When I was in my early 20s I became really interested in the art of lomography. It's a wildly unpredictable for of photography that uses low quality cameras, expired film, drilling holes in film canisters and even soaking unexposed film in random liquids to distort the film. It was a fun hobby that encouraged creativity without any artistic expectations causing me stress. The results were good or they were bad, nothing you can do about it. Unfortunatly it is a fairly expensive hobby. A good roll of film would yield 3 or 4 decent pictures.
These days I do not have the funds to spend a fortune on developing aweful pictures so I have started using a new methodology. Traditionally Lomography is an analog process but I got a toy that will teach me to code and create some unpredictable art. I got the Adafruit Memento a DIY Python Programable Camera. This camera takes pretty low quality photos that I find charming.
Now taking pictures is great but I want to try and embrace the Lomo life. My first task was to create my own digital film soup. I am not a super skilled programmer so complicated algorythms arent my forte but I can make do. I learned some basic photo manipulation from CS50X and was pretty confident i could blend 2 pictures together. I payed a visit to The British Library Flickr page and dug through their Decorative Papers Collection. I was able to create 21 beer, 18 gin, 13 rose, 18 rum and 18 whiskey filters.
The cli Film Soup filter asks for an original image to effect. It then asks for which soup you would like to soak the film in. Last it asks how long you would like to soak the film fore. Obviously the python script is soaking anything so all its really asking is what collection of images should be used to blend with and what strength you want the blend to be. 0 means none of the alcohol image will be used while 100 means a lot of the alcohol image would be used. The program went through the images pixel by pixel taking the average RGB values of both images and adding them to a new canvas... if you will. THere was some complicated math to determine the values after "soak time" and I'll admit I had ChatGPT help me work it out.
Pretty quickly I realized I had a problem. My photo often lost a lot of it's definition when filtered. I had to create a buffer that checked the brightness of the original images pixel. If it was a dark Pixel the filter would have less of an effect. This buffer protected the original structure of the photo, even if the "soak time" was maximized.
Once I had blends I liked it was time to think about the bigger picture... get it? The goal of this project was to create a lomography filter. Altering one picture in a fairly randomized way was great but I needed to mimic soaking a roll of film in soup. This wasn't the biggest change to make. the code now would be pointed to a directory / folder of images. It would iterate through each image one at a time choosing a random alcohol filter to blend with. THis functionally worked great but we have a new problem to deal with in the future. The program, thanks to my current skill and choice of Python, is very inneficient. This will be a good chance to learn some new skills but that will come in time. For now I am quite happy.
I tested the filter on a roll (directory / folder) of several pictures from the Memento camera. This filter looks great on black and white images but it is an utter disaster on color images. It makes them incomprehensible at worst and ugly at best. Fortunatly I really love the black and white setting on my camera and I alwats take a few pictures in both color and black and white. On the other hand getting a rolls worth of photos back with similar but random effects is awesome. doing multiple photos in a batch really takes the control out of my hands. I get at least a few usable images out of it but its unpredictable nature disincentivizes me from running the code over and over again. I get what I get and I don't get upset!
Someday I will post the code on github for anyone to view or manipulate. It's by no means a good filter for most people but I will be using it and It recreates the joy I had anxiously waiting to see what chaos awaited me in the soup.