Oak Park, Calif. - Digital Film Tools has unveiled Power Stroke Version 1.0, a stroke-based, color-correction, colorization, and special effects plug-in, and Power Matte 1.0, an interactive image-matting tool.
Designed with the creative workflow of colorists, film/video editors,graphic designers, and artists in mind, Power Stroke introduces an interactive stroke-based workflow to quickly perform targeted adjustments. Instead of drawing exact masks, using inaccurate matte extractions or hand-painting frame to frame, regions of interest are isolated by drawing a few simple and loose After Effects open or closed masks. Power Stroke then uses the concepts of luminance-weighted chrominance blending and fast intrinsic distance computations to determine the edges of the target area, and adjustments are made only in those areas.
Masks can be assigned multiple corrections and effects, such as color correction, recoloring, or desaturation, colorization of black-and-white images, blur, fill light for dimly lit image areas, and diffusion/glow. Using patented algorithms, Power Stroke produces high-quality results. Gestural selection, colorization, and image adjustment have been combined into one process.
Power Matte is an interactive image matting tool capable of extracting almost any object in an image--even fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. This extraction process creates a matte--essentially a black and white cutout. White matte areas are extracted, black areas not, and gray areas in between represent a level of transparency.
After a matte is extracted, the foreground object can be composited onto a new background as well as apply filter and image corrections only within the area defined by the matte. All this is made possible without the aid of bluescreen or greenscreen photography.
Power Matte iteratively estimates the transparency value for every pixel in the image, based on a small sample of foreground (what you want to cut out) and background (what you want to get rid of) pixels marked by defining simple open or closed masks.
Power Stroke is based on research and technology by Liron Yatziv and Guillermo Sapiro from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, and Power Matte is based on unpublished research and technology by Jue Wang from the University of Washington. Both products are exclusively licensed by Digital Film Tools.
Power Stroke and Power Matte for Adobe After Effects are available for download or purchase at www.digitalfilmtools.com for $195 each.