Change Colors

Quote from Triangle TechJournal
CyberImaging’s most impressive feature, however, is its color manipulation. “When the user wants to see what another color looks like the software rotates the ellipsoid, so that the highlights and transparency effects can look realistic. Otherwise we’d end up with a big blob without any texturing.” Realistic highlights and coloring, Wilson explains, was a major challenge CyberImaging had to overcome. Initially they were going to implement a drawing function that allowed the stylist to “paint” highlights on the new image. But harkening back to a cut-n-paste model, however revised, only produced results that looked drawn in. Wilson’s alternative was to have his software automatically render highlights. “It took us about eight months to create an algorithm that determines where the top of the hair is, versus the bottom. It also determines if the strands are running North, South, East or West.” The CyberImaging software is able to calculate which strands of hair would go together, if a stylist were going to do highlights. It can also determine whether highlights should run to left or to the right, and where they should begin and stop. “We created an algorithm that matches each stranded hair and determines whether it is should be highlighted. That was a big challenge, and no one in the marketplaces ever done that before.”