Adobe to the Rescue

Office planned to ensure a lot of work, but with the ongoing release celebrations and rampant holidays, "work" just seemed to work as a past time in the overburdened spree of past-time activities and the likes.

We did have enough fruitless discussions over the oncoming "work" activities for the forthcoming releases, but effortlessly sacked them to the backyard.

In these "flurry" of events, everyone had their own way of keeping themselves occupied, may it be from my group or others. Some engaged in searching for lands and plots for investment purposes, using the ever friendly and extremely infections "Google Earth", some used this time to get back to their last family lives, some engaging in "mission" activities, others found peace in strengthening their financial image and technical skills on freelancing.

For me it was a little of all and getting back to one of my much liked hobby and activity- Art. Well now that I live in the computer era and a so called geek by standards (and my hairstyle), and that painting dubs and finger sketching in he office spelt odd, computer generated art seemed to rhyme perfect.

I could have got down to generating 3D landscapes and sceneries through code, but that did not guarantee any completion since I could be whisked off my carpet anytime into "work world". Tool-based image generation, animation etc. was the only way to get around it.

Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint/Draw, Paintshop, Gimp etc. were a few image processing, generation tools I was pretty much well versed with ever since my college days. Overtime, due to availability and ease, I got more and more attached and comfortable with Adobe. Not that- others are bad, just that my office owned a legal copy of Adobe and I had hardly ever worked on the other softwares since college days.

There was another reason for my affinity towards image processing. I was always (and am still) a great fan of computer generated graphics- may it be games, movies, 3d models you name it I love it!

Back when I was in 7th grade (1990), I had frequent visits to Mumbai (nearly once in 3 weeks) and stay at my Aunt's place. They had this 386 computer. It was one of the costliest and most expensive machines at that time. For me it was always the DOS based game-station for the "Prince" or "cat" game. I always wondered how these images came up on screen and performed stuff commanded through the keyboard. I issued this "type" command on the "prince.exe" file once, and saw all those smiling faces and weird Aztec characters on screen, and wondered is that what they call computer language- a language that’s very much different from english and much an upcoming field. Is that what they teach in those "new" computer academies- the language of smiling faces and Aztec characters! I relished imagining myself coding Faces and Aztec on a "bulb monitor" and generated a game in which a person looking like "the prince" had a rifle and shot some birds from the tree. I knew I had to do something in the field of computers. That’s how I landed up in the course of Computer Engineering- in envy for graphics and its likes.

That was the very reason I always wanted to do a project based on computer graphics for my engineering course. I never, for some reason was deeply attracted towards images or their processing activities. Not that I hated it, it sure was one of my likable topics. The topics I loved the most were also amongst the topics I learnt (syllabus/course wise) the least- Graphics, D.S.P., image processing. My technical presentation (as part of the final course) involved a topic on "Virtual reality", while doing this I learnt how the world of computer rendered graphics, image processing sub-systems, video and sound processing all worked hand-in-hand to create the perfect user experience.

User experience, this was something no one at college level would even ever bother about. That's why I guess, its one of the many reasons why subjects like Software engineering are amongst the least likable and most mug-able. But in course of researching "Virtual reality", I got a hint of what user experience would mean, if not in totality.

The engineering project we (me and my two counterparts- Mangesh and Sandeep) finally had to settle for was in the area of Text Recognition (OCR- Optical Character Recognition). This topic dealt with the fundamentals of image processing, the subject we knew nothing about (that’s the very reason why it turned out to be one of the most exiting subjects we ever learnt in our four years of engineering course). Everyone in this group had little or more knowledge about image processing tools mentions earlier, which made it even more exiting to implement those tool-effects using our very own lines code on to images. What added 3 cheers to our project was - A MAIL.

Everyone would have played the game of DOOM and QUAKE. One of the creators and masterminds behind the free flowing graphics for these games was Michael Abrash. We knew we had to ask him or take some advice from him about our project, picked up his mail-id from one of his books -"The Graphics Programming Black Book". No one expected a reply, considering the fact that he would be a big personality after the release of these games. But within a few hours we got a mail from the man himself. He said he had not much knowledge in the field of image processing, but pointed us to some resouces (user groups) in the same field, and bid us his well wishes in the success of our project. That was enough to move on this project, with amazing guidance from Dr. Sampath- our project guide, to successful completion.

Now you know I am very much a computer graphics geek. And yes back in engineering days, by friends recognized me as one of "The Graphics Man". I always loved "Graphics" and my name/nick "Vindy" taken side-to-side.

But as things had it, I have never done one piece of Graphics coding or activity as part of my six year professional experience. Sure, I would engage in graphic coding or image-tool endeavors just to keep my spirits high.

Now that’s what I had to do in this time of "past-times". Adobe came to the rescue. Photo enhancements and basic filter effects were not alien to me, but none of the filters advanced filters confluence was of clear knowledge. This is where the various communities Eg. Orkut etc. came to the rescue offering a range of e-books and the internet world presented an array of sites, that had step to step and crystal clear explanation of the various filter effects and their confluence.

What the image variations filter meant was a self learnt course for me. But getting at par with Layers with color variation, curves, hues, contrast, brightness etc. overlays was made clear through a couple of tutorials. Filter management using a conjunction Clouds, Difference Clouds, lens flares, ripple, chrome, dust. glowing edge etc. effects led to an array of outstanding images that at one time seemed to me was only possible by through complex computer code execution (Sure the tool it self is a piece of code, but what I imagined was- it was possible only though hours of complex instructions and execution).

Ponds, wonder clouds, matrix style, backlight, old photo-type backlights, fantabulous text effects and many effect generations became clearer and clearer to me though its repeated use.

For me, now, gimme a photo and its just as effortless and easy to understand what sort of effects are to be driven into the image to give it that weird and amazing look :).