CAGD 112 Midterm Collection

 

Panorama

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The goal of this assignment was to create a panorama from scratch. As in take individual photos and stitch them together manually through photoshop. I was planning to take roughly 30 photos, with ideally 5 being used to make a single panorama. This way I had multiple options to work with, if things didn't seem to be looking too good while at the editing stage. 25 of these photos were right outside my house, and the remaining 5 were from my friends house in Sonoma. The latter to me at least looked significantly nicer then the ones I took near my house in Mill Valley, so I decided to use those for the final panorama.

Here's the 5 photos laid side bye side in order:

    I took these photos by hand, as I did not have a tripod available while at my friends house. Because of this, there somewhat significant differences in the angles each photo was taken. These are most visible when looking at the unevenness of the top and bottom arch that follow the outline of the photos. Further more (going left to right), the area from photo 2 to photo 3 were so off that only about half the branches of the tree lined up properly, this would cause one of the most difficult areas to resolve later on.

Even after cropping the photo as much as possible to clear empty space, the lower left and right corners had significant areas where they were missing content. Normally this could be fixed very easily with the cloning tool in Photoshop, but because both of these areas were railings, which had a perfect manmade symmetry to them, the tool struggled greatly to duplicate it while keeping the rails aligned. I could only do so much to resolve these two areas, but from afar, they looked fine. I spent 2 hours roughly resolving the corners and the missing branches. 

It was a struggle, and because I spent so much time to fix the major issues, I completely failed to notice some more minor ones until I submitted. The main one being the differences in lighting in the (still left to right) 4th photo. This was caused by a glare on the lens. I tried to resolve it by messing with the saturation, but since not everything in photo was affected by the glare (mostly the sky and branches), it caused the lower half to look unnatural instead. I was unable to find a resolution to the issue, and with my current skillset, presumed I was simply not capable of resolving it. What I did realize though, was that this, and actually all the major issues I hit, would of never occurred if I better stabilized the camera while taking the photos.

Here was the final finished product, which is not representative of my best work, but I think showed a great recovery considering the 5 images I started with:

HDRI

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    This project I greatly enjoyed. The goal was to simply take 3 photos of the same object/area, except with differing exposure levels. One very low, one very high and one at a normal level. After this you just had to simply combine them. Besides some light shading and RGB edits, this was not very heavy in the editing department, and was really more based taking nice base photos.

Here's the 3 photos I took of the same plant, with differing levels of exposure:

By combining these 3 photos together, you would end up with one HDR version. I didn't use a tripod for the photos, but I did rest the camera against a piece a wood, which seemed to stabilize the camera completely, as all the images came out aligned. That was pretty much all to it, a simple but very fun and exciting assignment. What I could of done better though was use more radical differences in exposure. I realized afterword's, compared to the teachers example, my photos were far more similar in exposures then theirs. I might of pushed the saturation too high as well, as can be noted by the lime coloration in the plants, and the multiple shades of blue in the sky.

Final HDR:

Things

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    For this assignment I had to take a bunch of photos of really just anything. They  just had to not be far away (aka no landscapes). I took pictures of lots of flowers and household objects that I found interesting. Out of photos I took though, one really stood out as "different". For some reason on the fence right outside my house, there was a fake chicken tied to a post. I figured it be fun to use the picture for the project as it felt so random.

The majestic chicken tied to fence:

This was really the first assignment where we didn't have to make the final image black and white. Because of this, I really wanted to mess around with saturation and hues. Why not make a already weird chicken even more different. I thought it would look nice if I changed its coloration to something more alien, as it was already unrealistic in the spot in which it was, so why not amplify its weird traits even more. Besides some minor shading and the above mentioned color changes, the image was mostly unaltered.

The now even more exotic alien chicken:

On the Edge

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The very first big assignment, this helped us get into the routine of what we were to expect, and help teach us the basics that we would need to use later on. We were instructed to take roughly 30 photos of a some sort of subject from roughly 5 feet away. Multiple angles were meant to be used to attempt to find the best one. I believe it was implied that this "subject" in the image was suppose to be a person, but I chose to use a tree. I was hiking near Stinson to a peak of a mountain when all of a sudden, ominous fog started to roll in. This was very weird, as fog tends to stick to lower elevations, and it was very windy that day as well. I think the heavy tree cover is what helped kept the fog from disappearing, and created a very beautiful environment as the rays of light shined through the foliage above.

Here's the base photograph:

We were instructed to dodge and burn, which I did near the middle and lower half of the photo. I was worried about touching the fog above as it might make the viewer think its just blurry, and not water vapor. The tree on my left was the "subject" so I darkened it, and lightened everything around it to try the guide the viewers eyes. Overall I thought it turned out rather well. If I were to do it again I'd try to take a better base photo. I was struggling to capture the fog without making it look all weird and fake. Taking multiple photos with different settings would of helped me a lot more in the editing stage, though at the time of the photo, I did not have any future plans for it.

Here's the final grayscaled image: