CS 194-26 Final Project: Fake Miniatures

Jeffrey Wang (cs194-26-acl)

Overview

For this project, I digitally recreate tilt-shift photos in order to mimick the illusion of taking photos of a "miniature" version of a subject with a post-processing of an actual image. To do this, I allow the user to select a user-specific point in which defines a "focus line" that would be the "focus" of a miniature scene. I assume that the focus line is simply the horizontal line straight from the point of the user's choosing. This is simplified in order to ease the input necessary from the user, and directly calculates a "Depth of Field" based off of the size of the image itself. For the purpose of this assignment, I define the depth of field as 150. Originally, I thought about defining it as a function of the log of the height, but for simplicity kept it at 150 pixels since the image sizes weren't drastically different.

I then would take the Gaussian blur for each "level" of the image DOF pixels away from the specified focus line, increasing the value exponentially for each level farther away from the original image that I was.

To make the effect more apparent, I also increasing the saturation of the resulting image by 40%.

Pictures taken from the internet

City Skyline taken from here

Cityscape by Sanjay Chauhan


Pictures taken by me

UCLA

Tokyo Airport

Summary

Overall implementation of this project was pretty straightforward. I originally wanted to define DOF as a function of the height of an image, but realized that the results seemed a bit choppy with what I had (as can be seen with my photo in UCLA). For the pictures taken by me, the images are a bit larger, and the miniature effect is harder to notice when I ran the code on my images. In order to account for that, I increased the sigma value of my Gaussian blur for the pictures that I took.


CS 194-26 Final Project: Vertigo Shot


Overview

In this project, I duplicate the dolly zoom effect through use of still images taken from a Nikon camera.

To do this, I chose a "foreground" object that would remain the same relative size throughout the image as I "zoomed" out physically. This was done by literally walking backwards, and zooming in the correct amount in order to maintain the original size of the foreground object. This was a bit tough because I didn't have very accurate markers of the object, thus making the results slightly off-centered. There were also some issues initially of me not being able to read in the images as .JPG files, as they originally were taken as .NEF files, but I switched some settings to account for that.

Sequence 1: bags in Eshleman 10

Sequence 2: pillow in HoC

Bells And Whistles: Results as animated GIFs

Bonus: Taken with a larger zoom lens in Eshleman 3rd Floor
Extra Bonus/Failure: My friend getting in the way

Summary

This was a fun and light-hearted project to do. I also experimented a bit with recording a video and capturing the dolly zoom effect. This was done by taking advantage of the rolling chairs in Eshleman and using them as makeshift "dollies". Unfortunately, it was hard to replicate the full effect because I didn't have a stable setup (my hands) despite my optimizations to the shot (having my friends pull me through the hallway). But overall, it was a fun experience!