Enhancement and stylization of photographs

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-95).A photograph captured by a digital camera may be the final product for many casual photographers. However, for professional photographers, this photograph is only the beginning: experts often spend hours on enhancing and stylizing their photographs. These enhancements range from basic exposure and contrast adjustments to dramatic alterations. It is these enhancements - along with composition and timing - that distinguish the work of professionals and casual photographers. The goal of this thesis is to narrow the gap between casual and professional photographers. We aim to empower casual users with methods for making their photographs look better. Professional photographers could also benefit from our findings: our enhancement methods produce a better starting point for professional processing. We propose and evaluate three different methods for image enhancement and stylization. First method is based on photographic intuition and is fully automatic. The second method relies on expert's input for training; after the training this method can be used to automatically predict expert adjustments for previously unseen photographs. The third method uses a grammar-based representation to sample the space of image filter and relies on user input to select novel and interesting filters.by Vladimir Leonid Bychkovsky.Ph.D

Realtime Fewshot Portrait Stylization Based On Geometric Alignment

This paper presents a portrait stylization method designed for real-time mobile applications with limited style examples available. Previous learning based stylization methods suffer from the geometric and semantic gaps between portrait domain and style domain, which obstacles the style information to be correctly transferred to the portrait images, leading to poor stylization quality. Based on the geometric prior of human facial attributions, we propose to utilize geometric alignment to tackle this issue. Firstly, we apply Thin-Plate-Spline (TPS) on feature maps in the generator network and also directly to style images in pixel space, generating aligned portrait-style image pairs with identical landmarks, which closes the geometric gaps between two domains. Secondly, adversarial learning maps the textures and colors of portrait images to the style domain. Finally, geometric aware cycle consistency preserves the content and identity information unchanged, and deformation invariant constraint suppresses artifacts and distortions. Qualitative and quantitative comparison validate our method outperforms existing methods, and experiments proof our method could be trained with limited style examples (100 or less) in real-time (more than 40 FPS) on mobile devices. Ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of each component in the framework.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Of Ghosts and Garage Sales: The painted realizations of reflective nostalgia

Painted from the lost snapshot photograph collections of strangers, the Testimonial paintings represent both the mythical potential of earlier times and the maddening reality that no matter what details are revealed, they can only ever be ghosts of the glories and tragedies that preceded our own. In the search for their stories, for their truths, for their absent memories, everything and everyone that we could have known lies dormant. The ghosts, the legion of “selves” arise from the questions asked of the paintings, and through the invented answers that activate the fractured past. In order to do this, I analyze the concepts of postmemory and reflective nostalgia, exploring how they manifest as paintings

Literary Impressionisms. Resonances of Impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish Prose 1880-1900.

This dissertation aims to locate and draw out resonances of impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish prose at the end of the nineteenth century, a field hitherto overlooked in the critical debate on literary impressionism. Through the initial examination of the use of the term in an international context comprising the Scandinavian scene, the aim is to show the many alternative accesses to literary impressionism. By focusing on three landmark discussions on the theme in the Nordic countries of the late nineteenth-century (Herman Bang, the Kristiania Boh\ue8me, August Strindberg) the inclusive, wide-ranging Scandinavian understanding of the relationship between impressionism and literature is introduced. Accordingly, the texts thereafter chosen for closer scrutiny are intended to disclose this extensive interpretation of impressionist writing: Helena Westermarck\u2019s short story Aftonst\ue4mning (Evening Mood) from 1890 is read as an example of interart transposition, i.e., as a piece of prose adopting a theme, as well as the compositional aesthetics, of painterly impressionism; Stella Kleve\u2019s novels and short stories are instead seen as indicative of the narrative modes of a literary impressionism drawing on theatrical representation, as in Bang\u2019s impressionist poetics, but also present textual features such as the \u2018metonymic mode\u2019 and \u2018delayed decoding\u2019, elements central to the international approach to impressionist prose. The concluding analysis of fictional impressionists in the prose of authors such as Gustaf af Geijerstam, Mathilda Roos, and Georg Nordensvan advances a many-sided portrait of the impressionist painter while remaining true to this study\u2019s pluralistic approach to literary impressionism by including a discussion of K. A. Tavaststjerna\u2019s Impressionisten (The Impressionist) from 1892, whose protagonist is not an artist but a hypersensitive, impressionable subject. This last section also investigates how fiction is used to convey a critical discussion of the means and methods of painterly impressionism, as well as the function of the use of the visual arts in the texts

Literary impressionisms. Resonances of Impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish Prose 1880-1900

This book aims to locate and draw out resonances of impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish prose at the end of the nineteenth century, a field hitherto overlooked in the critical debate on literary impressionism. In order to frame the many alternative approaches to this issue, it examines the use of the term ‘literary impressionism’ not only on the Scandinavian scene but also in an international context. By focussing on three landmark discussions in the Nordic countries (Herman Bang, the Kristiania Bohème, August Strindberg), an inclusive, wide-ranging Scandinavian understanding of the relationship between impressionism and literature is advanced. The texts chosen for closer scrutiny disclose this extensive interpretation of impressionist writing: Helena Westermarck’s short story Aftonstämning (Evening Mood) from 1890 is read as an example of interart transposition, Stella Kleve’s novels and short stories are seen as indicative of the narrative modes of a literary impressionism drawing on scenic representation, but also present textual features such as the ‘metonymic mode’ and ‘delayed decoding’, elements that are central to the international approach to impressionist prose. The concluding analysis of fictional impressionists in the works of authors such as Gustaf af Geijerstam, Mathilda Roos, and Georg Nordensvan sketches a many-sided portrait of the impressionist painter while remaining true to this study’s pluralistic approach by including a discussion of K.A. Tavaststjerna’s Impressionisten (The Impressionist) from 1892, whose protagonist is not an artist but a hypersensitive, impressionable subject. This last section also investigates how fiction is used to convey a critical discussion of the means and methods of painterly impressionism, as well as the function of the use of the visual arts in these texts

A Lived-In Life

A Lived-In Life documents the creation of my thesis work and accompanying discoveries. The movement of Fauvism and artists Vincent van Gogh, Alice Neel and Henry Darger are named as historical inspirations. Contemporaries named as influential include female figurative painters Jenny Saville, Xenia Hausner, Hung Liu, Elizabeth Peyton and Anna Bjerger. I reflect on my position within contemporary art culture, placing myself between abstraction and photo realism. I discuss graduate school epiphanies on material, asserting my commitment to sustainable and safe practice. I address the historical use of photographic reference, as well as the role of photography in contemporary culture and how I approach it in my own work. Significant changes and decisions made in the months leading up to the show are discussed. These include elimination of projects created in New Forms, a change in printmaking technique, and the inclusion of artist books. The paper will also detail the multitude of artistic techniques learned throughout my time at RIT, specifically those techniques that were used in the creation of my thesis work