The short story is, I have lots of images that need to have uniform looking brightness/contrast levels. Is there a plugin or technique to do this in either Photoshop or AfterFX without having to eyeball every single one and guess if the group is uniform? The starting images all have different brightness/contrast levels to begin with.
The long story is…
I have some X-Rays and Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) that I got into the computer using a light table and a digital camera because the scanner was having trouble capturing the transparency. I got the idea of putting the MRI brain scans in sequence and creating some cool clips of the MRI scanning through brain slices. So I got all the brain pictures cropped up, saved as individual files, and then aligned them in Photoshop. Then I dumped all the layers to AfterFX and wooshed through them quick. It looks soooo cool and did just what I thought it would.
Theres just one thing I didn’t account for…
My problem is, the images change brightness over time and flicker when the clip is played, because they were shot off a light table. Theres a lot of images and it would take some serious time to adjust the brightness/contrast on all of them by hand and try to make them look uniform. So is there a plugin or method for Photoshop or AfterFX that can do just that?
i would try to use after effects to adjust the brightness/contrast of the images be much more easier. Not too sure if there is a normaliser (make ever image the same) in AE, but i can suggest to precomp the images into one compostion, then import that compostion into your main compostion and apply the brightness and contrast on that imported composition.
hope that helps
–when you get it done, post a link to it, i wouldnt mind checking it out.
Thanks everyone,
I just needed some leads. I’ll try out some of those ideas and post an animated .gif or .swf or something to show. It has so much potential if it just doesn’t flicker. We’ll see.
Just thought I’d follow up w/ this thread. Heres the final result… idk, I think in adjusting the bright/cont. it lost a lot of it’s energy. Maybe if I size it down it’ll make a nice Flash preloader.
I ended up just biting the bullet and adjusting the bright/cont. and hue 1 layer at a time. I think its true of most people here that when something is finished you don’t really think about the work. You think about how cool it looks.
I might have another problem now though. That swf is 17kb. Is that too large for a preloader? If so, how can I reduce the filesize? Theres 15 individual images there that I have to work with.
Importing images is a little bit new to me, I usually just do everything within Flash. So does Flash recompress the images regardless of how large they are (filesize) to begin with? I’m semi-lost.
yeah flash compresses the image and usually by default use Lossleess/gif compression with smoothing, to get to this go to your library (ctl l) then right click on the source image, go to properties from there you can test your setting to see how large the file size of that image is compressed and normal, play around with the settings to find the best file size to quality ratio. For this i think you would be able to use Gif, take smoothing off and the files size should be small enough, if not try jpeg and untick use default jpg compression and play around with the percentages.
17kb might be too large for a preloader, but i am pretty sure you can get that file size down.