Histrogram/Gamma Control I Dreamed About Last Night

[basspig]

I had an interesting dream this morning.. I was shooting my movie with my EX series camera, and I was going after a certain look, with deep blacks and a dark and foreboading tone. And... my EX camera had a control that was like the Histogram, but with about a dozen vertical sliders that could be moved around, to control how many bits per pixel were allocated to a particular luma level. But also, the tool would allow you to choose the chroma range by dragging the triangles at the bottom of each slider into a color palette that is derived from the frame of video.

The colors below were what my scene looked like in the dream. By dragging the triangles into one of the color swatches below the histogram, one could control the contrast range of that color. So the spacing between each vertical slider is the range of bits assigned. A lot of space, means that contrast is stretched over a few bits depth. Close together means a narrow range of color over a given depth in bits.

So this is what it looked like in the dream:




It was the ultimate way to tweak the gamma curves! I remember feeling a sense of power and satisfaction that I could tweak the gamma for various tonal ranges of color in my picture and it was so easy and gratifying to move a slider and watch the results change instantly!

I presume the triangles not dragged down to the palette are working on the entire RGB range equally. It's hard to derive rational meaning from something you see in a dream, but this one was so darned explicit, all I had to do was copy everything down when I woke up.

[dazzdeadmeadow]

I have lots of explicit dreams....I think I best leave it there!! Ha ha

[Jay Gladwell]

That's amazing. Looks like you might be onto something, Mark!

[basspig]

It's quite unusual for me to have dreams with such a degree of clarity that I can sit down and sketch out what I saw, but for some reason, I remembered everything, even hours later. The way that tool/feature worked in the dream, it was the ultimate in picture controls. Who knows? Maybe some day in the not too distant future, camera picture profile controls may have a similar interface.

[Chadfish]

Your subconscious worked out a problem your conscious mind had. It's a very viable solution. Now the trick is how to implement it. Follow those dreams man. You could possibly develop this further, and patent it. Then sell it to Sony.