Volumetric and flat photographs. Volumetric images

Today you will find a lesson from which you will learn how to make 3D photo effect. Also, this effect is also called out of frame(framework, screen, etc.). Let's get started.

Step 1. Loading the original photo into a graphic editor

Step 2 With a tool "Freer selection" we circle the area that we will go beyond the border of the frame (frame, screen, etc.)

Step 3 Exclude from selection inner region. To do this, switch the mode "Free selection" on the "Subtract from current" and circle the inner area between the arms.

Step 4 Let's apply a little feathering to the selected area to soften the edges of the selection a bit. To do this, go to the menu "Select - Feather". Leaving the default settings, click OK.

Step 5 Add a new transparent layer and copy the current selection onto it. The layer structure is now like this:

Step 6 Now our task is to draw a frame from which our object will emerge. To do this, take the tool "Rectangular Selection" and draw a view selection.

Step 7 With a tool "Perspective" modify the frame, as in the screenshot. Don't forget to change the mode of the Perspective tool to "Isolation"

Step 8 Add a new transparent layer to the very top of the layer stack and paint over it with white.

Step 9 Add another new transparent layer and place it in front of the original image. Now invert the selection ( "Select - Invert") and paint over this layer with black.

Step 10 Reversely invert the selection and return to the layer with the frame. After that, reduce the selection by 15 pixels through the menu Select - Reduce. Press "DEL" on your keyboard to delete the inner part of the selection. Remove Selection via "Select - Remove".

Step 11 With a tool "Eraser" erase the part of the frame that overlaps the object. Right here:

Optional step. Through the menu "Filters - Light and Shadow - Cast Shadow" add a shadow to the frame layer. We do not touch the filter settings. After that, go to the background layer, fix the alpha channel and paint over the current layer with white.

P.S. As you may have noticed (or maybe not), a small artifact remained on the image - a thin line (both in the text lesson and in the video). To remove it, you need to go to the layer with a black background. And then gently erase it with the Eraser.

Video Tutorial - 3D Photo Effect in GIMP

Another lesson..

Perfect panoramas and 360-degree 360-degree shots can be taken even on a regular smartphone. It is enough to install a special application and follow our advice.

Google Street View: 3D Photo App

With the Google Street View app, which is available for free for Android and iOS, you can create true 360-degree photo panoramas.

• After installing the application, click on the orange camera icon in the lower right corner. Here you can choose whether you want to connect the app to a professional 360-degree panoramic camera, import a 360-degree photo, or use your phone's camera.
• To take a three-dimensional picture, you will have to turn around its axis several times, holding the phone at different angles. The main thing - make sure that you do not feel dizzy.
• While shooting a panorama, the app displays orange dots to point the camera at.
• After taking a picture, wait for a while while the application records it.

Secrets of Android and iOS: what the Camera app can do

If you don't want to install the Google Street View app, use the stock Camera app found on any Android or IOS smartphone. The standard application will not allow you to make a real 360-degree, since such shooting does not include areas of the earth and sky in the frame, but the result can still turn out to be quite decent:

• Open the Camera app and select Panorama mode. After shooting starts, a line will appear on the smartphone screen along which you need to move the device.
• To take a photo with subtle transitions, slowly rotate around your axis.

How to create the perfect panorama?

To ensure that you always get perfect panoramic photos, do not forget two important factors:

• Take pictures in a calm environment: it is best if there are no moving people or cars in the frame.
• Create panoramic shots in even lighting conditions to avoid sharp transitions in the finished photo.

Photoplasticon or Imperial Panorama

Greek stereos means "bodily", "voluminous". Surround sound is the accepted standard these days, but stereo photography (or 3D photography) remains outlandish fun for many. But in vain, because it allows you to capture reality in much the same way as a person sees it.

Traditional photography has developed a serious arsenal of technical and artistic means of conveying volume: depth of field, focal length of optics, perspective, shadow pattern and composition. The human brain can get information about space from the content of a flat picture. But ordinary photography is incapable of conveying volume directly in the way that a person perceives it.

The volume, depth of the image is a subjective thing, since we are limited by our senses. The axes of the human eyes intersect at a certain angle at the point to which our vision is directed. It turns out a pair of flat images in which there is a shift in the visible space (parallax). As a result of the fusion of these images, a three-dimensional picture appears in the mind. To perceive the volume allows the distance between two points (for example, the eyes), called the stereo base. The distance can be changed using technical means (for example, stereo binoculars or an artillery rangefinder). With an increase in the stereo base, the depth of field decreases and visual acuity increases.

Stereo photography is a method of photography in which the camera has two "eyes" instead of one. It doesn't have to be lenses. The result is important - frames on film with the necessary base shift. Stereo photography does not create a three-dimensional image in reality, but allows you to make a cunning substitution of real space for a photograph taken and prepared in a special way.

The ability of 3D photographs to convey the complex structure of the depicted object is especially valuable in "technical" genres, such as shooting architecture, natural and urban landscapes, and macro. Using stereo photography for artistic purposes provides completely new creative tools.

History of stereo photography

In 280 BC. e. Euclid first discovered that depth perception is achieved precisely because each eye sees slightly different pictures of the same object. Following him, Leonardo da Vinci described these abilities in 1584, who devoted several of his writings to the peculiarities of visual perception. The theory of stereoscopic perception was presented in scientific form by the German optician and geometer Johannes Kepler in his work Dioptrics (1611). Two years later, the Jesuit Francois d'Aguillion used the term "stereoscopy" for the first time.

Around 1600, the Italian artist Giovanni Battista della Porta painted the first stereo painting. At the beginning of the 17th century, his experience was repeated by Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli, who used the technique of paired images. A century and a half later, the Frenchman Bois-Clair (G. A. Bois-Clair) created three-dimensional images using the raster method. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy managed to try himself in stereoscopic drawings. In the 20th century, the Spaniard Salvador Dali painted three-dimensional paintings using the needle screen method proposed by the inventor of three-dimensional cinema, the Russian émigré Alekseev. Viewing images obtained using the raster and needle methods did not require any special devices.

The discovery of stereo photography is associated with the name of Charles Wheatstone, professor at King's College London. In 1833, Wheatstone created a mirror stereoscope - a device that allows you to see a three-dimensional picture using a pair of original pictures with an offset. At first, the scientist used his drawings as objects. In accordance with the experiments, a scientific base was created. In 1838, Wheatstone gave a historic lecture on volumetric imaging to the Royal Society in London. The report was titled "On Some Remarkable and Hitherto Unobserved Phenomena of Binocular Vision".

Why did Wheatstone use drawings in his stereoscope rather than photographic images? The answer is simple: photography was invented by the Frenchman Daguerre only six years after Wheatstone's discovery, in 1839. The first pictures taken by the stereoscopic method, Wheatstone presented to the public only in 1851 at the World Exhibition in London.

The first camera with two lenses designed to create stereopairs was created in 1849 by the Scottish scientist David Brewster. Brewster is also the inventor of the simple stereoscope without mirrors. In 1855, the Frenchman Bernard creates the first reflex attachment for ordinary single-lens cameras, which allows you to shoot stereo pairs. A little later, the Englishman Barun improved this design.

One of the first to appreciate the potential of 3D photography was the English reporter Roger Fenton, who traveled around Russia in the 1960s and is the author of a series of photographs dedicated to the Russo-Turkish War. In the same years, the famous French photographer Antoine Claude, who opened the London Temple of Photography in 1851, became interested in three-dimensional photography. According to Claude, a stereoscope in a cheap and compact form presents a model of everything that exists in various parts of the globe. Interestingly, it was Claude who in 1853 patented a method for obtaining stereo photographs.

In 1858, the Frenchman Joseph d'Almeida discovered an anaglyph method for creating three-dimensional images, which allowed viewing three-dimensional images using glasses with red and green lenses. This method was used to create books, postcards, comics, maps. In the 1920s, the first anaglyph films appeared, which were called plastograms.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the French physicist Jonas Lippmann discovered a method for creating images that did not require special viewing devices. Images must have a special surface based on a lens grating (raster). The surface consists of microlenses, under which there are image fragments for the right and left eyes. Looking at the image from a certain angle, you can see a three-dimensional image. Photographer Maurice Bonnet first used the raster method in the 1930s to create three-dimensional portraits.

Nowadays, the method of creating raster images involves preparing a paper substrate on a computer, which is then printed. by conventional means and is supplied with a plastic screen with a lens raster. This method is used when creating pocket calendars with three-dimensional pictures or a changing image (vario effect).

Stereo photography appeared almost simultaneously with conventional photography. However, it took almost a hundred years for it to gain mass popularity. At the beginning of the 20th century, stereo photography was perceived as mass entertainment, not an art form. Amusements based on the stereoscopic effect were popular. Boxes with stereographic images, which depicted views of distant lands made by travelers, rural sketches and nude models, became widespread.

In the first half of the 20th century, interest in stereo photography was very high. The first cameras produced by Franke & Heideke were designed specifically for stereo photography: the Heidoskop (1920), which shot on sheet film, and the Rolleidoskop (1922), which used roll film (6 x 13 cm stereo pair format). Soon Voigtlander's Stereoflektoscop (6 x 13 cm format) and Julius Richard's Verascope (45 x 107 cm format, type 127 film) are on sale.

In 1939, the American William Gruber founded the View-Master company, which a year later produced a narrow-film stereo camera. View-Master has come up with many innovative products for taking and viewing 3D photos and movies.

The advent of highly detailed Kodachrome color slide film in the late 1930s, as well as the growing popularity of compact narrow film cameras, contributed to the emergence in the 1940s and 50s of a large number of stereo cameras with a frame format of 24 x 23 mm (Edixa, Iloca, Kodak Stereo, Stereo- Realist) and 24 x 29 mm (Belplasca, Verascope F40). The German companies Zeiss (Contax) and Leica offer mirror adapters that allow you to take three-dimensional photographs on conventional rangefinder cameras. Note that the design with a third sighting lens or rangefinder has not undergone fundamental changes until today.

In the 1950s and 60s, there was a surge of mass interest in stereo photography. Special cameras and stereo attachments, stereoscopes for viewing images are produced. Souvenir sets are sold, consisting of paired slides depicting world attractions. Stereo cameras were used to photograph the surface of the Moon, Mars and the Sun in the American space programs.

In future 3D photography will certainly attract much more attention than it is currently receiving. Of course, it depends on the technical base, which is constantly being improved. So far, two are available simple ways creating 3D photographs.

Photographic techniques for conveying the depth of space in a photograph

Depth of field control

Nevertheless, our lenses have one property similar to the device of vision. This is the depth of field - the depth of the sharply depicted space. Do you think this is not so due to the fact that basically we see everything around us as sharp? Put your finger up to your nose and focus on it. The background will be blurred. Using a small depth of field, we highlight main object shooting, focusing on it. At the same time, secondary characters and the background are blurred, imitating our vision mechanism.
Of course, this method is not used in landscape photography, where all plans must be in the field of sharpness.

How to get low depth of field and beautiful bokeh:

• The more open , the more blur.
• Use fast lenses. For example, I most often photograph at aperture values ​​in the range of 1.8–2.2;
• The longer the focal length, the greater the blur, the more beautiful the bokeh, the more plastic the picture;
• The closer to the model (larger portrait), the greater the blur;
• A full sensor camera produces more blur than a crop;
• To have something to blur, you do not need to put the model close to the background (near the wall, fence, tree). It is always better to spread them out into plans with different zones of sharpness. This tip applies to studio photography as well.

Very often in the studio with bright walls in the background and a lot of props it is difficult to distinguish the model. And it is worth moving it away from the background and shooting with an open aperture - and the photos look much more skillful, with an emphasis on the main thing. You also need to be able to work with the interior!

Dividing the entire scene into foreground and background

Surely everyone who has at least a small idea of ​​​​composition knows that you should try to use several shots in a photograph. When shooting landscapes, everyone remembers this, but when shooting portraits, they often forget it together. But no one canceled the effect of planning as a way to convey depth.

Background - background. It must be chosen so that nothing sticks out as if from the model, it is beautifully blurred in the bokeh (of course, if this is not a landscape). Use the rules of linear, aerial and color perspective (more below). The middle plan is our model, the main subject of the shooting. It would be nice to place something else in the same plane with the model that will be in the sharpness zone (a bush, twigs with leaves or flowers on a tree). This will give an additional sense of depth and planning.

Foreground - this is what is often forgotten about in portraiture. It helps to convey depth even better. From the foreground, you can create a kind of frame, framing the plot is an effective way to build a composition. In addition, in this way the feeling of peeping is conveyed when you want to convey the ease and naturalness of the scene.
As a foreground, you can use branches of bushes, flowers, low branches of trees. If there are none nearby, ask an assistant to hold the prepared branches in front of the camera. In the studio, you can use suitable props, flowers, peek out from behind ajar doors.

The foreground can also be just grass blurred in bokeh: just lower the shooting point and shoot while sitting or lying down. If the shooting uses flying objects (flower petals, autumn leaves, feathers, paper pages, confetti, etc.), ask the assistant to scatter them in different planes from the model so that they are both in the sharpness zone and blurry on the front and back plans. Such details effectively “introduce” the viewer into the picture, when they seem to fly out of real life into a photograph.
It happens that it is not possible to put something in the foreground immediately when shooting (for example, it does not fit into the frame). Then you can photograph a suitable branch separately and then add it using Photoshop, or use the same program to create a foreground from blanks on a transparent background found on the Internet. Do not forget to blur them to varying degrees in different planes.

Landscape photography often uses a wide-angle lens to effectively capture the foreground. Objects located in front (stones, logs, a bridge, etc.) seem to pull us into the picture. Geometric distortion of a wide angle in this case is only at hand. The same technique can be used in portraits, enhancing the foreground and the “pulling” effect.

Linear perspective

This is a natural change in the image scale of diverse objects located on a plane. The closer an object is to the camera, the larger it is.

The first sign of a linear perspective is a decrease in the scale of receding objects, the second is the desire of parallel objects to converge at one point on the horizon line.
What to do to convey this most linear perspective in the frame:

• choose well the background. A path going into the distance (straight or winding), a road, rails, a row of houses, a long corridor, pillars or columns - all this helps in conveying perspective and creating the effect of the viewer's presence in the frame;
• try to place the model and the convergence of perspective lines at power points, but not at the same one;
  do not arrange the lines so that they take the eye out of the frame. The gaze should follow inside the frame and wander around it;
• sometimes you can use a wide-angle lens by getting closer to the model. It enhances the transfer of perspective, since in life we ​​also look at the world from a wide angle. In this case, place the model in the middle, as geometric distortions increase towards the edges of the frame.

  tonal perspective

  This is a physical phenomenon, the essence of which is that light passing through a transparent medium - air, is refracted, scattered and reflected. Depending on the state of the atmosphere, its pollution and humidity, light is scattered in the air layer to a greater or lesser extent. Then we see an air haze (highlighted distances). Now you understand why such aerial landscapes are obtained in the early morning or in fog, when the air is clean and humid?
  To convey aerial perspective, remember that the farther the object:

• the less saturated tones;
• less clear outlines of shooting objects (haze);
• softer contrast;
• lighter details.

If you are lucky and you photographed early in the morning at dawn, then perhaps the camera will convey all these nuances. Otherwise, it can simply be taken into account during processing:

• reduce background saturation;
• raise the sharpness and clarity on the model (and the foreground in the landscape);
• raise the contrast of nearby objects, leaving the background with no contrast;
• add light spots to the background or paint fog, haze (with a white brush with low transparency in the blending mode "Screen");
• darken the foreground, make a vignette.

Color

Color and volume are also closely related. Prominent (warm) colors are perceived closer, receding (cold) colors are perceived further than their present position. This phenomenon is called chromatic stereoscopy. Artists successfully use this effect to convey three-dimensional forms. Its effectiveness has been tested in the practice of painting and when working with the interior and wardrobe. Receding and protruding colors are able to visually distort three-dimensional space or make the plane voluminous, embossed.
Warm and cold colors located side by side help each other to sound brighter and louder. Warm becomes even warmer, and cold becomes even colder.

Using the contrast of warm and cold, you can highlight the main thing in the photo. The spatial properties are also affected by the difference in lightness and the contrast of the color spots of the object. With a high contrast, a smaller color spot becomes catchy and stands out as a figure, while a larger one is perceived as a background. Catchy and contrasting colors protrude and protrude. With low and medium contrast, gray colors are removed.

How to use color rendition to enhance the effect of volume in a photo:

think carefully in terms of color to the choice of model (hair color), background, clothes, interior items and props;

You can use light sources of different temperatures when taking photographs. In a studio, this can be cold light from a window combined with constant warm artificial light, constant sources of different color temperatures are also suitable. In the interior, you can combine natural light from a window or reflected flash light in combination with the warm light of lamps, candles, garlands in the background or foreground;

tone the photo in post-processing. There are many options: from separate toning (split-toning) of lights and shadows into warm or cold in the "semi-automatic" mode using Photoshop functions to coloring the desired objects with a brush (in the "Soft light" mode);

pay attention not only to harmonious color schemes, but also to the amount of each color in the photo. Highlight with color the main objects and details that you want to focus on;

work with saturation correctly: saturated and pure colors are perceived closer, and less saturated colors are perceived further.

Ideally, you want the photo to use several of the above techniques. Then your photos will come to life and play, as in three-dimensional reality.

A printed picture or viewing it on a computer screen is a flat, two-dimensional picture, and the world is three-dimensional, and the problem of transferring the volume of a three-dimensional world on a one-dimensional plane has been worrying photographers for more than 100 years, and artists have been solving this problem for hundreds of years. But artists can add whatever they want to their creations, but we, photographers, use only what we can see. However, we and artists have the same set of “tools”: linear perspective, tonal and scale perspective, as well as the presence of blur in the image, that is, depth of field.

Translated from in English taking pictures looks like “to take a picture”, which literally means “to take a picture”, not to do it, but to take it! It's very subtle. Because we, photographers, take what we see and leave its imprint on our film or matrix. And how we do it, how we build a frame, where we make a blur zone, it is on these decisions that the result we end up with depends. Let's take a look at each type of perspective and see how it affects the shot.

Air is never transparent, because it consists of molecules of different nature, and molecules are also objects with their own density and weight. The tonal perspective depends on the humidity, dust content of the air and manifests itself in different weather conditions differently.

The most striking manifestations of tonal perspective can be observed in fog, in windy and dusty weather in the desert or steppe, at dawn over water. And all these phenomena lead to the following: the farther the object, the less distinct and clear its outlines, the less saturated it is, it seems lighter and less contrasting.

In the photo below, we see tonal perspective at its brightest, in the morning mist. The background of the image has become lighter, the colors and objects on it are less saturated, the outlines are almost blurred, the contrast in the background is almost zero:

Scale Perspective

Large-scale perspective is manifested in the reduction of objects of the same type: the further the object, the smaller it is.

In the picture of the dried river bank, we see two types of perspective: linear and scale. The changing scale of the dried parts of the coast gives the image volume, bringing it closer to three-dimensional. It is not for nothing that landscapes are shot with wide-angle lenses (focal length 17-28 mm): distorting the foreground, this type of lens makes it seem to be convex, these lenses draw the perspective and scale of objects much better than long-focus lenses, which seem to “collapse” the picture, making the foreground flat (because of its narrow angle of view).

It should also be noted that wide-angle lenses, due to their wide angle of view (approximately 70 degrees), give sharpness throughout the image with a smaller aperture value, and this is useful in low light conditions, but more on sharpness later.

In still life, you can also apply this type of perspective by organizing the rhythm of receding objects of the same type. In the image below, we see two types of perspective: linear and scale, and the spool of thread in the foreground enhances the feeling of volume, as does the small DOF (depth of field):

Linear perspective is expressed in lines that tend to converge at one point on the horizon or at infinity. A road stretching into the distance, a bridge, lines of railings, curbs, houses, electric wires…. all of which can serve as the basis for linear perspective. Linear perspective very often appears in landscapes, where there are enough basics to form a linear perspective.

But what about, for example, in a macro plot or a still life?

In the above shot, we see the linear perspective that the leaf of the plant forms, and the blur adds depth, volume to the picture. The drop is the main object, because it is highlighted by sharpness and is located at the point of the viewer's attention (at the intersection of lines that divide the frame into three equal parts).

IPIG

The blurring of the background or part of the image is also a tool that affects the volume of the frame, and the aperture controls this: the smaller its value, the more blurred the part of the image that is closer and / or farther than the focus point (point of sharpness) will be.

There is a lot of advice in various articles about the mathematical calculation of depth of field, I prefer a non-mathematical approach, because our most important tool is our eyes. Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects that will be sharp at a given aperture.

In photography, the designation DOF (depth of field) is adopted, which depends on:

1. distance to the object (the larger it is, the greater the depth of field and vice versa);
2. on the aperture value (the smaller it is, the smaller the depth of field and vice versa);
3. from the focal length of the lens: the smaller it is, the greater the depth of field (at the same distance to the object).
4. on the linear size of the matrix (not the number of megapixels): the smaller the size of the matrix, the greater the depth of field (this can be taken into account when shooting macro if you need a larger depth of field).

The above picture (with a drop on the leaves of the plant) was taken with the following data:

- aperture = 8.0 ( Nikon camera D300, nikkor 105/2.8 lens);
— focal length = 105 mm;

DOF in this case = 5-10mm., The distance from the lens to the object was approximately 30-40cm.
When shooting a larger object with the same aperture and the same focal length at a distance of 20 meters, the depth of field can be 5 meters.
And at the same distance (20 meters), with aperture 15.0 and focal length = 20mm, the depth of field will be throughout the entire frame, starting from 3 m from the photographer to the very horizon. To finally understand what's what, let's look inside the camera and understand what the aperture controls.

Aperture is a retractable "petals" inside the lens that regulate the diameter of the hole through which light passes into the camera. So, the narrower this hole is, the sharper the picture is. The aperture value is the amount by which its petals protrude.

With an aperture of 5.6, the petals are exposed quite a bit and the hole is large, and therefore the depth of field will be small, part of the image will be blurry.

At aperture of 20.0, the petals are already exposed enough, the aperture is small, and therefore the sharpness will be significant when shooting a landscape wide angle lens it will be throughout the frame if the frame is made in a long shot. Even the beams of flashlights are collected "in stars" at this aperture value.

If you have SLR camera(it doesn’t matter digital or film) or an advanced soap dish (a camera with a fixed lens), then when you change the aperture settings, changes in sharpness can be seen immediately in the eyepiece or on the camera screen. It is precisely this information that you need to trust when checking the result on the camera screen after pressing the shutter button. Blurring allows you not only to control the volume of the image, but also the viewer's attention, which is also an important factor in compositional construction:

The blurred background made it possible to highlight the model, make the background uniform, and make the image three-dimensional.

Let's see how the above picture was taken:

- aperture = 4.5;
— lens focal length = 150mm;
- the distance to the model was several meters, depth of field = 15-25 cm, the background is very blurred (it was a cobblestone pavement).

So, we have understood how to control the volume of the frame, how to build a frame in such a way that the picture does not look flat. But there are exceptions to any rule, and you, as a creative person, have the right to choose whether you need volume in the picture or not. Here is an example of a laconic frame, where the volume would be fatal, it would “kill” the idea of ​​​​the picture:

The linear perspective here is expressed only by a “hint” in the form of light ripples on the water. And only the photographer decides which tools to use to build his frame and how they will affect the idea of ​​​​the picture, and it is his decisions that are called mediocrity, talent, artistic taste or bad taste, genius or style.