Conscious Manipulation of Image and Effect Focus

[Synthetik]

It's often very tempting to just hit the action button and apply a particular paint preset or image processing effect to the entire canvas. But by working with the concept of selective application of focus of a particular effect you can achieve some really interesting results. The image below was created by combining together several different kinds of directed effect focusing techniques.

One typical effect is to center the viewers attention on a particular aspect of an image while blurring or diffusing the viewers attention at areas of the image you do not want them to concentrate on. Often this involves centering the object of interest and rendering it with sharp focus while progressively blurring the boundaries of the canvas. You could do this in your digital camera when taking a photo but it's also easy to add afterwards. There are a number of different Image Processing effects in Studio Artist that incorporate a border modulator which can be used to create this kind of effect. Adaptive Filter and Adaptive Convex Hull are 2 of my favorites for this kind of application. For the image above, i used the Adaptive Filter with the Border Modulation to blur the outer boundaries of the image while retaining focus at the center of the image. I then used the Canvas Image to Source Image menu command to load my modified image as the new source.

I also wanted to have the ability to selectively focus the various effects i wanted to use to create the final image. To do this i created a centered spherical selection mask that i could use with different image processing effects to selectively focus them in the center or at the boundaries of the canvas. You turn on the Mask popup to mask an image operation based on your current region selection, and you can use the region selection invert menu command to flip the focus from the center to the boundaries of the image with this kind of a selection mask.

I used the Sphere Multiplier image operation to create the centered spherical selection mask. I started by setting the current region selection to full off, then i set the Ip Source popup for the Sphere Multiplier Ip Op to Region Selection, and i set the Composite popup for the Ip Op to Replace Region Selection. Many people forget that you can use the current region selection as both the source and destination for any of Studio Artist's image operations, and this is a really powerful way to modify a region selection or to generate various mask shapes for things like selectively focusing processing effects.

One of the things i wanted to do was to apply a Gradient Lighting effect to the area of user focus in the center of the canvas while applying a Geodesic Warper melt effect to the boundaries of the image. It was easy to do this with the centered sphere selection mask i created using the steps above. This example is a simple one just involving centered focus but you can easily imagine how you could create selection masks based on positive and negative space or edge areas in your source image to selectively mask effects or to enhance the look of a final painting.