字幕表 動画を再生する 英語字幕をプリント If you put a colorful image into photoshop or instagram and blur it, you’ll see a weird, dark boundary between adjacent bright colors. Yuk! In the real world, out of focus colors blend smoothly, going from red to yellow to green – not red to brown to green! This color blending problem isn’t limited to digital photo blurring, either – pretty much any time a computer blurs an image or tries to use transparent edges, you’ll see the same hideous sludge. There’s a very simple explanation for this ugliness – and a simple way to fix it. It all starts with how we perceive brightness. Human vision, like our hearing, works on a relative, roughly logarithmic scale: this means that flipping from one light to two changes the percieved brightness a TON more than going from a hundred and one to a hundred and two, despite adding the same physical amount of light. Our eyes and brains are simply better at detecting small differences in the absolute brightness of dark scenes, and bad at detecting the same differences in bright scenes. Computers and digital image sensors, on the other hand, detect brightness purely based on the number of photons hitting a photodetector – so additional photons register the same increase in brightness regardless of the surrounding scene. When a digital image is stored, the computer records a brightness value for each colors – red, green and blue – at each point of the image. Typically, zero represents zero brightness and one represents 100 percent brightness. So 0.5 is half as bright as 1, right? NOPE. This color might LOOK like it’s halfway between black and white, but that’s because of our logarithmic vision – in terms of absolute physical brightness, it’s only one fifth as many photons as white. Even more crazy, an image value of 0.25 has just one twentieth the photons of white! Digital imaging has a good reason for being designed in this darker-than-the-numbers-suggest way: remember, human vision is better at detecting small differences in the brightness of dark scenes, which software engineers took advantage of as a way of saving disk space in the early days of digital imaging. The trick is simple: when a digital camera captures an image, instead of storing the brightness values it gives, store their square roots – this samples the gradations of dark colors with more data points and bright colors with fewer data points, roughly imitating the characteristics of human vision. When you need to display the image on a monitor, just square the brightness back to present the colors properly. This is all well and good – until you decide to modify the image file. Blurring, for example, is achieved by replacing each pixel with an average of the colors of nearby pixels. Simple enough. But depending on whether you take the average before or after the square-rooting gives different results!! And unfortunately, the vast majority of computer software does this incorrectly. Like, if you want to blur a red and green boundary, you’d expect the middle to be half red and half green. And most computers attempt that by lazily averaging the brightness values of the image FILE, forgetting that the actual brightness values were square-rooted by the camera for better data storage! So the average ends up being too dark, precisely because an average of two square roots is always less than the square root of an average. To correctly blend the red and green and avoid the ugly dark sludge, the computer SHOULD have first squared each of the brightnesses to undo the camera’s square rooting, then averaged them, and then squared-rooted it back – look how much nicer it is!! Unfortunately, the vast majority of software, ranging from iOS to instagram to the standard settings in Adobe Photoshop, takes the lazy, ugly, and wrong approach to image brightness. And while there are advanced settings in photoshop and other professional graphics software that let you use the mathematically and physically correct blending, shouldn’t beauty just be the default?