much more complex because the fire is a dynamic thing and the areas where there is no fire change randomly. So to create a mask, you must get a bit creative unless you have software such as ParticleIllusion where you can import your campfire and create an alpha channel video where all the relevant "black" is removed. You can sometimes use the chroma extraction feature of PTE to remove black rather than green, but it's tedious and the result will not generally be all that great. In this sample I've created two masks. One for the campfire itself and one for the reflections in the eyeglasses and on the legs of a couple people. It's far from perfect and could be vastly improved by tweaking, but you will be able to get the idea. For the eyeglasses and legs I simply greatly increased the size of the fire video and lowered the opacity of that video greatly. The masks were done using the original image and painting or leaving the existing reflection white then painting everything else black...

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/campfireexperimentptecomponents.zip (The PTE File which also contains the original photo to see the effects of cloning out the existing campfire.

http://www.lin-evans.org/pte8/campfireexperiment.zip (The exe file in PC format)

Best regards,

Lin

[JudyKay]

Thanks a lot Lin. I will play with this over the next few days. Well...around Christmas festivities

Merry Christmas!

[Lin Evans]

Hi Bert,

Thanks! It's fun trying to create realism from combining still images and video clips with PTE - challenging, but fun....

Best regards and Merry Christmas,

Lin

[Lin Evans]

Hi Judy,

Hopefully, it can give you some ideas to improve on. There are myriad possibilities, as JPD once said, the only limitations are one's imagination!

Merry Christmas to you and your family too!

Best regards,

Lin