Group cropping

[jackamus]

Is it possible to crop about 20 grouped rectangles, all slightly different size, to a common cropped size?

[Leigh]

I presume you're using Designer. so you could use Layer Clipping to do this. You could create a new Vector Layer and create a single rectangle to the size you want the crop to be and duplicate this rectangle over all the objects you want to crop. You can then clip the Vector Layer to the Group of rectangles. Alternatively, you could clip each rectangle in the Group separately.

 

If you attach your file, we will be able to see what you're trying to achieve and hopefully help you further :)

[jackamus]

Hi Leigh,

I have 26 photos which are basically time-lapse but they were taken by a camera that wasn't always in exactly the same position. These are progress photos of a painting I have done and I want to create a kind of time-lapse video. I have some software that will allow me to do that but unless all the images are exactly the same size the software will stretch the image to fit. This causes the image in the finished video to 'wobble'.

 

The problem now is that I did manually crop them using AD and produced a reasonable video. However if it helps I have attached a Dropbox link to an AD file where you can resize them to recreate the original cropping problem.

 

There is another aspect to cropping and that is the car must always be in the same place withing the cropped area. Again I manually adjusted this using AD.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gobsym9bw9l4ghj/Cropping%20test.afdesign?dl=0

 

 

 

[DavidMac]

Hi Jackamus

 

I took a look at your file. If have understood your requirement correctly, this sounds less to me like a cropping problem than a registration problem.

 

If you can get the car in perfect registration so it doesn't move then everything else should register fine as well and cropping should not be necessary.

Here is my suggestion:

 

Turn off visibility in all but the bottom two layers. Set layer 2 to something like 50% opacity. You can now use the arrow keys and tiny adjustments of the bounding box handles to stretch, squeeze or rotate. to get layer two perfectly registered over layer one. I won't pretend it will be easy - it will likely be very fiddly, but it should be entirely achievable.

 

Once you are happy with the first registration set layer 2 to full opacity turn on layer 3 visibility, set to 50% and repeat the registration ...... and so ad nauseam until you have registered all layers. You should now have a perfectly static car and in theory, if the car is registered, so should the edges of the coloured background be registered too.

 

That's my best guess at this ....... 

 

Good luck

 

David Mac

[jackamus]

Hi David,

'Registration' that's the word I should have been using! Thanks for that but I did do something similar however I will go back and try it the way you have suggested.

[DavidMac]

Then I think you did the right thing. It's just going to be murderously fiddly.

[jackamus]

I think you are right. I did try it and as you say it is fiddly. I will leave it and make sure that when I do my next painting I will make sure I photograph it accurately.

[DavidMac]

I think you are right. I did try it and as you say it is fiddly. I will leave it and make sure that when I do my next painting I will make sure I photograph it accurately.

 

 

It occurs to me that you may be able to ameliorate the problem by using what in the movie business we call "soft cuts". That is say, when you make your final video, using a very short dissolve of five to ten frames between each image instead of a hard cut. It's not a cure - it's a disguise. But it may help.

 

Certainly clean registration of the originals by carefully measured camera position exactly centred on the picture will save a lot of heartache. This also applies to the lighting which should be equally as consistent as possible and even across all the picture so you don't get brightness changes in parts of the image from one shot to the next. Easiest way to do this is in a darkened room with two lamps of equal brightness either side of camera at about 45° to the your picture. This will avoid hot spots from reflections of the lamps. Keep them some distance away, if they are too close the outside edges of the picture will have a tendency to be brighter than the centre. One simple way to check even lighting is to hold up a finger in front of the picture. It will cast two shadows. As you move your finger from side to side across the picture the two shadows should stay the same brightness. Try and adjust your lamps to achieve this. I do this often when lighting green screens for effects work. Its crude but quite effective. 

 

Obviously if you have an incident light meter than you can measure the brightness across the image. But they are not something found in the average toolbox!

 

Very best of luck.

 

David Mac

[jackamus]

Hi David,

Actually I have already considered much of what you have suggested except for the two lights. This is not going to be very practical for me. I think my easiest option to achieve even lighting is to use a flash. At the moment, although it is a cheap digital camera, it does have a 'Fill-in' flash feature. This tends to remove the uneven lighting caused by the window in my studio. However this is my second trial on a new painting.

I can't use a tripod as my studio is not large enough so I have a wooden bar, with the camera firmly attached, which I place across the door frame at the same height every time and pointing at the centre of the painting. When I've finished the painting I'll check out the results on my computer.

[DavidMac]

Sounds fine. I can tell you even with the most sophisticated equipment we end up improvising with stuff lashed and clamped to bits of wood!

 

Just watch if your flash is close to the lens that it doesn't reflect in the painting if you are using media that have any shine.

 

My wife's cheap little pocket Ixus camera has an item in the menu that displays a grid in the viewfinder. Very useful for alignment. Might be worth a check.

[Alfred]

My wife's cheap little pocket Ixus camera ...

 

I guess it's all relative, but are any Ixus cameras really "cheap"? :unsure:

[DavidMac]

I guess it's all relative, but are any Ixus cameras really "cheap"? :unsure:

 

:D  :D  :D  :D

[jackamus]

My £60 Samsung camera (not smart phone! I might add) has an alignment grid too.

No flash hot-spots as I only gloss varnish the painting when I am totally finished.

 

I have another bridge camera (Panasonic FZ72) which has a good feature in that it can be set to always return to the last zoom position when switching on. With my Samsung I have to reset the zoom each time which, if not careful, can add to the final 'registration' problem of the photos.

Another problem is, even with two cameras, one will always be out of action for the duration of the project.

 

What I really need is a cheap camera that has a return to zoom feature. Curry's tell me it is only Panasonic that does it - unless some one knows different?

[DavidMac]

OK. One last suggestion then I will leave you alone. Ask around your friends and, in all probability, you will find one who has an old 35mm camera with a fixed lens (probably a 50mm) gathering dust unloved in a drawer somewhere that they would lend you for a while. It can be very basic. You don't need a sophisticated model. Many photo processors provide a transfer from film to digital. If your studio set up permits you can simply leave the camera bolted to some nice rigid surface where it cannot move and set up a fixed board with precise registration marks for the picture placement. No zoom problem, and neither of your digital camera's tied up. You get 36 shots without having to re-load or move it. Here in Brussels you can find these cheap in the flea markets too.

 

Just an idle thought .......

Now I shall finally leave you in peace.  :)  :)

[jackamus]

I appreciate the thought and help you are offering but in this particular case this is a step too far.

 

There is one thing I will try with my cheap Samsung camera and that is not to use the zoom (2.5 X) but simply set the camera to maximum resolution (16mpixels) which should give me a final lower resolution of 6.4 million. This should be good enough for time-lapse video.

[DavidMac]

Excellent idea!

 

6.4 MPixels is plenty! Most movies for cinema are finished in 2K resolution - that is to say 2048 pixel width. That's about 3.15 MPixels.

[jackamus]

That about wraps up this thread!

[DavidMac]

Yep!!!

[DavidMac]

On looking at this thread to today I was absolutely appalled. I was genuinely intrigued by your problem but I crossed the line from being helpful to be being boorish and far, far worse, patronising. I am truly chagrined.

 

On a positive note, I have learned a lesson the hard way - by making an ass of myself. I won't do it again.

 

Please accept my apologies.

[jackamus]

I've no idea what you are talking about! I appreciated all that you said.

[DavidMac]

Thank you. But I said too much ........  :)

[DavidMac]

Well I really didn’t expect to be popping up on this subject again but a completely serendipitous coincidence may have provided the perfect solution to your problem!

 

This morning I started looking at HDR and Focus Merging in Affinity Photo. I had never looked at these before because they are not something I am likely to need, but I wanted to find out more from simple curiosity. 

 

The opening procedure for these is something called stacking. Essentially stacking is the loading of multiple images from one camera position - each one to its own layer and automatically aligning them with each other precisely. It occurred to me immediately that this is exactly what you are looking for!

 

So I decided to give it a try. I exported the layers from your designer file to separate PNG files and imported them into a stack in Affinity photo. It took Photo about a minute and it’s done a remarkably good job of aligning them. I didn’t have to do a thing!

 

I’ve ported the resultant layers back to Designer so you can take a look. You will see that aligning the car has caused the edges of the background to move from one layer to another so you will need to apply a constant mask or crop to get rid of that - but that’s a simple procedure.

 

I’ll upload the file and PM you a link to so you can take a look. You will need the beta release designer to open it. 

 

So if you intend to do many of these, and you don’t have it yet, it might well be worth a look at Affinity Photo. If you go here Aligning Images you can watch a short tutorial that shows you how simple the procedure is.

 

Once you’ve looked at the file do let me know what you think.

[jackamus]

David,

I downloaded the file you sent me and I need to know how this was done? It looked very good!

[jackamus]

Sorry David, I have just read you last post and I will be looking at the video tutorial on Stacking in AP.

[jackamus]

I have just watched the video and I will have to have a go with this on a new set of images.