‘Old Da Vinci’ Art Cam mode

Latest painting mode implemented in my Art Cam app, giving the look of an old cracked oil painting.

The shots of the park and trees make use of a an exposure lock feature I just built in too – I can point the phone to a bright part of the sky, lock the exposure, and then recompose the shot lower down on some shaded glade areas in the trees – picking up some nice shadows and warm evening greens and highlights.

Suprisingly I’m still not playing around with colorzing the palette – the painting algorithms seem to do a good job of taking the actual image from the camera and reproducing the colors in an artistic way without actually changing the color. One aspect of this is perhaps how the video noise (fluxuations in RGB values based on thermal interference etc) combined with the space/color averaging technique from my Mosaic code, are naturally creating an artistic impression of the colors.

I’m having a lot of fun going about taking snaps like this, as immediate ‘paintings’.  You’re constantly looking at the world through an impression of it, which subtly is synthesizing the notion of art and photography.  Painters after all strive to give an impression of the real world through the veil of brush strokes and color mixing.  Why shouldn’t computer algorithms be doing the same?

Painting the moment

Trying out the first brush painting mode for my Art Cam app – it’s quite basic at the minute, but I’m happy with the results.

Decided to test drive it going out for a coffee and a stroll in the park on a sunny day.  The pics are taken like photographs, the iPhone paints the scene in real time, and hit camera button to take a snap.

It uses my mosaic code as the basis to analyse the incoming camera feed and average out similar areas of color into a single block.  A stamp of a simple brush sprite is then painted into the block according to the block size, and also with some randomisation of position to avoid ‘grid’ artifacts.  The smaller the block area, the less randomisation, so that some level of detail can be maintained.

There are no colorizing/palette fx yet on the images – these pics use the colors straight from the camera view, but I have some coloring algorithms done which I’ll be showing next, with hopefully some more development on the brushed painting mode too.

Zio now available free in iTunes UK

Zio is now available in both US/UK as a completely free app, go here:-

Zio in iTunes UK

Rest of world imminent!

Mondrian video filter

Was playing around today expanding my mosaic generating code into the style of classic Mondrian art.

The first thing was to clip all the colors coming in from the camera, so that anything approaching red,blue or yellow gets ramped up to a 100% bright/saturated hue, and everything else is either white or if very dark, black.

The gallery shows the original test photo, with the gradual abstraction and enlarging of the block sizes.

The Mondrian filter will be one of the many real time camera modes available in Art Cam.

Original photo

1st Level of abstraction

Progressively higher abstraction

Moving camera around picks up different compositions

Mosaic algorithms for Art Cam

This is quick a glimpse of the mosaic algorithm I’m working on at the minute for my next app Art Cam.

The first algorithms, seen on my previous post, were straight forward pointillism fx.  Eventually these and the mosaic fx will combine to create the various Art Cam modes for the first version.

The code basically tries to approximate the live camera view into blocks of similar color, from small to larger pieces, without overlapping, giving a tiling effect. I’m happy so far, but it still needs improvement.

‘Test Card’ for Art Cam