Posted by
dscho on
Oct 03, 2011; 1:16am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Image-Processing-in-Art-Is-Imagej-the-right-tool-tp3682462p3682470.html
Dear Derin,
On Sun, 2 Oct 2011, Derin Korman wrote:
> I am a Teaching Assistant at Harvard's Visual and Environmental studies
> and I have several projects that need image processing. They mainly
> revolve around Camera/Image culture, authorship, questions of
> singularity (not the positivist one).
>
> I have no previous programming experience apart from some Actionscript
> and modifying some github projects, I was wondering if you had a
> suggestion as to what language to learn. Processing offers some object
> import functions but I couldn't tell if it would suffice(if it does,
> that's great as it encompasses some libraries that would ease some
> work), ImageJ was recommended to my by Nitin Sampat, C++ naturally has
> various image processing libraries, Matlab I know to be very powerful
> but one might say it is too difficult a hill to climb before I reach
> image processing.
>
> example tasks: averaging 1000+ images, doing subtraction/difference
> calculation, generation of random images, and extracting sequential
> pixels/parts from images and combining them in another
> ([x1,x2,x3][y1,y2,y3][z1,z2,z3] -> [x1,y2,z3])
I agree with Leonardo that the easiest way to get started is by using
ImageJ's Macro language. The option to record macros from your mouse
clicks is not the least reason why it is convenient.
But I would also like to throw in a word of caution:
So far, ImageJ has mostly been used primarily in contexts where the pixel
intensities are more or less guaranteed to be linear with the values we
want to measure (e.g. photon counts in both biology and astronomy or
electron counts in material sciences).
However, when you are looking at works of art, at least a basic knowledge
of color spaces and color coding is necessary. See e.g.
http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html for a compelling demonstration
that we see something else than what we think we see.
That last point is probably extremely important for your averaging task to
avoid nasty surprises down the road.
Ciao,
Johannes