Painting F:Gorge near AmalfiChapter 2: What we can easily see in this picture
In this picture, there is quite much detail. However, the first impression of this picture is not related to these detailed things. Instead, the whole picture is divided in two parts and gives strong impression of contrast caused by dark and bright color. Also, it is easily figured out that this is scene of nature, mountain and valley. We can see and feel the big tree, water and sky. These brief and clear understanding is done in Visual area 1(V1) because these features are belong to low-level feature analysis: elements of color, shape, and texture information.
Most of all, the mountain and shadowing lands are pop-out because its strong dark color and strong contrast comes from the edge with clear bright sky and bright water’s color. It is realized as clusters: dark, bright, middle which can also explain shadowed wood, water, and woods.
Since all of details in this picture are comparatively small size, identification of these is done in what pathway. However, there is no relation with moving things like reaching out or grabbing things, so information is not going through where pathway in this case, just seeing and analyzing picture.
Among all the small details, there are something more pop-out than any other details. This is because these stands out things are making more big degree of feature-level contrast between themselves and their surroundings.
First of all, in the front part of this picture, rocks are pop-out. The color of rocks is brown but their surrounding waterfalls are almost white. Thus, it makes strong contrast and the sizes of rocks are bigger than any other small details in this picture, so they are strongest pop-out objects.
Also, in the front part of the picture, in the dark shadow, there is cut tree, the base of a tree, and this is standing out in the dark. Since all the other nearby color is dark green and brown, so the cross section of the tree which is yellowish brown looks stick out.
In the middle parts, the bridge is noticeable because of its remarkable big size even though the color is similar to its surrounding. Besides, the orientation of this bridge is horizontal which is different from most of all objects, vertical, in the picture, so this is strongly pop-out. Also, using the dark cast shadow under the bridge, we can easily recognize the stereoscopic depth, so it has geographical cues as well. However, it helps to more remarkable this object although this is just small part that the high light of background and strong contrast arise from that high light’s bright parts and dark colors of bridge. In this case, the bridge is used more than two feature channels so that it is more distinct than the other object.
Another distinct object is people. These people are located in bright right part of the picture, but their adjacent surrounding is colored darker, almost black, than the other background. Also, the background part used greenish brown color but hair of a person colored red, so that makes more outstanding. Furthermore, the gesture of people makes the shape of this whole object more curve and this differ from the background straight trees.
Also, there is a tree in the middle parts which is stand out. Unlike the other trees, it has more bright white leaves and it is covered dark background. Moreover, the location of this tree is almost right middle part of the picture and just only this one tree is there so that these distance and location make it pop-out.
Since this picture is very static image, there is no motion feature channel.
In conclusion, the painter used various feature channels to occur pop-out effect: color, orientation, size and stereoscopic depth. Through using pop-out effect, the painting succeeds to lead viewer’s sight to follow the whole structure from bottom water to upper side of sky or vice versa and to focus on the details as well.
Chapter 4: color of the painting
Among many various kinds of elements for the painting, one of the most important aspects is probably color. Color can change the whole painting’s impression and understanding. In this painting, generally several colors are used: green, red, black, white and partially blue. However, if you more look deeply and try to follow as many detail as you recognize, there are lots of color is used in the painting. This is maybe because our visual system has inclination to make segmentation smoothly by understanding and changing the colors into more briefly. In other words, in smooth graduation of color in this painting only we can see green, orange, and etc. simple color at first glance.
Since the bright and dark parts are clearly divided, we can hardly notice the similar color is used in different parts of in the painting. Actually, almost same color is used in different parts of the painting and these are recognized different color. This is caused by colors tends to change in appearance by affecting nearby adjacent colors. Because of this chromatic contrast (or simultaneous lightness), same green color is more greenish and bright in dark side and it appear more dark and less greenish in more yellow and bright background.( figure 1)
Figure1. Chromatic contrast
This picture’s color tone is divided in three parts: dark and cool greenish color, bright and brown tone color, and olive mix with reddish color. Also, the dark and bright parts represent in color black and white make an extreme contrast so that viewer’s sight can follow and focus on the middle parts of the painting, the valley, most details are located. The connection of light flow from sky to water bottom part of the painting is emphasized by surrounding opponent channel that is red and green. These color tone divisions seem to help to organize the structure of the painting and make viewer understand the scene itself and space depth.
In addition, contrast arise from luminance difference is used for making small objects in the painting. For example, many rocks and branches in the water make big contrast in a grey scale (brown color is mixed for the objects) so that we can easily distinct compared to rock in shadow (black and green). Also, contrast caused by black grass and white people make our eye-catching.
In short, the painting used color design well. Since all objects and the structure are filled with the whole canvas, it was close to the point of being board and feeing heavy to see. However, it is understandable by using the color well and clustering parts by color. Also, smooth and natural color changes and contrast come from opponent-channel provide strong sense of space depth.
Chapter 5: Visual space and time with the painting
To this painting only pictorial depth cues are appropriate because this is static picture.
In the painting, it used various pictorial depth cues: occlusion of objects such as water fall, bridge and mountain, size gradients of trees, texture gradients between foreground and distant water, cast shadows and shading, and reference to nearby known object. There are no linear perspective and depth of focus in this picture.
Occlusion, one of the most powerful pictorial depth cues, makes the viewer to have the feeling of objects order and provides understanding of depth and distance between objects in the painting. For example, we can recognize tree stump and adjacent ground are more frontward than waterfall.
Cast shadow is used for the bridge in the middle part of the painting. Cast shadow on the surface water let viewers to know about the distance between them. Also, this provides the information about the direction of light. The light looks like coming from back side of bridge because the shadow is long enough and proceeding to the front.
Interesting thing in this picture is human beings are so small compared to the other object. Thus, we can realize the other trees, valley, and mountain are how much big. The people are used as a reference which gives a hint for relative size and distance depth as well.
Besides, it is hardly observed but the foreground of water looks falling down and stereoscopic texture of water can be observed. However, more distance water like under the bridge; there is no texture description for water. Also, the rocks size different, the further away the more small size, can give sense of the distance.
Since this picture is a representational (realistic) painting and it is about the scenery of nature so the standards for 2.5 designs are not relevant in this case. Also, because of the same reason, shadowing is used in anywhere; this picture’s light source is sunlight so that all of objects have shadow.
Affordance for this picture is probably that a great nature and beauty of nature or how a small being human compared to nature. However, there is no interaction with an image and this is not related to action so affordance and cognitive cost are not proper for this picture.
To conclude, this painting is successfully making pictorial depth cues. Therefore, even though this picture is just 2 dimensional simple painting, viewer can realize the depth of the space and understand space better.
Painting H: Still Life with three puppies Chapter 1. Visual queries
We make visual queries to perceive and understand visual information. In a visual query, we combine acts of attention, drive eye movements and tune our pattern-finding circuits. Good design should support this process with their clarity and correctness. For fine arts, the clarity is not always the first consideration as the artists preferably look for beauty, visual impact and new vocabulary of expression. However, it’s still interesting to analyze this piece of painting from the perspective of visual queries, to see how easy different visual information is accessed to.
When we first come across with this painting, we probably see the dogs first then the cups and fruits in containers. After a few seconds, we realize there is a table with drawings, three eating dogs, three empty cups and some fruits both on the table and containers. We don’t get the entire image at once because the visual queries are conducted on a need-to-know basis. We rapidly access to certain part from the image with swift eye movement when we need that information.
In the previous example, the cognitive task is to figure out the physical content of the image. To do this, we realize categories of objects on the table first then go into the details of each category like numbers and subtle differences between alternatives. We do so because the brain solves problem in nested loops from generality to details. Firstly we choose candidates for visual problem solving. Then we make eye movements and test the patterns.
At the moment we want to know the physical content of the painting, there goes a top-down process that our attentions build a bias in favor of the signals we are looking for. As we distinguish different objects by contour, the features that form the contours of object become louder to their detectors respectively and cause eye movements. From the aspect of bottom-up process, information is successively selected and filtered so that low-level features defining contour can form into patterns and meaningful objects in the following stages of processing.
In summary, in the task of finding physical content on the canvas, the painting supports viewers well with clear contours made by color, close outlines and orientations. However, the display of image does not work well with all the visual queries from people. For example, when the task is to .It takes more time than simply understand what the objects are. Because the capability of working memory is limited; we redo the operation rather than memorize the result of the last trial.
Chapter 2.What we can easily see?
Continued with the task of identifying physical objects in the painting, in the visual queries, there is a sequence of how we discover different objects. We discover certain object before the other objects because it is easier for us to see.
For example, to identify the objects, we look at the painting for the first time. The things pop out may be foreground objects with darker colors, including dogs, cups, and fruits in containers. They are distinct because the low-level features they have, darker colors, have strong contrast to the lighter color of the background. Color is one of the channels which are identified quicker by the V1 neurons of the brain thus make it easier for the eyes to make fixation. In addition, these objects are bigger in size compared to the smaller fruits beside the cups (which are also colored light). Size is also among the low-level features that can be processed faster. With the differentiation from multi-channels, the contrast of feature gets bolder. We see the darker and bigger foreground objects long before we discover the table and smaller fruits with lighter color.
On the contrary, the blue patterns on the table are hard to identify because the color between the table and the pattern are of low contrast. Moreover, there are no low level-features from other channels distinct enough.
Besides, it’s easy to find the time when the painting was made at the left-down corner of the canvas, because we plan the eye movement on the information available from the current fixation of the eye as well as the previous experiences. This information, in terms of eye movement tendencies, tells us about where to look for something. Usually we make signature and time at the corner of a painting. This experience directs the eye movements to the corners of the painting and saves us time.
In general, it’s rapid and easy to identifying most of the objects in the painting, because the painting has a scale multi-structure of the required information. On the top level, the objects dived into two groups, the white background and dark objects in the front. If we look into the dark objects, the objects from the same categories are placed in groups, dogs around the container, cups in the middle of the canvas, and fruits at the bottom of the canvas. This kind of visual groups make it quicker to revisiting the place that have been looked at as It permits visual search skills to develop in the form of eye movement sequences that occur in response to the general properties of a particular scene.
Chapter 3. Structuring Two-Dimensional Space
In this painting, we identify different objects because we can interpret the combination of object features into patterns. One of the crucial mechanisms during this process is binding, which means reorganizing the features of information into contours or regions.
GENERAL CONTOUR
Most of the objects on the canvas are easy to identify, because it’s easy to find the contour and divide the region. In the example of the dogs, there are drawing lines of the general contour of dogs. These general contours help us to stimulate the generalized contour mechanism. An object may be separated from its background in many different ways including luminance changes at its silhouette, color differences, texture boundaries, and even motion boundaries. The brain requires a generalized contour extraction mechanism in the pattern-processing stage of perception.
INTERFERENCE
In the painting, there is no big interference between different patterns. The background with patterns of plants which is possible to interfere with other patterns overlapping with it, is colored in white and light blue. This introduces a big difference in feature level between different patterns of information, color.
PATTERN LEARNING
However, when seeing this painting, there are some moments I couldn’t understand the pattern. For example, I couldn’t recognize the breed of the dog though I got enough features of its appearance. This is because I don’t learn that specific pattern before. During the process of pattern learning, there is a critical period in the first few years of life when the neural pattern-finding systems develop. In this period we learn about the universal patterns. There are also many patterns that are related to the specialized cognitive work of an individual (Figure 2).
Poster C: Clubmed FashionChapter 4: A colourful cruise
The first word that comes to mind when looking at the Club Med ad is “colours”.
Its background is relatively quiet, being only blue with some white, but the foreground is an abundance of bright pinks, some green, yellow and white, and details in every other shade.
The contrast between the two parts of the image is very clear, although this is caused by a difference of colours on different colour-opponent channels. This is probably because of the very large difference in wavelength: the blue background is perceived by the short wavelength-sensitive cones, while the foreground is closer to red and orange, so perceived by the long wavelength-sensitive cones.
Contrast on the luminance channel emphasizes the three white images on the picture. For the ship, this is useful, because the ad actually advertises cruises. However, the significance of the duck and the person in the cloudy attire on the right are very doubtful.
The only important detail, the Club Med logo, has a good luminance with its white letters on the dark blue background, and therefore clearly legible.
As mentioned before, the picture generates a strong signal on both opponent channels with strong colours, but the large background area has a slightly lower saturation that the more detailed foreground, which helps to improve the visibility of these details and the attractiveness of the whole ad. Still, the difference in saturation and luminosity is significantly smaller than advised in chapter four.
Also, the ship should be the main point of attention, but because it is part of the background with a low luminance contrast (compared to that of the foreground), it almost fades away.
The ad does not try to convey movement or depth by shading: not even in the successive plane, and it does not contain any colour-coded information or colour sequences.
As for the meanings of the used colours, there is a combination of peace, freedom and space for blue, opposite the exuberant, cheerful, exotic collage of pink and yellow. This clearly suits the feeling the ad wants to evoke: cruising in quietude on the wide oceans, and visiting exciting, exotic locations on the way.
Concluding, the ad succeeds in evoking the probably desired emotions, but clarity and attractiveness could be improved by enhancing the difference in luminance contrast and saturation between foreground and background. By, for example, using a pastel shade of blue for the background instead of the current bright, darker blue, both these points will be solved. The colour of the logo would have to be adapted to keep the contrast for legibility.
Chapter 5: A cruise through space and time
Since the Club Med ad is only a picture, only pictorial depth cues are relevant.
The used depth cues are occlusion of the top layer, the difference in size between ship and objects in the foreground, and a slight atmospheric perspective in the background.
There are no cast shadows, and there is no line perspective. The image has a small focus on the third dimension: the overlap does cause a great effect, but the overall result is rather that of two two-dimensional layers positioned in the towards-away dimension. Some of the objects in the foreground are shaded, but not all of them, and not all in the same way.
This agrees with the principle of 2.5-dimensional design for static, non-interactive designs that states that depth cues should be used to support the design goals, and not to give the most realistic reproduction.
In this case, the occlusion is used to frame the ship in the background. The foreground does not cover anything important, and transparency would only make the picture unclear. The overlap within the foreground does not matter, because it is about the emotions evoked by the various images together, not their details.
There are no obvious relationships between the different objects, neither spatial nor with joints or other connections, but the colour scheme and the overlap show which ones belong together in the same layer of depth.
The relative distance between the two layers in pointed out by the difference in size between the ship and the most noticeable objects in the foreground. There are hardly any depth cues within the layers, so there is no overabundance of depth. The differently sized people do not suggest perspective because of their random placement: for example a tiny man in front of a large woman, which does not follow human perspective.
Also, the Club Med logo is placed on the image plane; slanted, but not in a line perspective.
The only important object, the ship, is easily recognizable in its side view.
Affordances and cognitive cost are irrelevant, because there is no interaction with the image.
From the point of view of perspective, this ad is quite well-designed. There are no superfluous depth cues that hinder the recognition of important elements, namely the logo and the ship. However, the different spatial positioning of the two layers could be clearer, because there is a strong reliance on colour to discriminate the layers, and to make the size difference between the main elements in both sufficient for an experience of depth.
Chapter 7: A narrative about a cruise
Chapter 7 does not clearly mention the narrative values of single-frame images that are not cartoons or diagrams: it explains how to follow the audience’s cognitive thread by using action lines to communicate movement, arrows for the sequence, and text to clarify consequences.
The Club Med ad has none of these, except for the text in the logo:
“Club Med croisieres automne-hiver 2006-2007” (cruises autumn-winter)
The placement of the logo, in the top-left corner, suggests it should be the starting point when looking at the picture.
From this point, the question is whether the narrative thread of the image follows the cognitive thread of the audience, which follows three steps:
- Establishing the problem
- Elaborating the problem
- Resolving the problem
The problem could be: what will I experience on a cruise with Club Med?
At least, this is what the image seems to answer. However, the audience could just as easily wonder: “Where does this cruise go?” or “How much does it cost?”
Therefore, the problem is not clearly established.
Also, there is no elaboration at all. The whole image is a solution to the problem first mentioned, with no structure at all.
This picture does not convey a strong narrative, because the audience’s attention is not guided: there are no links between different parts of the image.
The ship is framed by the images in the foreground, but their bright colours maybe attract even more attention. The audience will not be able to divide their attention between so many objects in the time they will on average spend looking at an ad.
At first glance, the ad seems mainly pattern-based, but at a closer look, most of the used images are symbolic: used to convey ideas instead of literal meanings. Since the picture advertises a cruise, the ship in the background of the picture is suggested to be the actual cruise ship used for the offered holiday.
Unless Club Med can guarantee its customers they will encounter at least one girl in thigh-high leather boots and one white duck, the images in the foreground have an emotional and motivational purpose.
However, the facial expressions of the people in the picture are not clear enough to stimulate the mirror neurons of the audience. It is therefore questionable if this would make people take action to actually book the cruise; it is probably meant more to stimulate their imagination.
Poster A:Photographer 2
Poster A:Photographer 2
This particular picture seems to be an advertisement for the camera shown in the picture. But since no explicit words are used and no brand name is mentioned, the author uses other cues to direct the attention of the reader to the main subject of this picture. When someone looks at the picture for the first time one will most likely notice that the picture consists of the largely blurry out of focus background surroundings and the more focused man holding a camera taking photographs from a car. The camera he’s holding is in perfect focus and is very good visible in the front and it seems to demand the most attention after you’ve taken a good look of the picture. This contrast of blurry and crisp is easily recognized by the brain, and it would seem that during the first few quick glances, we tend to automatically seek out objects that are more in focused. We then give more attention to these subjects and more information of these parts is likely to be retained in our memory. For example the details information of the focused parts like the orange scarf, the safety helmet and the camera itself are more likely to take notice, while information of the blurry background such as the tree and the mountain are of less importance and may be largely ignored by most viewers.
Another element that stands out at first glance is the two numbers in the lower mid-section. The appearance of these numbers is in contrast with the rest of the image and therefore easily noticeable. Since these numbers pop out so much, the contained information (the numbers 48 and 49) is mostly likely to be retained in the memory of most viewers as well. Furthermore the blur trail of the out of focused area suggests a sense of motion and the direction the car is heading.
This pattern of looking for focused objects seems to happen automatically in our brain, also finding elements that are odd and out of the place is rather easy as well. The way that our brains filter information and process through images using patterns is described as the so called bottom-up way of perception. Since no task or specific cues are asked of the viewer, people are open to interpreted this image they way they like. With no top-down processes involved, the aforementioned information is more likely to be retained in the limited visual working memory
Chapter 3 - Structuring Two-Dimensional Space
As mentioned before, the other things that pop out in this picture and grab our attention are the two numbers in the lower mid-section, probably page numbers. These numbers are printed in red and are in high contrast to the rest of the image. The contour of the perfect circular form is also very odd compared to the realistic nature of image. One can immediately tell that these are added effects and do not belong to the original picture. It’s interesting that they are not aligned horizontally as if there are randomly stamped on top.
The numbers themselves are printed in different fashion. Number 48 uses a cut out from the red circle, number 49 uses the red circle around the red number itself. Notice that the number 48 stands out more and is easier to read than 49. The contrast of the number 48 with the red surrounding is higher, while the background texture of the road creates more interference with the red number 49 which makes it somewhat harder to read.
The man with the camera is very much in focus and therefore has a very clear crisp contour. Due to this it is very easy for viewers to separate the main subject from the blurry background. Interesting is that the texture of the mountain behind the left shoulder of the man is very similar to the texture of his coat. The contour of the man in that particular area is harder to be discriminated from the background compared to other areas. But this overlap is limited to a very small area so in conclusion, the photographer does a good job here to isolate the main subject from the background and managed to guide the attention of the viewers to the subject.
Chapter 7 – Visual and Verbal Narrative
It was assumed that this image is an advertisement for the camera the man is holding because of the prominence of it. However, a typical camera ad would contain crystal clear imagery with vivid colors. In that sense this particular image does not fit in the description of such an advertisement as the color scheme is rather cold and bland, the grainy and blurry background is used to rather give a feeling of a certain mood than to demonstrate the sharpness of the camera. It seems that the author is trying to convey a deeper message through this image.
Judging from the gesture and expression of the man in the car, I think that the author tries to communicate the sense of freedom and the joy of adventure to the viewer. The blur trail that suggests speed and motion also adds to the adventurous nature of this image. The image is framed in such a way that only half of the car body is visible, with the man leaning his body way out of the window. The left page consists entirely of scenery to suggest the feeling of space. The mountain, the valley and the tree create the feeling of being outside in the nature and the crash barrier adds to the excitement and danger involved with speed. Al together this message tries to visualize the excitement of adventure very well.
But since the author chose not to include a single word to give a hint about the message he tries to convey, the viewer is open to interpret and discover the narrative behind this picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment