mindboggling

Michael Zhang

These Photo Restorations May Boggle Your Mind

Tetyana Dyachenko is a Ukrainian photo retoucher who often does restorations of vintage photos that are extremely damaged -- often seemingly beyond recovery. Yet using her Photoshop skills, Dyachenko is able to recover (and recreate) extremely fine details in the photos.

Michael Zhang

Dual Photography Lets You Virtually Move a Camera for Impossible Photos

Want to see some mind-blowing research into photography (from the mid-2000s)? Check out the video above about "Dual Photography," a Stanford-developed technique that allows you to virtually swap the locations of a camera and a projector, allowing you to take pictures from the perspective of the light source instead of the camera sensor.

Michael Zhang

The Amazing Photo Manipulation Art of Erik Johansson

Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.

Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.

Michael Zhang

Photo “Printed” by Hand Using 200,000+ Nonpareils Candy Sprinkles

For a fine arts project at his university, art student Joel Brochu spent a whopping 8 months meticulously recreating a photograph using tiny nonpareils (the tiny sprinkles used on cakes and donuts). 221,184 individual sprinkles were placed on the 4-foot-wide board, which was covered with double-sided tape and a thin layer of glue. Each sprinkle was placed by hand using jewelry tweezers.

Michael Zhang

Amazing Optical Illusion Shows That Our Eyes Are Horrible Light Meters

Here's a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view. [#]

Interesting huh? Our eyes aren't very good as a light meters, since they're easily deceived by context.