Image Effects, Filters, Masks and Other Image Processing Methods

Restoring your family photos with photo editing software is fun, exciting and rewarding, especially if you use these five tips to increase your success.

Use the Clone Tool
If your photos are plagued with dust, scratches, creases or old boyfriends, then the clone tool is about to become your best friend. Most photo editing programs include a clone or rubber stamp tool that can be used to remove unwanted objects, like your ex, or to patch up ruined parts of a photo. Great advances have been made in object removal over the past few years, most notably in the content-aware functions. Content-aware means that the program takes into consideration the surrounding environment – the colors, tones and objects – and renders a repair as close as possible. This makes it very easy to fill in places and remove unwanted objects and people. It can take some time to get used to how these restoration tools work, so be sure to play around and get some experience.

The new releases come less than 12 months after the last major updates, but offer competitively priced upgrades that are less than half the price of the full versions at $29.99 and $59.99 respectively.

The new releases include a number of additional editing tools and filters in addition to a tweaked user interface and enhancements to key areas such as image management.

Both tools gain a new Radial Gradient tool, which can be applied to other editing effects to subtly progress across the user’s photo. Uses for the tool include off-centre and multiple vignettes and drawing focus to a specific object. ACDSee Pro also adds a similar Linear Gradient tool.

Other new features common to both applications include a new Home base allowing users to create multiple ACDSee databases, an improved user interface placing photos firmly at its centre, the ability to find images with no assigned keywords and support for the new WebP format.

ACDSee Pro 7 users gain a large number of exclusive new features on top of these updates. Chief among these is support for non-destructive photo repairing using the program’s Heal and Clone options to erase dirt, dust and other unwanted objects.

Also new in version 7 is a sharpen/blur brush, allowing users to selectively paint over parts of an image to bring them into (or out of) focus. These are joined by a Detail brush, which works in a similar way to dodge and burn tools by accenting specific details via the stroke of a brush. Users can emphasise parts of an image by repeatedly brushing over the same area.

In this tutorial, we will show you 4 ways that you can create long shadow effects in Photoshop. Part of the recent, "flat design" trend, long shadow effects are a popular but not necessarily new phenomenon. The trend's strongest impact seems to be on interface design elements and icons but it is being increasingly used as part of web designs, as well. 

There are many great books and tutorials about Photoshop but I want to talk briefly about a few of the essential elements of the program which make it such a revolutionary and essential part of my creative work.
The newest flashy features are always fun to play with, but the continuing strength of the program has much more to do with the long established tools that have been refined over the years, but in their simplest form remain the core of this magical window on photography.  My goal is not to provide detailed tutorials, but to help those unfamiliar with the program to develop an appreciation of its power and to understand why it is worth the effort to incorporate it into their creative process.  Full versions of Photoshop come with a substantial sticker shock, but most of what I will be discussing can be done in Photoshop Elements and a variety of other editing programs for a substantially reduced cost.

Adjustment layers work in the same way as Image Layers but they contain processing instructions rather than pixels. An Adjustment

layer may be used to modify the appearance of the underlying image layer(s) in a broad range of ways.

Layer Masks are not actual independent layers but are best thought of as a window placed over an Image or Adjustment Layer to control how it is seen.  The basic rule

is, "White reveals, Black conceals".

We at Synthesis Corporation, a company originally born as a primarily hardware-oriented developer of custom image processing Intellectual Property, have been aware of this trend, and have been working in close collaboration with ARM to port and optimize our image processing algorithms to the Mali™-T600 series of GPUs. Mali-T600 represents the state-of-the-art in GPU architecture for mobile devices, with support for OpenGL® ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, OpenCL® Full Profile and Google® RenderScript, offering the software developer support for a wide range of APIs for graphics and compute.

As a first step, we have decided to port our proprietary Super-resolution (up-scaling) and adaptive luminance/dynamic range enhancement algorithms, both of which have seen a number of design-wins in FPGA and ASIC-based products for industrial and consumer applications, but turned out to be too computationally expensive for customers who wanted an embedded software-based solution. In this blog, we would like to present an overview of these two GPU-based solutions, and report the great performance benefits achieved through optimizing these for Mali-T600 GPU Compute.

Super-resolution scaling
A digital image, or a video frame, usually consists of a 2D array of discrete sample pixels, which can only be properly displayed at a fixed screen resolution. However, screen resolution tends to vary widely across platforms, especially for mobile devices, thus making sharing of digital media content across different platforms non-trivial.

Another interesting image hover effect using simple HTML and CSS coding. Some of the effects in that page will not work to due to blogger template but it will work 100% if you implement it separately. This was all about swiping image hover feects using simple CSS programming. The idea behind this was using a background image below the original image and swipe it, when hove and display are in the background image.