Levels control shader

A little piece of code to reproduce the Levels control of Photoshop…

Input levels:

I already talked about the gamma correction (mid-tone slider), and I won’t explain what the shadows and highlights (black/white points) sliders are doing (excellent article here) but basically these can be used to remap the tonal range of the image. Here is how it’s calculated:

#define GammaCorrection(color, gamma)  pow(color, vec3(1.0 / gamma))
#define LevelsControlInputRange(color, minInput, maxInput) min(max(color – vec3(minInput), vec3(0.0)) / (vec3(maxInput) – vec3(minInput)), vec3(1.0))
#define LevelsControlInput(color, minInput, gamma, maxInput) GammaCorrection(LevelsControlInputRange(color, minInput, maxInput), gamma)

Example with values from the 1st screenshot (blackpoint = 90/255, gamma = 4, whitepoint = 150/255), red: original color, green: blackpoint & whitepoint modified, blue: same with gamma:

Output levels:

This is useful to shorten the tonal range meaning compressing it to reduce contrast and shift it, details here.

#define LevelsControlOutputRange(color, minOutput, maxOutput) mix(vec3(minOutput), vec3(maxOutput), color)

Example with values from the 1st screenshot (min output = 40/255, max output = 180/255), red: original color, green: output levels applied:

Putting it all together:

#define LevelsControl(color, minInput, gamma, maxInput, minOutput, maxOutput) LevelsControlOutputRange(LevelsControlInput(color, minInput, gamma, maxInput), minOutput, maxOutput)

Same example but both input and output levels taken into account, red: original color, green: final result:

So these macros make it quite easy to increase or reduce contrast, shift and clip tonal range, lighten or darken shadows and highlights. I added the (GLSL / HLSL) code to the Photoshop Math shaders.

Photoshop gamma correction shader

After reproducing contrast, hue, saturation, brightness controls of Photoshop in pixel shaders, here is the gamma correction filter

Photoshop

There are 2 ways of changing gamma in Photoshop:

• Image | Adjustments | Exposure…
• Image | Adjustments | Levels… (or CTRL+L) and then move the midtone slider.

Gamma correction is not the same thing than Brightness at all, even if it can give the impression it is. For example here is the histogram of my original image:

Then after setting the gamma to 0.5 (it compresses the highlights and stretches the shadows):

And here it is after lowering the brightness (Image | Adjustments | Brightness/Contrast…):

Here you can see it clipped the values after some threshold in the shadows (and also in the highlights) and you’re loosing a lot of lighting information in this case. That’s actually why I wanted to have also a gamma control in my post-processing effects.

Shader

A little macro:

// Gamma from 9.99 to 0.1
#define GammaCorrection(color, gamma)   pow(color, 1.0 / (gamma))

color = GammaCorrection(color, 0.1);

Here are the curves it produces with extreme values (limits of Photoshop [9.99, 0.1]):

So you see it stays in the same range and give a non-linear luminance (if correction value is different than 1). By the way I used this awesome web function grapher here.

By zooming and taking a very close look I noticed a few tiny differences with Photoshop in the shadows (seriously you need to toggle screenshot from shader and photoshopped image quickly and scan the image to see where it’s not the same). Photoshop on the left, shader version on the right (gamma = 0.1).

I also saw that the gamma in Photoshop (on the left) produced some banding artefacts somewhere, and it didn’t in my shader (on the right),  well.. :

I added the code in my Photoshop Math (GLSL/HLSL) shaders.

Photoshop math with HLSL shaders

See my original post about Photoshop math in GLSL (blending modes, contrast, desaturation, RGB to HSL). Now it’s also in HLSL!

Download PhotoshopMath.hlsl

Photoshop math with GLSL shaders

I usualy play with Photoshop to try post-processing effects on photos or game screenshots, it’s a lot faster than coding directly anything in shaders, but at the end I wanted to see my effects running in real-time. So I adapted a big part of the C-like code from this famous Photoshop blending mode math page + missing blending modes to GLSL (and now HLSL!) code and I added a few other useful things from Photoshop, such as Hue/Saturation/Luminance conversion, desaturation, contrast.

For example, I tried combining a few things in my Editor:

Translating Photoshop operations on layers gives this kind of code:

uniform sampler2D Tex;
uniform sampler1D GradientMap;
uniform sampler1D GradientGround;

varying vec2 uv;

void main()
{

vec3 color = texture2D(Tex, uv).xyz;

// Split-tone
vec4 colorDesat = Desaturate(color, 1.0);
vec3 splitColor = texture1D(GradientMap, colorDesat.r).rgb;
vec3 pass1 = BlendColor(color, splitColor);

// Vertical gradient
vec4 verticalGradientColor = texture1D(GradientGround, uv.y);
vec3 pass2 = mix(pass1, BlendColor(pass1, verticalGradientColor.rgb), verticalGradientColor.a);

// Luminosity
vec3 pass3 = mix(pass2, BlendLuminosity(pass2, color + vec3(0.08)), 0.5);

// Linear light at 40%
vec3 pass4 = mix(pass3, BlendLinearLight(pass3, color), 0.4);

// Final
gl_FragColor = vec4(pass4, 1.0);

}

Here is the list of blending modes and functions I got:

Blending modes:

• Normal
• Lighten
• Darken
• Multiply
• Average
• Add
• Substract
• Difference
• Negation
• Exclusion
• Screen
• Overlay
• SoftLight
• HardLight
• ColorDodge
• ColorBurn
• LinearDodge
• LinearBurn
• LinearLight
• VividLight
• PinLight
• HardMix
• Reflect
• Glow
• Phoenix
• Hue
• Saturation
• Color
• Luminosity

Functions:

• Desaturation
• RGBToHSL (RGB to Hue/Saturation/Luminance)
• HSLToRGB (Hue/Saturation/Luminance to RGB)
• Contrast

Here is my GLSL code, almost all the blending modes are macros and some do per-channel operation so it could run faster using vector operations with masks (to take into account the values per component), but still I guess it could help

Download PhotoshopMath.glsl

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Update:

Oh and by the way you noticed the Split-Tone pass in my example:

// Split-tone
vec4 colorDesat = Desaturate(color, 1.0);
vec3 splitColor = texture1D(GradientMap, colorDesat.r).rgb;
vec3 result = BlendColor(color, splitColor);

It’s just the same thing than the Gradient Map… of the Create new fill or adjustment layer in Photoshop but blended in Color mode, which reminds me Color Temperature and Cross-Processing effects

–

Update:

I updated the .glsl file, because I forgot a line in the ContrastSaturationBrightness() function and I had some issues on specific hardware due to conditional returns, so now it’s fixed.

And now, here is the HLSL version

Download PhotoshopMath.hlsl

Real-Time Peter de Jong Attractors

A simple B&W version. Again, everything is done on the CPU, running at 80fps on my single core 3500+. 10000 iterations per frame. Random but still a bit too cyclic due to my way of changing the attractor’s parameters (almost same frequency and amplitude a bit too extreme causing these empty frames). It also does produce blank frames with specific parameter values (not necessarily extremes), wonder if that’s the same with Clifford attractors.

Attractors & Quartz Composer

I’ve been playing a bit more with NodeBox the other day, trying to render Peter De Jong attractors. Something I already tried in my (unnamed) Editor with Ogre. Here is a video my first real-time experiment with Ogre (30FPS on a 3500+, don’t care about the GPU since the attractors iterations run on the CPU):

Actually I accelerated the video 3x the normal speed.

So, I tried to do it another way with NodeBox and I started from this little code (thanks btw) and made things animated and exported to a movie (things like this go very slow in real-time with this tool):

And then during a right click / Open with … I just remembered I had Quartz Composer. I had no idea how it works but this is actually the kind of tool I was looking for lately Here are 2 quick tests I made from my previous B&W video:

A few simple image operators and blending patches and we’re done.

Experimenting NodeBox

Heya! I recently discovered NodeBox, amazing software dedicated to computational art / creative & generative programming. I’m not gonna (re-)present anything about it, but here are some videos of my first two attempts with this fantastic tool.

Just changed 1 or 2 things from this little tutorial. If you keep looking at the center point, after watching the video, you’ll see the stopped image rotating in the inverse direction, heh.

The next one is another variation with some colors and cubes, and just a different way to rotate some objects.

CrossProcessing shader

Hi ! I’m doing a lot of image processing at work since a few weeks, and there a lots of things I wanna try, from post processes to dynamic geometry, but I would need another life for that. After having watched some (really nice) super cars videos (just check at the first one showing the Corvette to see what I mean), I’ve been talking with Nico about the Cross Processing effect, also called xpro, used in photography, and probably in the Corvette video.

After a quick talk (thanks) I made a simple pixel shader that post process a given scene with this nice effect

I followed this Photoshop tutorial to make it, here are the steps to work with the shader:

• Make a black-to-white gradient
• Add a New fill or adjustment layer, select Curves, and set the curves just like in the tutorial

• Save the 1D image, it’ll be used in the pixel shader just like a curve modifier
• Modify the final color of your pixels with this (GLSL) code:

vec3 curvesColor;

curvesColor.r = texture1D(curveTex, pixelColor.r ).r;
curvesColor.g = texture1D(curveTex, pixelColor.g).g;
curvesColor.b = texture1D(curveTex, pixelColor.b).b;

gl_FragColor.rgb = curvesColor;

And voila ! Here are some screenshots I took in Reverse (my end of studies project [team of 6 students]), maybe not the best example for this kind of effect but anyway:

Without

Without

With

With

With

With

In fact it makes me think about color temperature again, but this time the color is modifyed per channel and is dependent to the color components themselves instead of the luminance component of the pixel.

One more screen with all the effects combined during turbo (dolly zoom, desaturation, radial motion blur):

With

Well, I guess these are the first public screenshots of the final version of the game

Oh and by the way …

Kinda color temperature

Hi all, I’m not dead.

I saw an interesting image the other day, that directly made me think about the color temperature concept. It comes from the game Fallen Empire: Legions, upcoming Tribes clone running in a web browser on instantaction.com. It produces another interesting effect, because it seems to use another color palette and still link it to the luminance of the object’s pixels.

Maybe they’re not doing anything like this to get this particular lighting and they are using multiple lights or even any photoshop treatment, but it could be and that’s the way I interpreted it

Patriotic