Normalizing Layers

[Love Has No Logic]

Hello everyone. A have a question to ask of all of you. I am trying to normalize a layered image, but not in the traditional "normalize" sense of digital photography, but in the more appropriate to sound sense. basically, I want to take a group of photos and place them all on separate layers in a new document, and then take the average color values of each pixel through the layers going deep, and assign that color to the pixel, creating a ghostly, cloudy, impressionistic effect that is vaguely, if at all, related to the images that I started with. I've searched the adobe studio exchange and countless apple scripting websites to no avail. Anyone know of a way i can acheive this effect through photoshop or of a script site/action site I could donwload something to acheive this effect with? Any help would be greatly appreciated. If e-mail is disabled, please contact me at mike AT armsreachrecordings DOT com. Thanks a ton.

[sPECtre]

Mike, could you post an image of what you are trying to acheive?
Do you want to make an impressionist picture, or a ghostly image, or just to be able to sample with "all layers"

[Love Has No Logic]

Actually, the problem is is that the onl places I've seen this were hanging in a gallery, so it's not like I could scan it in.

Basically it's just a layered image that is flattened, but flattened by averaging the values of the pixels going straight down through the layers of the image instead of just taking the values for the pixels that are right on the top. I'm pretty sure, through hours of exhaustive research, that I'm probably going to have to write an apple script to acheive this. Maybe someone knows of a good applescript for photoshop resource or of someone who may know how to acheive this that I haven't thought of.

The impressionistic/ghostly reference isn't the end I am looking for, they were descriptions of the actual end. The actual end is really an amalgamation of the images used to create the effect and retains characteristics of all those images (whether it's 2 or 75), but gives makes reference to those other descriptions I so poorly gave.

Mike

[sPECtre]

Mike, could you remove all the other posts in the other forums, so everyone (including you) can find the answer to your question easily...

Lowering the opacity of the layers is not enough to acheive your result? playing with the blending modes either? (if you lower the opacity, then use dissolve, then merge this layer to a transparent one, then blur the result, you get a impressionist effect, too, like I did for the title of : http://photoshoptechniques.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=394&highlight=violent+softness )
could you find the name of the artists doing that sort of works, so I could try to Google an image...

[Scott W.]

Unless there is some reason this is more difficult than it appears...... seems to me one could take the number of layers present and devide that into 100% to come up with an equal opacity % setting for each layer. Then simply grab the eye dropper and choose a color.

Perhaps I'm not understanding the question but it really doesn't sound any more complicated than that unless you want to average pixels across a single image.

[Love Has No Logic]

http://www.mocp.org/

It's the museum of contemporary photography in chicago. Check out the image on the right of the screen. it's Jason Salovan from a series of all the playboy cernterfolds from the 60's-90's. He took them all from each decade and layered them on top of each other, then merged them into a layer taking the average from each pixel to create the color for that pixel, throughout. As you can see, you can still see a blurred image of the female form, and set next to each other you can actuially see a slimming through the decades. He wrote his own program to do this. I;m just wondering if there's a way to do this in photoshop. I'll try the techniques you mentioned both of you, thanks, but I don't think they will each work the specific way I am hoping, but may end up working good enough for the project I am working on.

I did start writing an apple script that will probably work in the end, except it is going to take a while to run on a 75 layer image that is 300 dpi 8" by 8" (more than just processor intensive time. It physically selects pixel by pixel through each layer, ugh). Anyways, thanks, and I'll post results of my experiments in a few days.

SPectre, I'll go delete the other posts. Sorry, I wasn't sure where to post it and wanted to make sure I got a response.

[strych9ine]

That was a badass show... he's got some incredibly innovative work.

I wish I could help you, but I am completely ignorant as to how to go about using apple scripts in photoshop. Hey sPEC, do you by any chance have any links to topics such as this in your massive tut library?

:)))

[Love Has No Logic]

Hi Strychnine. Indeed it was quite an amazing show. I was up there for a lecture for my photo course and ignored everything from the vault we were seeing and just wandered around looking at those pieces. Quite nice. I also liked his star wars montage. And beleive me, I counted and it definitely was not every frame from star wars. We need to meet for lunch one day at thai spoon.

Mike

[strych9ine]

Mmmm... thai spoon... I miss that place. Goddamn administration wouldn't let me go to school this semester because of a loan that didn't come in on time (bummer) but I'll be back in the fall. Nevertheless I still make it out for the occasional show... it would definitely be cool to meet up for lunch sometime though.

Please post what you are able to come up with, you've peaked my interest. ;}

[sPECtre]

Mike, no prob for the other post, but it would have been difficult to track down...

Sometimes, the art critiques like to "sew" an history on something simple... Coulnd't an action be described to profanes as a program one did write? (Not to remove any credit to those very interesting and inspiring works)

[I've been close to the fine arts society, and I heard different explanations for the same picture, given by the same gallerist/critique to two different persons.

The funniest is with abstract contemporary art. I think that is is easy to be famous, if you know the good persons, and have good smooth talk abilities... That's why I'm always suspicious of criique explanations]

But anyways, when you have a stack of layers with different colours and blending mode, Photoshop IS doing the blending pixel by pixel anyways. then there is clearly another layer of paint-like lines to give an abstract finish...

I think it is be very possible to do this in Ps, simply with a collection of pictures, and blurring them a bit to "help" the averaging, then as Scott suggested, divide 100% by the number of layers to be blended, and maybe use color blending mode... the more picture the ghostier the effect will be.

There was such a thing done way in the past (beginning of the old century), with the faces of criminals, to create an average criminal face [it was at the time they believed in Phrenology (analyzing the caracter of someone by the shape of his head :LOL: )]

[Love Has No Logic]

S9. Sorry to hear about the Columbia bureacracy coming down hard on ya. It's not fun at all trying to deal with them. I just got in a huge yelling match in the hallway the other day with Jay Wolke (head of the art/design dept.) over some registration bs. Not a smart move. Ooops. Anyways, good luck on your return. tuition is being increased another 8 and a half percent next year. Gotta get that money to buy all the new software coming out this summer I guess.

Spectre, I'm actually finally in front of a computer and the more I think about it, the more that this should work close enough to what I want to use this for (just background textures), so I'm trying and am going to see what happens. I'll post. once again, thanks everyone for your help.

Mike

[markzebra]

Yes —* to get back to the boring subject ...

Spectre and Scott have got it right. What you talked about in your first post —*an averaging of the pixel values is easy to do in exactly the way Scott said, by reducing the opacity of each of the layers. Don't worry about blend modes here, that will complicate the issue.

But that will only give you a very blurred indistinct image. depending on how many originals there are!

The image that you linked to has been done in a much more controlled way. Whoever said that it was done only in the way you suggested (by averaging each image), has said so to make it fit firmly into the concept about "averaging" the female body image over time. But thats not all that has been done.

The texture has actually been in some way artificially texturised, to give it a canvas or painted appearance. This may have been done more cleverly using data from the original images rather than 'outside' data, but its still a 'canvased' image to me. It also looks very much like its been manually gone over by 'bleaching' out areas, which adds to the painted look.

[jonbalza]

I think that the method of lowering the opacity is the way to go, but just a reminder: It may still not be quite right. What I mean is this:

Lets say you have 2 pictures you want on top of each other. You divide the 100% by 2 and get 50%, so thats what you think should be the opacity for both layers. The problem is that you still have a 25% transparent image. (At least, theoretically, it is. I haven't checked it out yet on my computer. ;} ) That is because you have to 50% transparent images, and the second one is only 50% of the first one. In otherwords, the second one only has .... Ahhhh, never mind...

I think (hope) you get the idea. I am too tired to try and explain this in a way that even I can understand it. Of course, I'll try this out and see what comes of it.

[Love Has No Logic]

Theoretically that should have worked, but alas, did not come close. I changed the opacities and then compensated for the extra transparency (via jon's reply, way to be on top of PS Math) Just got mud. Then I took out some images so it was less interference, still got mud. Just solid brownish goo. Played around with the blending, no luck. For the meantime I'm just going to get my actual paint and brushes out for this background, and when I get around to applescripting this to work how I envision it I'll post it up for all the mac users to enjoy. I'll keep watching though.

[strych9ine]

I'm thinking about the possibility of someone theoretically using this process to produce the ghost images. This seems like a plausible method, but it appears to me that there is some other steps besides that. I each pixel is determined according to the mean pixel color for each layer, the image would have a huge quantity of grayish, muddy colors. On the playmate image, the background is predominantly tones of teal and light blue. I could see that the ghost of the body would produce that kind of color, but the backgrounds in nudie magazines aren't so amazingly similar that they would produce that general color as an average.

Just a thought, but I think there is a lot of "touch-up" at the end of the normalizing process.

[Love Has No Logic]

I did take that into cosideration, and obviously there is colorizing work going on after the fact, but the shapes and structure of the piece created is what is important, and in my attempts through opacity it is just turning itself into pretty solid mud, with no actual shapes or intersections or anything occuring. It's annoying me because I know there is an obvious solution that I am overlooking. $}

Oh, if anyone is interested (on a completely different topic) I have a radio show every Thursday night at 6:30 PM central time. It's focused around Chicago independent music and can be heard online at radiofreechicago.org.

[jonbalza]

Do you have a background layer on the image? (You know, one where the transparency can't be changed.) If you do I would try deleting that to see what you get.

[Love Has No Logic]

the first thing I do is usually delete the background layer or duplicate it and get rid of the locked version, so nope. Thanks though.

[jonbalza]

Ok, I tried the technique, and got some pretty reasonable results. I grabbed the only series of images I could find - apologies to www.whatisthematrix.com - that had similar styles/themes to them all, and used them.

All in all, this had 12 layers, each set to 15% opacity. Since these seems to be a pretty reasonable look to the image, I think that your problem might have been that the images weren't similar enough in content. I'm pretty sure that those playboy images had to have the same content on all of them, which means there were similar colors at points.

I'm off to try this on some wildly different images, to see the what kind of result I get.

[jonbalza]

Actually, another thing to try is to make the lower layers in the stack have higher transparency, and then lower each one as it gets to the top of the layer palette. That seemed to make a difference when all the images looked very different.

In the posted image, the left half is the half where every layer is equal opacity. It seems to give more weight to the images on top. The image on the right is the same collection of images (from a recent trip to a museum in Milwaukee) where I have the graduated transparency in effect. In that one, because the top image is only at like 3% transparency, you can't distinguish the layer order as much. (If you couldn't tell from the image on the left, it is definitely the skull image on top, followed closely by a building.)

Hope this is getting close to the effect you are aiming for, I think it looks pretty cool.

[jonbalza]

CRAP! I forgot the stupid image.

--- really, I'm not spamming. ;}

[Love Has No Logic]

It's not exactly what I was looking for, but definitely I'll be able to work with this technique. Using some filters and blending modes and other stuff along with brushes and touching up I think I can get close to the texture that I am looking for. Amazing, all of this for a background. If I can get something I like I'll post it along with SMALL versions of the original photos. Once again, I can'ty say it enough. Thanks for the help.

Mike

[venivedi]

Though late too much, what about using Apply Image(for blending among layers, images, channels)?
By the way, Love Has No Logic, have you find a clue for that matter?

[Love Has No Logic]

I never found a way to do it with photoshop, so I did it traditionally using acetate, paint thinner and color printouts and transparencies. In the end we ended up going with a different idea for the layout so it was all for not. Anyways, sometimes the quickest, easiest way to do something is to do it by hand.

Mike

[venivedi]

I agree.
Sometimes by hand sometimes by mouse or tablet~

I would love to see your outcome, too. That would be appreciate if you don't mind. ^^*