talkmagic.co.uk

I assumed the phrase 'Offer good towards print costs only' means only the product, not the P&P which would apply to a printed item therefore it would apply to a download - if not, dunno how I got away with it!

Perhaps someone could ask lulu to clarify?

Hurrah. The Milky Bars are on Lulu!

I'm struggling trying to combine two photos and create a hybrid image. I have Jon's great little book but I'm technically hopeless. I have a black and white photo of me and a similar of Sean Connery (I'm a bit grizzled and craggy like him). The photos will combine OK (perhaps a little resizing to get feature to align - but I'm getting nowhere. Anybody who cares to take on the challenge and produce a workable photo (looking closely you see Sean, from a distance you see me) will be very well rewarded in beer vouchers (i.e. money...). I can see great humour in asking a lady (looking at Sean C) to 'describe what she feels about this man' (without identifying him .... and the rest of the group seeing me). PM me if you are prepared to do this for me. Cheers Will

Funny that this has come up, I just bought this book last weekend. I've played around with the basic example in the book and I've not had much success.
How did you get on with the example? I hope to have a proper experiment with it this weekend. I trained as a photographer and I'm generally quite skilled with photoshop (I'm new to GIMP) and image manipulation in general, i'd be happy to have a play around with your images to see if i can make it work. No promises though - I'll probably fail miserably!
But it's all good practice.

Thanks FTHO, PM sent to you

I played around with this quite a bit a few years ago and always had very mixed results when it came to photos and eventually gave up with them. Words are far more reliable as long as they're roughly similar looking.

There's rather famous one where Albert Einstein morphs into Marilyn Monroe (and vice versa) - it was on a repeat of QI recently. See http://www.123opticalillusions.com/page ... monroe.php and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfvMU36fgKw .

I've also been thinking about this recently...found a few guides to it online from non magic related sources, but nothing very useful, does the book go in to some depth about it?

I played with this technique a few years ago when it was doing the rounds, too. I read an academic paper that proposed a method and worked from that (although I hear that Jon Thompson's guide is far easier to follow), with moderate success. The challenge comes from finding images that can be meaningfully combined: faces tend to work well (and for the most-striking effect, you should try to use subjects of different genders; I could never achieve much success with different races, though), perhaps because of the mind's ability to find faces in anything, but anything else needs a little thought.

Consider, for example, this bicycle/motorcycle (http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybrid_gallery/moto_bike.html) on the MIT hybrid images site. It works because of the shape similarity between the motorcycle and the shadow of the bicycle (and it's emotionally striking too because, hey: who's not cycled and wished they were on a motorbike instead, at some point or other?). If the artist had opted to merge a bicycle with a face, they'd have a far harder time.

As Lady of Mystery noted, text can often be done with greater reliability: a major reason for this is, I think, that the "fuzziness" around the edge of where the 'invisible' words are is quickly assimilated into the background of the image and thus ignored by the mind - like a stereogram: all the information is there, it's just that our brains are wired to see different things at different times.