Monday April 28, 2008
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Monday April 28, 2008 Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way
If you give a presentation about hardware products, it is easy to make your slides look good: Remove boring text, add nice photos of your hardware and all is well.
But what if you have to present on software, some web service or give a Solaris training with lots of command line stuff?
Sure, you can do screenshots and hope that the GUI looks nice. Or use other photos (like the one to the left) that may or may not relate to the software you present about.
But screenshots and photos (to a lesser degree) are so, well, 2D. They look boring. Wouldn't it be nice to present your screenshots the way Apple presents its iTunes software? Like add some 3D depth to your slide-deck or website, with a nice, shiny, reflective underground?
Well, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars with art departments and graphics artists (they'd be glad to do something different for a change) or work long hours with Photoshop or the Gimp (a most excellent piece of software, BTW), trying to create that stylish 3D look. Here's a script that can do this easily for you!
You're probably wondering why my daughter Amanda shows up at the top of this article. Well, she was volunteered to be a test subject for my new script. The script uses ImageMagick and POV-Ray in a similar way to my earlier photocube script that we now use to generate the animated cube of the HELDENFunk show notes. It places any image you give it into a 3D space and adds a nice, shiny reflection to it. Let's see how Amanda looks like after she's been through the featurepic.sh script:
-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -s 200 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.
The size (-s) parameter defines the length of either width or height of the result image, whichever is larger. In this case, we choose an image size of a maximum of 200x200 pixels, so the image can fit this blog. You can see the result to the right. Nice, eh?
As you can see, her picture has now been placed into a 3D scene, slightly rotated to the left, onto a shiny, white surface. More interesting than the usual flat picture on a blog, isn't it?
The script uses POV-Ray to place and rotate the photo in 3D and to generate the reflection. ImageMagick is used for pre- and post-processing the image. The reflection is not real, it is actually the same picture, flipped across the y axis and with a gradient transparency applied to it. That way, the reflection can be controlled much better. I tried the real thing and it didn't want to look artistic enough :).
The amount of rotation, the reflection intensity and the length of the reflective tail can be adjusted with command-line switches, so can the height of the camera. Here's an example that uses all of these parameters:
-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -h
Usage: ./featurepic.sh: [-a angle] [-c cameraheight] [-p] [-r reflection] [-s size] [-t taillength] image
-p creates a PNG image with transparency, otherwise a JPEG image is created.
Defaults: -a 15 -c 0.3 -r 0.3 -s 512 -t 0.3
-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -a 30 -c 0.1 -r 0.8 -s 200 -t 0.5 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.
The angle is in degrees and can be negative. One good thing about rotating the image into 3D is that you gain
horizontal real estate to fit that slightly longer bullet point in. It helps you trade-off
image width for height without losing too much detail. An angle value
of up to 30 is still ok, I wouldn't recommend more than that.
The camera height (-c) value is relative to the picture: 0 is ground
level, 1 is at the top edge. The camera will always look at the center
of the image. Camera height values below 0.5 are good because a camera below the subject makes it look slightly more impressing. Values above 0.5 make you look down at the picture, making it a bit smaller and less significant.
The reflection intensity (-r) goes from 0 (no reflection) to 1 (perfect mirror) while the length of the reflection (the fade-off "tail", -t) goes from 0 (no tail) to 1 (same size as image). Smaller values for reflection and the tail length make the reflection more subtle and less distracting. I think the default values are very good for most cases.
Check out the -p option for a nicer way to integrate the resulting image into other graphical elements of your presentation. It creates a PNG image with a transparency channel. This means you can place it above other graphical elements (such as a different background color) and the reflection will still look right. See the next example to the right, where Amanda prefers a pink background. Keep in mind that the rendering step still assumes a white background, so drastic changes in background may or may not result in slight artifacts at the edges.
You can also use this script with some pictures of hardware to make them look more interesting, if the hardware shot is dead front and if it doesn't have any border at the bottom. Use an angle value of 0, this will place your hardware onto that virtual glossy carbon plastic that makes it look nicer. See below for an embellished Sun Fire T5440 Server, the new flagship in our line of Chip-Multi-Threading (CMT) servers.
This script should work on any unixoid OS, especially Solaris, that understands sh and where a reasonably recent (6.x.x) version of ImageMagick and POV-Ray are available.
You can get ImageMagick and POV-Ray from their websites. On Solaris, you can easily install them through Blastwave. The version of ImageMagick that is shipped with Solaris in /usr/sfw is not recent enough for the way I'm using it, so the Blastwave version is recommended at the moment.
The featurepic.sh script is free, open source, distributed under the CDDL and you don't have to attribute its use when using the resulting images in your own presentations, websites, or other derivative work.
It's free as in "free beer". Speaking of which, if you like this script, leave a comment or send me email at constantin at sun dot com telling me what you did with it, what other features you'd like to see in the script and where I can meet you for some beer :).
"Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-28 00:44:56.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
3d
cool
effects
howto
imagemagick
imaging
photos
povray
presentations
script
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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Tuesday November 27, 2007 Shrink big presentations with ooshrink
I work in an environment where people use presentations a lot. Of course, we like to use StarOffice, which is based on OpenOffice for all of our office needs.
Presentation files can be big. Very big. Never-send-through-email-big. Especially, when they come from marketing departments and contain lots of pretty pictures. I just tried to send a Sun Systems overview presentation (which I created myself, so less marketing fluff), and it still was over 22MB big!
So here comes the beauty of Open Source, and in this case: Open Formats. It turns out, that OpenOffice and StarOffice documents are actually ZIP files that contain XML for the actual documents, plus all the image files that are associated with it in a simple directory structure. A few years ago I wrote a script that takes an OpenOffice document, unzips it, looks at all the images in the document's structure and optimizes their compression algorithm, size and other settings based on some simple rules. That script was very popular with my colleagues, it got lost for a while and thanks to Andreas it was found again. Still, colleagues are asking me about "That script, you know, that used to shrink those StarOffice presentations." once in a while.
Today, I brushed it up a little, teached it to accept the newer od[ptdc] extensions and it still works remarkably well. Here are some examples:
- The Sun homepage has a small demo presentation with a few vacation photos. Let's see what happens:
bash-3.00$ ls -al Presentation_Example.odp
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 392382 Mar 10 2006 Presentation_Example.odp
bash-3.00$ ooshrink -s Presentation_Example.odp
bash-3.00$ ls -al Presentation_Example.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 337383 Nov 27 11:36 Presentation_Example.new.odp
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 392382 Mar 10 2006 Presentation_Example.odpWell, that was a 15% reduction in file size. Not earth-shattering, but we're getting there. BTW: The -s flag is for "silence", we're just after results (for now).
On BigAdmin, I found a presentation with some M-Series config diagrams:
bash-3.00$ ls -al Mseries.odp
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 1323337 Aug 23 17:23 Mseries.odp
bash-3.00$ ooshrink -s Mseries.odp
bash-3.00$ ls -al Mseries.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 379549 Nov 27 11:39 Mseries.new.odp
-rw-r--r-- 1 constant sun 1323337 Aug 23 17:23 Mseries.odpNow we're getting somewhere: This is a reduction by 71%!
- Now for a real-world example. My next victim is a presentation by Teera about JRuby. I just used Google to search for "site:sun.com presentation odp", so Teera is completely innocent. This time, let's take a look behind the scenes with the -v flag (verbose):
bash-3.00$ ooshrink -v jruby_ruby112_presentation.odp
Required tools "convert, identify" found.
ooshrink 1.2
Check out "ooshrink -h" for help information, warnings and disclaimers.
Creating working directory jruby_ruby112_presentation.36316.work...
Unpacking jruby_ruby112_presentation.odp...
Optimizing Pictures/1000020100000307000000665F60F829.png.
- This is a 775 pixels wide and 102 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 947, New: 39919. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/100000000000005500000055DD878D9F.jpg.
- This is a 85 pixels wide and 85 pixels high JPEG file.
- We will try re-encoding this image with JPEG quality setting of 75%.
- Failure: Old: 2054, New: 2089. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/1000020100000419000003C07084C0EF.png.
- This is a 1049 pixels wide and 960 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 99671, New: 539114. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/10000201000001A00000025EFBC8CCCC.png.
- This is a 416 pixels wide and 606 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 286677, New: 349860. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/10000000000000FB000001A6E936A60F.jpg.
- This is a 251 pixels wide and 422 pixels high JPEG file.
- We will try re-encoding this image with JPEG quality setting of 75%.
- Success: Old: 52200, New: 46599 (-11%). We'll use the new picture.
Optimizing Pictures/100000000000055500000044C171E62B.gif.
- This is a 1365 pixels wide and 68 pixels high GIF file.
- This image is too large, we'll resize it to 1280x1024.
- We will convert this image to PNG, which is probably more efficient.
- Failure: Old: 2199, New: 39219. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/100000000000019A000002D273F8C990.png.
- This is a 410 pixels wide and 722 pixels high PNG file.
- This picture has 50343 colors, so JPEG is a better choice.
- Success: Old: 276207, New: 32428 (-89%). We'll use the new picture.
Patching content.xml with new image file name.
Patching styles.xml with new image file name.
Patching manifest.xml with new image file name.
Optimizing Pictures/1000000000000094000000E97E2C5D52.png.
- This is a 148 pixels wide and 233 pixels high PNG file.
- This picture has 4486 colors, so JPEG is a better choice.
- Success: Old: 29880, New: 5642 (-82%). We'll use the new picture.
Patching content.xml with new image file name.
Patching styles.xml with new image file name.
Patching manifest.xml with new image file name.
Optimizing Pictures/10000201000003E3000003E4CFFA65E3.png.
- This is a 995 pixels wide and 996 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 196597, New: 624633. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/100002010000013C0000021EDE4EFBD7.png.
- This is a 316 pixels wide and 542 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 159495, New: 224216. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/10000200000002120000014A19C2D0EB.gif.
- This is a 530 pixels wide and 330 pixels high GIF file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will convert this image to PNG, which is probably more efficient.
- Failure: Old: 39821, New: 56736. We better keep the original.
Optimizing Pictures/100000000000020D0000025EB55F72E3.png.
- This is a 525 pixels wide and 606 pixels high PNG file.
- This picture has 17123 colors, so JPEG is a better choice.
- Success: Old: 146544, New: 16210 (-89%). We'll use the new picture.
Patching content.xml with new image file name.
Patching styles.xml with new image file name.
Patching manifest.xml with new image file name.
Optimizing Pictures/10000000000000200000002000309F1C.png.
- This is a 32 pixels wide and 32 pixels high PNG file.
- This picture has 256 colors, so JPEG is a better choice.
- Success: Old: 859, New: 289 (-67%). We'll use the new picture.
Patching content.xml with new image file name.
Patching styles.xml with new image file name.
Patching manifest.xml with new image file name.
Optimizing Pictures/10000201000001BB0000006B7305D02E.png.
- This is a 443 pixels wide and 107 pixels high PNG file.
- This image is transparent. Can't convert to JPEG.
- We will try re-encoding this image with PNG compression level 9.
- Failure: Old: 730, New: 24071. We better keep the original.
All images optimized.
Re-packing...
Success: The new file is only 67% as big as the original!
Cleaning up...
Done.Neat. We just shaved a third off of a 1.3MB presentation file and it still looks as good as the original!
As you can see, the script goes through each image one by one and tries to come up with better ways of encoding images. The basic rules are:
- If an image if PNG or GIF and it has more than 128 colors, it's probably better to convert it to JPEG (if it doesn't use transparency). It also tries recompressing GIFs and other legacy formats as PNGs if JPEG is not an option.
- Images bigger than 1280x1024 don't make a lot of sense in a presentation, so they're resized to be at most that size.
- JPEG allows to set a quality level. 75% is "good enough" for presentation purposes, so we'll try that and see how much it buys us.
- If an image if PNG or GIF and it has more than 128 colors, it's probably better to convert it to JPEG (if it doesn't use transparency). It also tries recompressing GIFs and other legacy formats as PNGs if JPEG is not an option.
Before I give you the script, here's the obvious
Disclaimer: Use this script at your own risk. Always check the shrunk presentation for any errors that the script may have introduced. It only works 9 out of 10 times (sometimes, there's some funkiness about how OpenOffice uses images going on that I still don't understand...), so you have to check if it didn't damage your file.
The script works with Solaris (of course), but it should also work in any Linux or any other Unix just fine. It relies on ImageMagick to do the image heavy lifting, so make sure you have identify(9E) and convert(9E) in your path.
My 22 MB Systems Overview presentation was successfully shrunk into a 13MB one, so I'm happy to report that after so many years, this little script is still very useful. I hope it helps you too, let me know how you use it and what shrink-ratios you have experienced!
"Shrink big presentations with ooshrink" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-11-27 03:20:08.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
imagemagick
imaging
open
openoffice
opensource
script
source
staroffice
useful
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [12]
Thursday August 23, 2007 Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris
One of the features I like most about Apple's iPhoto application is the transition effect in slideshows where the whole screen becomes a cube that rotates into the next photograph. The same effect is also used when switching users, etc.
Recently we took a team photograph for an internal web page. I wanted that effect and I love the open source raytracer POV-Ray so I wrote a script that renders the same animation effect and creates an animated GIF using ImageMagick. You can see an example output to the right featuring photos of some popular Sun products. BTW, check out photos.sun.com for free, high-quality access to Sun product photography.
To create your own photocubes, you just need POV-Ray and ImageMagick in your path and the photocube.sh script. Being open source, all run on Solaris but also on Linux, NetBSD or any other operating system that can run open source software. I'd love to try this script out on a Niagara 2 system with its 8 cores, 16 pipelines, 64 threads and 8 FPUs. Hmmm, all rendering frames in parallel :).
There are already precompiled distributions of POVRay and ImageMagick on Blastwave that you can install very easily onto your Solaris machine if you don't have them already.
Just call the script with 6 URLs or pathnames. It will then automatically read in the images, render the animation frames and then combine them all into an animated GIF:
-bash-3.00$ ../photocube.sh *.jpg
Converting images to be quadratic...
Fetching and processing 721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
Rendering animation frames...
Creating animated gif file...
-bash-3.00$ ls
721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg photocube.gif
915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
-bash-3.00$
The script uses ImageMagick to make the pictures quadratic and to limit their size to 1200x1200 pictures if necessary. Since the -extent switch is fairly new, you'll need to use a newer distribution of ImageMagick, the one on the Solaris Companion CD is sadly not new enough. The POVRay source (embedded in the script) uses an S-curve to turn the cube which produces a natural and smooth acceleration/decelleration effect. It would have been more efficient to let POVRay output PNG files rather than TGA but for some reason some of the PNG files that POVRay produces were not compatible with ImageMagick.
Feel free to modify this script to your needs. You may want to experiment with other ways of animating the cube or other image transition effects. Maybe you want to use ffmpeg to create real video files instead of animated GIFs. Be careful when cranking up the number of frames while using ImageMagick to create animated GIFs, ImageMagick wants to suck in all frames into memory before creating the animated GIF and so you may end up using a lot of memory. If someone has a more elegant, scriptable animated GIF creator, please leave me a comment.
I hope you enjoy this little exercise in raytracing and animation. Let me know if you have suggestions or other ideas to improve this script!
"Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-23 13:20:47.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
apple
cool
diy
howto
imagemagick
iphoto
opensolaris
opensource
photos
pov-ray
raytracing
script
slideshow
solaris
You're welcome to use this Permalink
, add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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