Matt's Impressionist

This is a program I wrote for Stanford's CS248 class; it allows you to copy after a photograph -- or any image, really -- in an impressionist style. It works amazingly well, really, for what boils down to a simple idea! The original idea is due to Paul Haeberly, who came up with it in 1988 and holds a patent for it. Hopefully he won't be suing us... The latest incarnation of his implementation is available as a Java applet that you can play with.

Sample images... these are obtained from an AutoPaint function in my implementation that will move the brush around in predefined patterns and give you results quicker than you'd do by yourself -- works kind of like the filters in an image-editing program. You could also achieve these effects, or others, interactively...

That said, here are the samples.

This is the original image that the program is working from. You can choose various brushes and paint over the original, which fills an area equal to the brush size with the color of the original image.

This is the effect of my "blur" filter, which paints over the whole image with a large brush, then again with a smaller brush yielding more detail -- but the more detailed pass is mostly translucent and is blended over the original, blotchy pass.

This is the result of my "mosaic" filter, which paints over the whole image with a small brush in a very regular pattern... you'll probably have to look at the enlarged image (click the thumbnail) to see the effect.

This is the result of my "focus" filter, which starts with a really big brush and blends in successively more accurate passes in a narrowing region around the last mouse click, resulting in an image with a sharp focal point that blurs out at the edges.

Matt Ginzton

Last modified: Thu Jan 29 01:18:46 PST 1998

	This is the original image that the program is working from. You can choose various brushes and paint over the original, which fills an area equal to the brush size with the color of the original image.
This is the effect of my "blur" filter, which paints over the whole image with a large brush, then again with a smaller brush yielding more detail -- but the more detailed pass is mostly translucent and is blended over the original, blotchy pass.
	This is the result of my "mosaic" filter, which paints over the whole image with a small brush in a very regular pattern... you'll probably have to look at the enlarged image (click the thumbnail) to see the effect.
This is the result of my "focus" filter, which starts with a really big brush and blends in successively more accurate passes in a narrowing region around the last mouse click, resulting in an image with a sharp focal point that blurs out at the edges.