2010-04-08
In WWU’s scanning electron microscope competition, creative image manipulation is encouraged and entries are judged based solely on aesthetics.
What I enjoy most about this image is its dramatic depth of field effect:
It occurred to me that I might be able to highlight that by coloring by spatial frequency. As a quick proof of concept I used GIMP’s wavelet decomposition plugin to isolate several frequency ranges:
I then arbitrarily colored each,
and finally recomposed them to produce a false color image:
It mostly worked; the color is fairly well correlated with depth, and where not it still serves to highlight interesting features. After seeing this, though, I don't think I'll pursue the idea further as I prefer the more natural aesthetic of the original.