{ 2006 10 22 }

HowTo: Turn Photoshop into X-ray Vision Machine, well partially anyway!

Firstly I’d like to say this is still in development for me, I like to fiddle with images/code/etc etc and I thought this would be as interesting as my lie detector article. Ok, I am short of time today, however, I wasn’t short of time a little while earlier, when I put together some fascinating peices of software together, in order to try and create a DIY X-Ray Vision Filter Combination that would be successful at obtaining the ever-more infamous (yet aging) IR vision (or nightvision filter on some cameras), with the Missing IR data itself. Obviously this HowTo is limited on the resolution and type of camera you have used. For this tutorial I will be using some pictures I found while surfing the internet. Remember, this is about making the best of the data we have (visible), It may be possible to get some extremely successful and interesting results with this, depending how subtle or not peoples clothing transparency can be, also dependant on the wavelength size for light to propogate through it. Obviously if you have an IR filter on your camera already, you will probably not need this tiny HowTo, but might be worth taking a look at if you wish to improve blurry shots you’ve taken already.

Heres an Example at where you will be driving at (Yes, I did this..) [fullsizerender]

Update: a lot of you were unhappy about the results you were seeing, oh well, so much for keeping my site clean, heres some fun I had earlier providing the results (with this tutorial) that you’d probably most like to see (you dirty perverts! :) ).

b4after

The Tools you need:
Akvis Enhancer Plugin
Chromasoftware’s IR Film Filter
Step 0:

First we need to find a picture with enough information for us, I used this one.
step0
As you can see above there is a certain amount of information available already, it just needs to be filtered carefully and repetatively; in some cases creativity is required, most of you know what im talking about.

Step 1:

Ok now the real work begins, and you need to download yourself Akvis Enhancer Trial Plugin for Photoshop and the IR film plugin by ChromaSoftware, there are just the two I tried today while I had a few minutes spare. They work remarkably well, and in some cases, not at all. Let’s not get too excited, and give it a go. What we need to do is pull out more data from this 1 picture without requiring say 3 or 4 stills (this means using data that could otherwise be blocky, but heh, we can live with that, we need to see ALL THE DATA, ironically it is possible to see new definitions of objects (or whats underneath objects!) when we perform such filtering. Basically it changes the interpretation of each pixel (shadow, light, contrast, etc). Ok so lets use the akvis enhancer filter for photshop on this to get something like:

using avkis
Our Output:

enhance detail

Notice guys, it might not look so pretty, but you should see the picture now looks REAL, like you might EXPECT it to REALLY look like. Obviously bustyandreal.com fiddle with their pictures (or just have decent photographers, who knows? I don’t, nonetheless, here we have much greater detail, and in some cases blockiness/overexageration. This is a problem and needs to be resolved.. but not yet). Notice the contrast detail.

Step 2:

Ok so now you might be getting excited, or maybe, thinking “this is just lame man”, heh maybe.. lets continue though with an IR pass using ChromaSoftware IR Film Filter!

ir filter

Hmmmm… So Ok it could look better, you really need to have a play between both, so lets see what I ended up with below. Its worth noting if your clever enough with the filters I’ve mentioned and use brightness/contrast, you can begin to identify the colour of the wavelength beneath, I’ll show that example at the end of this tutorial (you dirty bastads!).

high IR Pass

Step 3 and 4: Place original image on layer over IR data , airbrush 30% opacity over original to reveal underlying IR undertones (our X-Ray see-thru clothes).

Ok, almost done, what we need to do now is take the filtered data, and put it back into our original picture, without it looking diar. That’s not too difficult, Grab the image you started with, (above at the very top of this tutorial), copy this in on a seperate layer. Now very carefully airbrush out the coloured layer clothing from the image , make sure you use 30% opacity or so on the eraser, or you will bugger it up. You will see a colour picture now, with X-Ray IR data embedded, its still colour too. NEAT. The beauty of the method is you get to keep some of the colour data too. You dirty bastads! It should look something like below:
step 3 and 4

And there we have it, same picture, but the underlying layer of clothing , at least, has been exposed. Have a play with it, there is no guaranteed way of getting results with this method, but you will get something! Please do let me know if you have better luck than this. I’ve found pink red and purple and white all seem to be fairly compatible colours for X-Ray filtering.

Step 5 Optionals: Merge Visible, Adjust levels (auto-level perhaps if your boring), Add more detail with Akvis Enhancer

I found that this method has some very interesting attributes and features, using just photoshop and some free trials, I was able to perform some fairly sophisticated procedures (including filtering out certain wavelengths) in just a few steps. Photoshop is truly a powerful tool as are the plugins I’ve used, I don’t know how much they are, but you don’t even need to buy them, I provide links at the top of the tutorial where to find them:step 5 re-enhance
Getting the colour out:

I found that it was also possible to retrieve the colours from clothing underneath, an interesting discovery but im not ready to share that yet until I find an automatic way of performing procedures, improving them, and perhaps begin conceiving a PHP image algo to go over the data in such a way. Not fun, oh wait, it is pretty interesting stuff.

And so, I end my dirty bastad tutorial at how to turn your PC into, albeit basic, X-Ray Vision Machine. Many thanks to my static model that I now call Jill. Time for sleep. Oh I almost forgot, checkout this IR colour sweep, god knows how I did it, I will have to try and reproduce it later (please forgive the blockiness, it was one of my first original tests)

irrendercolour

Heh, im definately going with red, nn.

Due to popular Demand:

Howto see underneath using only 1 filter… (levels):

more x ray tricks

If you really want to be fancy, combine this with the other methods, its extremely effective sometimes.

What THIS ISNT VERY EFFECTIVE?

Ok firstly, I used a model with a jumper… this is how good just the above filter effect alone can be (1 filter only):

effective

Another Perfected Render (very large)

Posted by azio on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006, at 11:54 pm, and filed under Computing.

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