The Power Of Blur: Blog Carnival June ’21
I love doing art-related posts for Campaign Mastery because they give me an opportunity to flex my artistic muscles and have some fun. As a result, I’m afraid that the example that I planned to use as an introduction to this post has grown rather larger than expected. It’s worth reading, though :)
One of the tools that I use all the time when compositing images is Blur, but it also has applications beyond the artistic. I’ll get to the relevance of this post to the current Blog Carnival, and to those applications, a little later. First, here’s a show and tell on how I use blur to successfully composite images.
Compositing Images
If you’re going to demonstrate compositing of images, then you need an image to composite into, so I started by throwing together a quick background. I literally spent about 5 minutes on this one – I would spend a lot more time on the real thing, of course.
You’ll also need an image to composite into the background. I spent quite a bit of time looking for the right piece of maritime clip art before finding an image of a shipwreck by Egor Shitikov from Pixabay. I downloaded it (always at a higher resolution than you are going to need, if possible – I was working at 1350 pixels wide, so I chose 1920 pixels wide for the download. I then pasted the downloaded image into my workspace as a new layer so that I could work on it, and resized it to fit.
Since I wasn’t including the sandbar, I needed to paint in some rocks. These would be almost completely obliterated by surf, so they didn’t need to be very good, but they would provide my guideline to the behavior of that surf – where it would break, and so on, so I needed to put them in. That also meant that I wouldn’t have to worry too much if a bit of them showed up behind the surf. I was careful to use the same color palette that I had used for the foreground land – consistency matters, even here.
The next step was to get rid of the unwanted parts of the imported picture. This is not as easy as it sounds; you have to select the parts that you want to keep and as little as possible as you don’t want to keep. I have to zoom in and out a lot in this process. I also have to keep in mind where the light source is and how much reflected light there will be – because of two factors.
First, the behavior of my art program – like most such, when I select a pixel corner-to-corner, it applies any operation ordered partially to that pixel. That includes deletion of unwanted pixels.
Second, if there has been any sharpening of the source file, there will be a halo of light around anything dark. This needs to be taken into account when choosing what to select and what not to select.
So it takes a fair bit of practice to get right, and a lot of ultra-finicky work. Masking can be more than half of any photo-editing operation!
Naturally, the human desire is to find shortcuts to this time-consuming operation – and I use blur to achieve that. This permits the use of a “relatively” rough job of the selection – but I still want to do what I can to cut down on the later difficulty. It’s an improvement but usually not a miracle!
This closeup gives you some idea of how accurate I have to be.
Once the extraneous material has been cut away, this is what I’m left with:
I started to reposition the image and then noticed the guard rails near the top of the boat. Sections of the old sky were still visible through them where I hadn’t cut them away – so that was the next thing to do.
Next, it was time to reposition and scale the boat to the size that I wanted. Notice that I very carefully didn’t put it in the exact middle of the image, even though I wanted this to be the focus of attention; that always feels fake and posed when it comes to landscapes. Instead, I positioned the boat roughly 2/3 of the way across the image, and completely in the lower half. I also had to bear in mind which side of the image was shadowed and keep the side away from the light source – people may not know why the image doesn’t look quite right, but they will know something’s off.
I decided that the prow of the boat was aground, as you can see below. The other thing to notice is that the image feels very “tacked on” at the moment, especially at the rear of the boat – because it has been.
Next, I need to start gathering what I need to put in the surf. That means selecting everything that’s not boat and then copy-and-paste the background that will be visible into a new layer.
This reveals the problem that I spoke of earlier, the part-pixel gap. It results in a void in between the two parts of the image. I wasn’t sure how visible it would be with the images reduced in size for display here, so I did a screen capture while zoomed in close:
All those half-pixels have become a void, bereft of image content. This is something that will have to be fixed, later.
First, let’s paint in the surf breaking on the rocks on the ‘surf’ layer. As with most art, I started with the darkest color (the same as the water beside the boat), then something lighter, then the lightest sections.
The next layer I need is the foreground. This is so that I can control the amount of blur in the image overall.
Once again, I mask, copy, and paste into a new layer.
But there’s a problem – part of the ship’s prow has to go in front of the foreground, but this foreground is currently in front of the ship, and will be so in the finished image. So I need to cut out the part of the foreground that will let the ship show through. The technique is to mask the ship, go to the foreground layer, and delete. When I do so, I get this as my foreground layer (I’ve shown an almost-transparent ship so that you can see how it will all fit together).
But, of course, this risks creating another void, one that extends around the entire bow of the ship.
This is the last piece of the puzzle in terms of compositing the image, before I start applying the blur. I thought readers might appreciate a quick summary at this point, so I’ve provided one:
This shows the four layers side by side, in the order that they will combine to form the finished image. (1) is the foreground; (2) is the surf; (3) is the ship; and (4) is the background.
It’s now time to apply the blur – but I never do so to the original layer, it’s always to a copy of that layer, and the order is important.
The graphic below tells the story. If my image was only one screen tall, I would use half the blur indicated; if it was 2700 pixels wide or so, I would think about 3 or even 4 pixels of blur. The choice is all about how it will appear when displayed full-screen.
The other thing that I’ll do before completing the image is to sharpen the boat image (not the blurred one, the one in front) – because the original was shrunken down from a considerably larger one, there is a natural blurring that takes place. This image shows the results, in closeup.
Once all the layers are consolidated, I will act to control the blur even more precisely. The sharpen function in my graphics software is all-or-nothing, but that simply forces me to use a better technique – I duplicate the composited layer, sharpen the duplicate, and then control it’s opacity, giving me 100 different sharpness levels to work with.
It might not show up very clearly because I have to shrink the images to fit the Campaign Mastery page, but this is the sharpened image, 100% opaque. Notice how the voids, those ghostly outlines, have all but vanished!
That’s too extreme for me, but that’s intentional. Look at what happens when I dial that sharpened layer back to 23% opaque, letting the original, underneath, show through:
The final step is to add some shadow from the prow onto the rocks – the water behind them is quite a deep navy blue and shadow on that won’t really be visible. But this is a chance to ram some extra shape and texture into the foreground. To do this, I paint a pool of black in a new layer, use various tools to tweak the shape and blur the edges, then set the compositing method to multiply and the opacity to whatever percentage looks right – in this case, I decide that a very light shadow is appropriate. But the results speak for themselves; the boat looks like it belongs in the image.
If I weren’t having to stop, save intermediate images after every step, fiddle around with screen captures, and the like, this image would have taken me about an hour to produce – 10 minutes (twice as much as my quick-and-dirty example) for the background, 20 minutes selecting the elements to be composited (the boat, and I might have also added a seagull or two), and 30 minutes putting the two together – more than half of it on masking. I literally spent more than three times that explaining the process!
Here’s a real one, put together for my Doctor Who campaign while I was thinking about this article:
There are only three floral patterns used in this image, but those three have all been manipulated in many different ways – shifting color spaces, inverted colors, more color spaces, reflections. I also used a lot of different compositing modes in combination. I also worked hard with my masking so that I got a three-dimensional render effect on adjacent panels. A significant part of the original image was gold, and the rest was virtually white when I started. And, of course, the background was a completely separate image. Finally, notice that a ‘void’ has been carefully created and preserved on the lower right because the image is dark against a dark part of the background at that point.
Ladies and Gentlemen (and anyone else reading this), I give you Brother Simon, the titular character from my Dr Who adventure, “The Pacifist” – a character who is dead throughout the adventure, so this is his one and only star turn outside of game recaps!
A Wealth of Specifics
As GMs, we need, and work with, specifics as often as possible. If there’s a tower, we need to know how tall it is. If there’s a golden urn, we need to know how heavy it is. If there’s a… well, you get the idea.
The game mechanics all run on specific numbers, and it doesn’t generally matter which game system your using for that to be a true statement.
We need those specifics so that we can objectively interpret what the players choose to do and answer their questions.
- “How tall is the tower?”
- “I want to climb up the outside of the tower. How long does it take?”
- “I’ll use a fly spell to beat the rogue. How far up has he climbed by the time I get there?”
- “Will the urn fit in my backpack?”
- “Is the top sealed? What’s inside?”
- “I’ve seen some of those really big Asian urns – how big is this one?”
- “How heavy would it be if filled with gold pieces?”
- “Maybe it’s filled with emeralds and rubies, what would they be worth?”
If any of the above ring true, it’s because I’ve heard them all in actual play. The problem is that because we have the details we need to answer these questions, there’s a tendency on our parts to answer questions with specifics, skipping ahead to the end of a process rather than inhabiting the moment.
- “The tower is 120′ tall.”
- “You climb at 20′ per turn, so it will take you six turns, maybe more.”
- “You fly at 40′ per turn, so it will take you three turns to get to the top. You’re twice as fast as the rogue, so he will be half-way up the wall by then.”
- “The urn is made of clay, 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide. So it would fit but you would have to take everything else out and then see what you could fit around the urn.”
- “There is a cork stopper. You can’t see what’s inside without opening it.”
- “It’s 18 inches tall and 10 inches wide. The mouth is flared to six inches across, and the neck – at it’s narrowest – is about 3 inches across – all outside diameters, you can’t see how thick the walls are. So it’s not one of those huge urns that you’re talking about.”
- “It would be too heavy to lift. and the bottom would be prone to staying in place and separating from the rest of the urn if you tried. But it isn’t that heavy, so you can be fairly sure that it is not filled with coins. There is something inside, though, you can hear it bouncing around if you shake the urn.”
- “If it were filled with precious stones, they would be worth at least 100,000 GP, but it isn’t. Unless you want to go shopping and fill it with your own money, of course.”
(For the record: what’s inside is an Undead cobra, who only gets more ticked off if the urn is shaken or lifted.)
All that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Most gamers wouldn’t blink twice at hearing such answers.
But let’s apply a little (metaphoric) blur, and see what a difference it makes:
- “You can see birds roosting on the roof but can’t tell whether or not they are Sparrows or Rocs from this distance.”
- “If you want to start climbing it, I’ll tell you when you get to the top. Make a climbing roll.”
- “You fly at 40′ a turn, but it will take more than one turn to get there. You’re ascending twice as fast as the rogue; by the end of your turn, you aren’t half-way there yet, but the rogue is at least one story below you.”
- “The urn is made of clay, about 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide. So it might fit but you would have to take everything else out and then see what you could fit around it, and it would be quite obvious.”
- “There is a cork stopper. You can’t see what’s inside without opening it. Shaking the urn from side to side tells you there’s something solid inside, but you hear nothing metallic about the sound.”
- “It’s not one of those Asian urns. This one is made of clay, 18 inches tall and 10 inches wide. The mouth is flared to six inches across, and the neck – at it’s narrowest – is about 3 inches across – all outside diameters, you can’t see how thick the walls are except at the mouth, and most clay urns have a thick lip, so that’s not the most reliable guide.”
- “It would be too heavy to lift. and the bottom would be prone to staying in place and separating from the rest of the urn if you tried – clay isn’t strong enough. But it isn’t that heavy, so you can be fairly sure that it’s not filled with coins. There is something inside, though, you can hear it bouncing around when you shake the urn.”
- “If it were filled with precious stones, they would be worth at least 100,000 GP, but it isn’t. Unless you want to go shopping and fill it with your own money, of course.”
Some of the responses have changed a little or not at all – some are unrecognizable. And notice how trying to make estimates involves some interaction with an object – if you want to know how heavy something is, without knowing what’s inside, you have to at least try to lift it. There’s an “if” that has become a “when”, for example.
Some players would complain about that – “I never said I was touching it!” – but the answer is “Then don’t ask questions that require touching something to answer.”
“Adding blur” in this case means redacting specifics, not jumping ahead to the end of a sequence, and assuming that if a player asks a specific question, their PC is doing what they have to do in order to get an answer.
Specifics make life mechanically simpler for both the GM and the player, and there are times when that’s appropriate; but most of the time they drain all or almost all of the color and life out of the scene, reducing it to a black-and-white sketch.
“A Wealth Of Specifics” is great, even essential, for the GM – but if handled in the most obvious way, as specifics, they are about as useful as “A wealth of Debt” – not a good thing at all.
Too Much Blur
You can also go too far, applying too much blur of this kind. This forces the players to tell the GM what they are doing to obtain their answers, which ends up being slow and very frustrating for the players. A taste of this is usually the best answer if you get multiple complaints of the “I never said I was touching it” variety; after that brief taste, a happier compromise is usually reached along the lines of “All you can tell without trying to pick it up is that it looks solidly constructed.”
Distance Blurs
It’s really hard to have both the background and the foreground in focus at the same time – it requires photography from a distance and a zoom lens and cropping the image to a small fraction of the original.
In both photography (without these heroic measures) and real life, there’s something called the focal plane. Objects outside this focal plane are blurred, and the more they are removed from it, the more they are blurred.
To understand this, you need an object a couple of feet away that is also a couple of feet away from a wall, like a chair, and a pen (if you don’t have one, use your finger). Hold the pen so that it’s about an inch from your eye. You can then focus on the pen / finger, or the chair / object, or the background behind the chair / object, but even in quite a small room, you can’t keep all three in focus at the same time.
When you look at the pen / finger, the chair / object blurs, and the background becomes almost nonexistent, it’s so blurred and vague. When you look at the chair / object, the pen / finger blurs into a vague patch of color, and the background is blurred but not so much that you aren’t aware of it. When you focus on the background, the chair / object becomes blurred, and the pen / finger blurs so much that you are barely aware of it. In fact, the human brain often subtracts details to the extent that the pen / finger can completely vanish from view – unless it does something to attract your mental attention.
The Basketball Gorilla
I love the “basketball gorilla” optical illusion, because it takes this to the next level. You need three basketball players in a dark uniform, three in a light-colored uniform, and someone in a gorilla suit who is initially out of sight. You tell a bunch of people – the audience – to count the number of times a player in a light-colored uniform passes the ball, then have the players pass the ball back and forth between them, sometimes to a like-colored uniform, sometimes not, all while moving around a bit. After a few seconds of this, anyone concentrating on the task has their awareness ‘tunnel-vision’ – they stop seeing the uniforms per se, and just see ‘light’ and ‘dark’. At which point, the gorilla can walk right through the middle of the play, can even catch and pass the ball, and as many as nine-tenths of the audience won’t even notice him. Even if they are told what is going to happen. What’s more, the remaining one-tenth or whatever will usually have an inaccurate count of the number of passes, because they were too busy watching for the gorilla (or whatever) to focus properly on keeping count. (NB: If you go looking for this demonstration on youTube, you have to view it full-screen for the effect to work; on a small screen, the image is so small that your brain processes the image as a single ‘object’ and isn’t fooled. A google search for ‘invisible gorilla’ will find several videos demonstrating the experiment, but I’d like to draw attention to a book by the people who first came up with the experiment – The Invisible Gorilla [I’ll get a small commission if you buy a copy]).
There are people who think that study should be conducted in an environment that is as antiseptic as possible. Others have music or TV playing continually, and the first group have trouble understanding how the second can study effectively with the environmental ‘pollution’ distracting them.
One of my early answers on Quora addressed this specific question. I’m one of the second group – unless the topic requires a great deal of intense focus, I learn more effectively with (reasonably soft) music in the background, especially if it’s not new music. My mind recognizes the familiar, and ‘tunes it out’ – and tunes out all sorts of other environmental distractions (birds, insects, passing traffic) at the same time. Careful ‘contamination’ of the environment brings me closer to the ‘antiseptic’ environment recommended by the first group. What’s more, should my attention slip (because the lesson is boring, for example), the familiarity of the sonic environment makes it easier to refocus.
Our brains have evolved to subtract the familiar so that we can better focus on the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous. We need to give priority to assessing anything that falls into that category for survival!
So, let’s apply those principles to a PC in an RPG.
Scene one:
As he has done every day for the past month, the PC sets foot out of the inn where he’s been staying and heads for his first appointment of the day. He has to remember where he has to go, and keep track of where he is; this requires a focus on the details of the mid-ground. He will be barely aware of the familiar sounds of the urban environment – the caravan-master bellowing at his wagon-beasts as he delivers overpriced wine to the inns and taverns, the sound of seagulls, the bells of the distant temples, the shouting of street urchins at play, the rustle of the summer breeze through the leaves of the many trees, the vague rustle of a million feet hurrying from place to place on the cobbled streets, the sound of the PCs own footfalls, and so on.
Because that list of sounds is so lengthy, it blurs in the mind of the reader (or listener) into an overall impression – “urban environment, leafy, near the sea”. If I had only provided a couple of them, or hadn’t run them together in that way, the details would have stacked up in the ‘focal plane’ until the player / reader had reached his individual capacity, at which point they would be ejected from awareness to make room for the next point of focus. Instead of painting a blurry picture of the environment to serve as a backdrop to events, the onus would be placed on the player formulating such a general impression for himself – which means that he’s distracted and not really listening to the GM (me).
There are ways to make use of this phenomenon. I could try to slip something into the background that I wanted to be there but not the focus of immediate attention, but that’s usually risky – if the player notices, he will focus on that and lose almost everything that follows. I could tack such a something onto the end of the list, so that there’s nothing ‘additional’ to lose, providing a natural segue to something of more acute interest and making it seem a natural part of the environment. Or I could simply leave it there as background as the character moves through the environment from landmark to landmark on his journey to whatever his first task of the day might be.
Notice that there’s a sparsity of details about any single item. That ‘fuzziness’ contributes to the ‘blur’.
The more often this description is repeated over successive days of play, the less the absence of any particular item will be consciously noted, especially if I randomly re-sequence them. This practice also keeps the description effective at creating that ‘backdrop’.
Once the character is focusing on the landmarks of his journey, it’s entirely plausible for him to fail to notice a ‘gorilla’ – a shadowy figure following some distance behind him, for example – unless I specifically mention it (in which case the player will immediately obsess about it). Some sort of perception or awareness or spot check is required, but getting the player to make one can give the game away by telling him that there’s something to focus on.
There are two solutions to that: making the roll yourself, or letting the player make the roll and then providing something else for their attention to momentarily focus on if they don’t succeed by enough in the GM’s opinion. Until about five years ago, I focused on the first, but once I thought of the second, it’s become more and more a part of my go-to toolkit.
Scene Two:
“You step out of the alehouse, counting your change carefully. One of the coins doesn’t look quite right, and you almost turn back to have words with the barkeep before deciding that it’s not worth the trouble right now. Besides, you have to be at the Palace Garden in a hand-span of minutes, and it wouldn’t do to keep the Prince waiting.”
This ticks several boxes – there’s color, there’s movement, there’s a little intrigue. There’s a vague impression created by mention of a Palace Garden, but it’s immediately undercut by the unusual “hand-span of minutes”, which in turn is immediately undercut by wondering what the Prince wants, and how he knew of the adventurer in the first place.
This effectively pushes “Palace Gardens” into first the mid-ground and then the background, mentally blurring them for the player and creating a backdrop. I can drop in all sorts of details about the gardens during the lead-up to the encounter and use the same technique to integrate them into that general background impression:
“Rose bushes arch overhead in cascades of color. The grass is lush and green underfoot, and somehow softer than any you have felt before. In the distance, you hear the cries of a hunting Malrog, no doubt terrifying herds of sheep and their handlers in equal measure, but the fierce hunters generally avoid urban environments – too many ballistae and siege weapons – so it poses little threat to you. The Prince stands in the shadows, his expression both unreadable and somehow clouded and dark. Normally a bright, cheery party-going type, this new mood is hard to assess, and bodes ill.”
Again: color, movement, and a progression from trivial to significant. The player might have asked about the gardens, especially after teasing about the grass being somehow unusual, but would then have been distracted by the Malrog, which he’s never heard of before (but which his character is obviously familiar with) – but then he gets distracted from that by the Prince.
Creating backdrops like this not only generates atmosphere, and helps players get into character, it helps the GM get into character too – but, most importantly, it creates depth of immersion. You get sucked into the story.
Interrupted Narrative
Some players will try to interrupt with questions whenever the GM takes breath. Others will wait patiently for the GM to finish. I vastly prefer the second, because it lets me build up ‘depth of narrative’.
At one point, I tried implementing a policy of “the narrative ends as soon as a question is asked or the GM is otherwise interrupted” – which matters if you have a progression from least important to most important! – but I decided that was unfair on the players who didn’t interrupt.
Over time, I’ve found that some interruptions break the mood, others simply overlay something else onto it momentarily, and learned to recognize the latter and simply roll with it. Interruptions of the first type get answered, curtly and with some evident annoyance on occasion. As a result, they have become far less frequent – and, in truth, I was sometimes not quite as irritated as I seemed, as an interruption lets me know when the interruption is too lengthy. So I’ve evolved in technique with experience, too. (All that being said, there are two things that will eventually make me blow my top – being constantly interrupted, and being nagged – and the latter is rare at the gaming table).
I wish I could be more specific for the benefit of the other GMs out there, but the differences are hard to pin down and might even vary with the mood of the table and the current in-game circumstances. As a very, very, very general rule of thumb, questions about content can be disruptive, passing side-comments less so.
I’ve even reached the point where I can anticipate possible interruptions to the narrative and build responses in that indulge the player being ‘triggered’ before steering back to the narrative, minimizing the distraction created by the interruption.
Conclusion
Blur is important in RPGs, just as it is in image compositing. It obscures details and creates a blended backdrop which imposes depth and immersion. All good things!
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