At 6:47 PM -0800 2/9/00, Gregg Iverson <giverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Giles wrote:
Heres the tricky bit to explain. - Now if you can imagine that all out of
focus elements in a photo have been rendered by a hexagonal aperture,
then one effect will be that all elements have been vaguely shaped as
hexagons - I don't mean that the whole out of focus area will appear as a
myriad of distinct hexagons, because in most circumstances it wont as
there are so many of them (infinite?) and they are all very blurred.
However, all these hexagons, though individually indistinct will have a
cumulative effect that the brain picks up on because there will be a
myriad of lines which are all parallel to each other. I probably haven't
explained this very well.
I wonder if shapes that tessellate produce more pleasing effects?
I believe the impressionist painter Seurat painted with distinct dots of
colour which up close look like dots but when viewed from a distance an
image formes as the brain integrates the distinct elements to form a
recognizable image. I think if the dots of paints were triangles - all
perfectly aligned so that all equivalent sides were parallel to each other
then one stepped back - an image would still form but it would seem to have
a different quality to it than one composed of round dots.
I've seen nice murals done with different horizontal lengths of paint
applied straight from the tube. Made for a TV type look to the mural.
It's just a theory.
How do we test it?
It should be relatively simple to do a simple-minded version of this by
using a paint program and building a series of paintbrushes of the appropriate
shape (hex or octagon or whatever) with intensity/opacity/saturation varying
inversely according to size. Stuff in focus gets drawn with the tiniest
brush, and stuff in the out-of-focus foreground or background gets painted
with the larger brushes depending on how out-of-focus it should be....
My guess is that the quality of the bokeh should vary according to how
consistently the aperture renders borders of varying orientations -- and
that probably if you look carefully some of the issues of bokeh quality
depend on the out-of-focus objects themselves, with some shapes and levels
of contrast rendering particularly well or badly with a particular aperture
shape.
paul
Paul Wallich pw@xxxxxxxxx
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