Shihanur Tahmid

Engineering Academy II

Harris

6 February 2023

Digital Imaging Project

Introduction

This assignment aims to understand the many types of technologies used for digital imaging and

how they work. We have been studying digital signal processing and what happens at the pixel

level when an image is altered in any way. We have also been dealing with lossy or lossless data

compression. This assignment is to show how that all goes together in one technology or

software. In this paper, I will be talking about the origin of Blender how it works, and what can

be accomplished with Blender for digital imaging, image modification, and beyond.

Background

In 1988, Blender was just a thought in the mind of Ton Roosendaal, the co-founder of the Dutch

animation studio Neo Geo. Ton later decided to create a new company for Blender called "Not a

Number" (NaN). His objective was to provide a cross-platform 3D application for free; this was

unheard of back then. 3D modeling and animating software cost thousands of dollars at the time.

This business plan attracted the attention of many investors; in early 2000 NaN secured £4.5M,

and blender 2.0 was released to the public. Due to insufficient funds, the company was shut

down by the NaN investors. By now there were 250,000 enthusiastic users of Blender; this

prevented Ton from “letting blender fade into insignificance.” Unable to create a large team of
developers he founded the Blender foundation in March 2002, To further the development of

blender as an open-source application. Ton convinced the NaN investors to agree to a unique

plan for Blender to release it as open source. They created the “Free Blender” campaign to raise

£100K to buy rights to Blender source codes and intellectual property rights from the NaN

investors. This is important because if they hadn't bought Blender then, it would be just another

one of those industrial applications that cost thousands to own today.

Theory

Blender is an open-source application with the theory that 3D software should be easy for the

general public to own. The way Blender works is you first have to model a 3D figure. To give it

color or textures you use “blender’s Shader Nodes. To make it a grayscale image blender has a

Color Ramp which blends two different colors primarily black and white. Then you fix the

lighting of the scene, this is the hardest part depending on the style you want to achieve. Then

finally you end off with compositing which is used for image modification. The

Brightness/Contrast increases the brightness, you can either increase or decrease the contrast of

the image. At the matrix level, when brightness is increased it adds a constant positive integer to

each matrix value. When the contrast is changed the difference between the min to max pixel

values is increased or decreased accordingly. The Glare node adds more brightness to bright

areas of an image to show an illusion of sun glare. To change the bit depth, you need to adjust

the resolution of an image. There are different kinds of thresholding in Blender. In the Glare

node, you can specify a threshold value, and the matrices will be adjusted accordingly. Here is an

image made using Blender and later edited to be darker. You can see the clear distinction
between the two images. {fig: landscape Edited} is clearly darker than {fig: landscape Original}

and the water now has ripples.

Applications

Blender is used in a multitude of tasks like modifying images or creating them from scratch or

even 3D animations. Blender is utilized by small studios and game developers because it is free

and professional. Other equivalent applications take thousands to use. Blender is utilized in the

game industry and film-making. All this goes back to digital imaging because when completing

any project in Blender each frame is fixed by either fixing contrast or brightness. The matrix

values are changed corresponding to the modification made to the image.

Conclusion

This technology is the future of digital imaging and 3D modeling; as time passes, more people

become animators and filmmakers. This software is free and open source because they operate in

a General Public License (GPL) system where everyone has access to the source code and can

copy or redistribute however they like. This system allows for more bugs to be caught and fixed;

this is important because other software that doesn't allow access to source codes poses more

issues and takes longer to resolve because there is only a set amount of people working on them.

This technology allows you to make and animate 3D models and finally alter the final product

with their digital imaging workflow. Here is a comparison between a model made in Blender and

one made using professional software. The model made in Blender is similar, if not better than

the one made in professional software. With this in mind, Blender will lead graphic designing,

3D modeling/animating, and digital imaging into the future; as more and more people take up
full-time animating and 3D modeling, they will seek more affordable software; Blender will be

there every step of the way.

References:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/license.html