Digitized images.

One day, while walking through a local mall, I came across a vendor with a unique product. For a small fee, he would produce a photograph-like image of me and put it on a plastic coffee mug or T-shirt. The whole process took less than five minutes. When questioned, he gladly volunteered how he accomplished this task.

Using a camcorder, he recorded the image, which was then fed into a computer via a video connector cable. The computer had a special video card that interpreted the images digitally. Once an image was selected, he then printed it out with a color laser printer.

Steps to Take

To produce images comparable to those at right, do the following: 1. Have the camcorder turned on and connected to a computer with a video cable. Have the computer running ComputerEyes/RT software. Capture a real-time image following the procedure outlined in the camcorder manual, and save it to a floppy disk. When saving the image, save it as a JPEG file. JPEG files allow you to save more images on each floppy disk, thanks to their ability to compress without loss of image quality. Alternative: Have a camcorder or VCR connected to a computer and play back a previously recorded segment. Have ComputerEyes/RT capture still images from this segment. When recording, think about the composition of the images. Is the background cluttered? Is there any variety? Have you selected focal points? Is the lighting adequate to provide a normal range of shadows? Have you chosen some kind of theme? Are you trying to elicit some sort of emotion? Are the colors harmonious? 2. Run Corel Photo-Paint Plus on the computer. Select a saved image, and manipulate it. You can do any of the following: change its size, proportions, color, contrast, texture, blend colors, create collages, etc. The possibilities are limitless. 3. When you're finished manipulating the image, you can now print it. If color is not important, you can use any standard dot-matrix printer. If color is important, then consider using a color ink-jet printer or a color laser printer. 4. Also, consider the quality of the paper to be printed on. Papers with a very smooth finish will provide sharper, cleaner looking images.

Hardware and Software

With the desire to produce unique photo-like and manipulated images, I upgraded my computer equipment to include: * a 486DX computer (8 MB of RAM, a 213 MB hard drive, a 1 MB video card) * ComputerEyes/RT interface board * a CD-ROM drive * a mouse * a keyboard * an SVGA color monitor * a Hewlett Packard[R] 550 Color Desk Jet Printer

I upgraded my software to include: * MS-Windows 3.1 * Corel[R] Photo-Paint[TM] 5 Plus * ComputerEyes/RT

Minimum Setup: If you are on a tight budget, you could get by with the following minimum setup: * an IBM[R] personal computer or clone (PC, XT, AT, PS/2 Model 25 or 30) or equivalent (any 8088-, 80286-, 80386-, 80486-based computer with Industry Standard expansion slots) * one 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disk drive * an available expansion slot in the computer * at least 640K of RAM * version 2.1 or higher of MS-DOS or equivalent. (MS-DOS version 4 uses large amounts of memory, and may not allow ComputerEyes/RT to run. If so, revert to version 3 or upgrade to version 5 or 6.) * a 30 MB hard drive * a VGA adapter (PS/2 Multi-Color Graphics Adapter, or equivalent) * a video camera, camcorder, video tape player, laser disc player, still-image video camera, or any video source that puts out a standard composite or S-Video signal