Butterface

So I just had a lot of fun stretching my ImSci muscles! Check out this awesome picture Bob and I made of ourselves:

Dr. Angry & Mr. Smile.

View the picture up close, and you see Bob smiling and laughing (or looking terrified, you be the judge). Now move farther and farther away, and Bob's face will disappear while my sad pouty face will become clear. (You can be lazy and see pretty much the same thing happen by looking at the picture and then squinting - but come on, is it that hard to get up out of your chair?) Awesome, huh?!? IMAGING SCIENCE!

I had a lot of fun putting this together, because I had to try a number of techniques to get a good final image. I had the most fun playing around with Fourier transforms in ImageJ and remembering how to manipulate them like I used to in Digital Image Processing classes. I forgot how entertaining and interesting that was, and it was way more fun to do the knitty gritty, behind-the-scenes image processing rather than just having some automatic filter do all the work for me. Though I guess that makes it more difficult when I could have taken an easier approach, but it's pretty eye-opening to perform the science behind the magic (and makes for a better blog post, let's face it.).

Now that I think about it, Bob should have been the one making the pouty face, since just before making this image he stepped on his $900 reading glasses and broke them...