August 18, 2004

  • I asked what people liked to see here, and some folks said they liked geeky stuff and photography stuff. Well, here's some geeky photography stuff:

    I spent a bit of time playing around with Lynkeos, which looks promising for what I want to do (stack images and do math on them). I loaded in a few 5-meg image files, though, and it subsequently RAM-swapped and ate up all my hard drive space. It was designed by a guy who wanted to stack tiny images retrieved from his homemade webcam/Newtonian telescope contraption (which he says has a focal length of over 3 meters, which I think is kind of cool).

    But some more searching led me to: VIPS, which is an LGPL/GPL application that is described as a combination of Excel and Photoshop. You give it a bunch of images and then define mathmatical relationships between them. Apparently major museums are using it to... Well, I don't quite understand everything they're using it for, but could a painter in, say, the 1600s ever in his wildest dreams imagine that his painting would sit before a huge contraption that collects digital color information at 20 pixels per millimeter so that people all over the world can see it over the internet? VIPS links to this huge contraption, so no doubt they're using VIPS to stitch the sections of captured painting back together in the computer.