This update includes dependency changes. Please run the command "pip install -r requirements.txt" or equivalent after downloading.

Added

• Configuration Tab (Work in Progress)
  • Initial GUI implementation for saving, loading, and handling default parameters requested by the user, such as default image search path
  • All widgets are currently disabled and will be enabled in a future update when ready

Changes

• Image loading methods loadDataLeft() and loadDataRight() now default to the Images_Points folder when the user is prompted to select an image
  • This will be configurable when the Configuration tab is fully implemented and released
• Code cleanup: Merged and removed duplicate methods for various GUI tasks to reduce unnecessary bloat - more planned in the future
  • updateRed() / updateGreen() / updateBlue() → updateColorSlider
  • triangleRedValueDone() / triangleGreenValueDone() / triangleBlueValueDone() → Removed in favor of directly calling verifyValue
• Rewrote checkUpdate() to instead parse api.github.com as well as silently terminate on exception or failure
• Modified requirements.txt:
  • Added Requests - missing from 2.0 release, required for checkUpdate()
  • Removed BeautifulSoup - no longer needed due to checkUpdate() changes
• Miscellaneous: Updated comments for initialized GUI variables and signal connections

Fixes

• Resolved crash when the total point pair count was brought below three through Delete Mode
• Corrected issue with Delete Mode that caused points to be improperly deleted (eventually cascaded into crashes)
• Fixed bug with image loading that caused PIM to crash when only one point pair was previously saved
• Removed unnecessary print statement on startup

As no issues have been reported with 2.0.0 Beta, it is now being released as Stable with a couple additions.

This update includes new dependencies - Please run the command "pip install -r requirements.txt" or equivalent after downloading.

Added

• New Mouse Modes
  • In addition to point placement, the user can now switch to two other modes when clicking on images: Move Mode and Delete Mode
    • (E) - Move Mode allows the user to drag any previously confirmed point to a new location
    • (Q) - Delete Mode allows the user to delete any previously confirmed point
    • Special thanks to GitHub user jankaWIS for creating this feature request
• Dynamic Image Loading
  • The user can now load images into the GUI from their OS by dragging and dropping them into the desired window
  • Input images are now dynamically resized to match the size of their windows in the GUI, greatly improving GUI responsiveness
    • Larger images (e.g. 1080p, 4K, etc.) are downscaled, smaller images are upscaled
    • The user's files themselves are unchanged - PIM instead manipulates copies that get cleaned up during termination
• Zoom Panning
  • The user can now pan images while zoomed in by clicking and dragging with the middle-mouse button
• Zoom Slider
  • QoL: The user can now manually set the strength of the zoom applied to GUI images (in realtime) for ease of use
    • Zoom strength is defaulted to 2x during initialization but can now range from 2x to 10x!
• Automatic Versioning Checker
  • On startup, PIM now checks your currently installed version against the latest stable release hosted on GitHub
  • A prompt is provided to automatically navigate the user to the latest release, if not up to date
    • PIM does not support automatic update installation at this time
• Triangle Widget Enhancements
  • In addition to the sliders, the user can now manually enter RGB values for the displayed triangles
    • The user can now choose between binary, decimal, or hexadecimal format when setting RGB values
• More Macros
  • The following key combinations have been added to support the user's interactions with the GUI:
    • D = Toggle Display of Delaunay Triangles
    • E = Toggle Move Mode (for moving individual points)
    • Q = Toggle Delete Mode (for deleting individual points)
    • Ctrl + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Zoom Slider
    • Shift + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Point Slider
    • Alt + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Alpha Slider

Changes

• PIM's GUI has received many needed internal changes. The following elements have been changed:
  • Redesign:
    • The GUI has been restructured from scratch to containerize separate blocks
      • As this allows for far more refined control over resizing behavior - which has historically been a very problematic piece of development for this project - EVERY documented resizing bug has been fixed with this change (more details in Fixes)
  • Miscellaneous:
    • Minimum size of the main window has changed from (788 x 690) to (844 x 763)
• Optimization: MorphingApp.py no longer conditionally sets size rules for the image windows (as Qt handles resizing correctly now)
• Complete rewrite of blendImages() to support proper QThreading during morphing, preventing GUI lockup
  • To accompany this change, all functions related to morphing are disabled during the process to prevent exploits
• Implemented a proper progress bar for full blending - the notification bar is no longer used for this
• Full blending now displays frames as they are rendered
  • PIM will still display the user's specified frame when finished morphing
• Alpha is now assigned 50% instead of 0% when reset
• PIM now prompts for confirmation when the Reset Points button is pressed
• Added queue & warnings to MorphingApp.py's imports
• Removed Matplotlib and itertools from Morphing.py's imports
  • As it was a dependency that is no longer in use, removed Matplotlib from requirements.txt as well
• Added pynput, beautifulsoup, & opencv-python to requirements.txt
• Added version.txt to facilitate automatic versioning checks.
• Removed NumPy's version restriction in requirements.txt (as the fmod() issue in v1.19.4 has been resolved)
• Simplified all remaining instances of legacy code where the last index of a list was being accessed
  • x[len(x)-1] → x[-1]
• Removed an instance of self.repaint() inside MorphingApp.py's checkResize()
• Removed multiple instances of self.refreshPaint() inside MorphingApp.py's keyPressEvent()
• Updated README.md
• And much, much more

Fixes

• Every single documented resizing bug has been hit with this update's GUI changes, including but not limited to:
  • Fixed: Input images would expand (or rarely shrink) by 2 pixels when loaded or each time the GUI was resized (very common)
  • Fixed: The bottom half of the GUI would often vertically expand/collapse before the top half (very common)
  • Fixed: The left half of the GUI would often horizontally expand/collapse before the right half (uncommon)
  • Fixed: Zooming into input images would cause random, incorrect resizing behavior (common)
  • Fixed: When maximized, the GUI would resize incorrectly with conditionally varying severity (very common)
  • Fixed: Inconsistent resizing behavior before and after a morph had been executed (very common)
• Fixed a long-standing bug where the GUI could temporarily become unresponsive while morphing
  • Additionally, fixed a bug where inputs to the GUI would be propagated during morphing
    • Example: This could lead to chain-morphing if the blend button was clicked more than once
• Fixed a bug where PIM could treat certain incompatible images as standard .jpg, causing a crash during morphing
• Fixed a bug where zooming in on the lower third of either input image would be visibly distorted
• Prioritized GUI parameter assignment to come first in the loadImage functions - thereby resolving several bugs & crashes
• Fixed an amusing bug where the Help tab could be edited by the user
• Fixed a crash that could occur upon resetting the alpha slider after executing a full blend
• Resolved a minor GUI issue where, when enabled, Green/Blue triangle color value text would remain grey until updated
• Fixed a bug where the Add Corners button would sometimes not enable after clicking Resize Left Image or Resize Right Image
• Corrected a notification bar bug when one image has been loaded and user tries to add point
• Other general code cleanup

Known Bugs

• While zoomed in, issue with highlighting points to be manually moved or deleted
• After clicking Resize Left/Right, points on the GUI do not visibly scale correctly
  • Comment: This is a purely visual bug. For now, this issue can be circumvented by just reloading the affected image.

Unreleased

• Key Macro: Tab / Shift + Tab = Switch Morphing Tab
• Configuration Tab
  • Comment: In the future, this tab will be used to set/reload default parameters for PIM to use on initialization. Still planning out what I do and don't want to be included in this tab though, so it has been excluded from this release.

This beta includes new dependencies - Please run the command "pip install -r requirements.txt" or equivalent after downloading.

Added

• New Mouse Modes
  • In addition to point placement, the user can now switch to two other modes when clicking on images: Move Mode and Delete Mode
    • (E) - Move Mode allows the user to drag any previously confirmed point to a new location
    • (Q) - Delete Mode allows the user to delete any previously confirmed point
    • Special thanks to GitHub user jankaWIS for creating this feature request
• Dynamic Image Loading
  • The user can now load images into the GUI from their OS by dragging and dropping them into the desired window
  • Input images are now dynamically resized to match the size of their windows in the GUI, greatly improving GUI responsiveness
    • Larger images (e.g. 1080p, 4K, etc.) are downscaled, smaller images are upscaled
    • The user's files themselves are unchanged - PIM instead manipulates copies that get cleaned up during termination
• Zoom Panning
  • The user can now pan images while zoomed in by clicking and dragging with the middle-mouse button
• Zoom Slider
  • QoL: The user can now manually set the strength of the zoom applied to GUI images (in realtime) for ease of use
    • Zoom strength is defaulted to 2x during initialization but can now range from 2x to 10x!
• Triangle Widget Enhancements
  • In addition to the sliders, the user can now manually enter RGB values for the displayed triangles
    • The user can now choose between binary, decimal, or hexadecimal format when setting RGB values
• More Macros
  • The following key combinations have been added to support the user's interactions with the GUI:
    • D = Toggle Display of Delaunay Triangles
    • E = Toggle Move Mode (for moving individual points)
    • Q = Toggle Delete Mode (for deleting individual points)
    • Ctrl + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Zoom Slider
    • Shift + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Point Slider
    • Alt + Mouse Wheel = Adjust Alpha Slider

Changes

• PIM's GUI has received many needed internal changes. The following elements have been changed:
  • Redesign:
    • The GUI has been restructured from scratch to containerize separate blocks
      • As this allows for far more refined control over resizing behavior - which has historically been a very problematic piece of development for this project - EVERY documented resizing bug has been fixed with this change (more details in Fixes)
  • Miscellaneous:
    • Minimum size of the main window has changed from (788 x 690) to (844 x 763)
• Optimization: MorphingApp.py no longer conditionally sets size rules for the image windows (as Qt handles resizing correctly now)
• Complete rewrite of blendImages() to support proper QThreading during morphing, preventing GUI lockup
  • To accompany this change, all functions related to morphing are disabled during the process to prevent exploits
• Implemented a proper progress bar for full blending - the notification bar is no longer used for this
• Full blending now displays frames as they are rendered
  • PIM will still display the user's specified frame when finished morphing
• Alpha is now assigned 50% instead of 0% when reset
• PIM now prompts for confirmation when the Reset Points button is pressed
• Added queue & warnings to MorphingApp.py's imports
• Removed Matplotlib and itertools from Morphing.py's imports
  • As it was a dependency that is no longer in use, removed Matplotlib from requirements.txt as well
• Added pynput and opencv-python to requirements.txt
• Removed NumPy's version restriction in requirements.txt (as the fmod() issue in v1.19.4 has been resolved)
• Simplified all remaining instances of legacy code where the last index of a list was being accessed
  • x[len(x)-1] → x[-1]
• Removed an instance of self.repaint() inside MorphingApp.py's checkResize()
• Removed multiple instances of self.refreshPaint() inside MorphingApp.py's keyPressEvent()
• Updated README.md
• And much, much more

Fixes

• Every single documented resizing bug has been hit with this update's GUI changes, including but not limited to:
  • Fixed: Input images would expand (or rarely shrink) by 2 pixels when loaded or each time the GUI was resized (very common)
  • Fixed: The bottom half of the GUI would often vertically expand/collapse before the top half (very common)
  • Fixed: The left half of the GUI would often horizontally expand/collapse before the right half (uncommon)
  • Fixed: Zooming into input images would cause random, incorrect resizing behavior (common)
  • Fixed: When maximized, the GUI would resize incorrectly with conditionally varying severity (very common)
  • Fixed: Inconsistent resizing behavior before and after a morph had been executed (very common)
• Fixed a long-standing bug where the GUI could temporarily become unresponsive while morphing
  • Additionally, fixed a bug where inputs to the GUI would be propagated during morphing
    • Example: This could lead to chain-morphing if the blend button was clicked more than once
• Fixed a bug where PIM could treat certain incompatible images as standard .jpg, causing a crash during morphing
• Fixed a bug where zooming in on the lower third of either input image would be visibly distorted
• Prioritized GUI parameter assignment to come first in the loadImage functions - thereby resolving several bugs & crashes
• Fixed an amusing bug where the Help tab could be edited by the user
• Fixed a crash that could occur upon resetting the alpha slider after executing a full blend
• Resolved a minor GUI issue where, when enabled, Green/Blue triangle color value text would remain grey until updated
• Fixed a bug where the Add Corners button would sometimes not enable after clicking Resize Left Image or Resize Right Image
• Corrected a notification bar bug when one image has been loaded and user tries to add point
• Other general code cleanup

Known Bugs

• While zoomed in, issue with highlighting points to be manually moved or deleted
• After clicking Resize Left/Right, points on the GUI do not visibly scale correctly
  • Comment: This is a purely visual bug. For now, this issue can be circumvented by just reloading the affected image.

Unreleased

• Key Macro: Tab / Shift + Tab = Switch Morphing Tab
• Configuration Tab
  • Comment: In the future, this tab will be used to set/reload default parameters for PIM to use on initialization. Still planning out what I do and don't want to be included in this tab though, so it has been excluded from this release.

Hotfix:

• Fixed a bug where the absolute path to Images_Points was incorrectly assigned for non-Windows machines
  • '\\' → os.path.sep

Hotfix:

• Fixed a bug where starting/ending image names could be incorrectly assigned when certain OS conditions were met
  • re.search('(?<=[/])[^/]+(?=[.])', x).group() → os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(x))

Known Bugs

• The GUI can sometimes become unresponsive during morphing calculations (but eventually returns to normal)
  • QtCore.QCoreApplication.processEvents() is a potential workaround but currently produces buggy results

Added

• Point Size Slider
  • QoL: The user can now manually change the size of points rendered onto the GUI (in realtime) for ease of use
  • Point width values still default to 4 during initialization but can now range from 1 to 10

Changes

• PIM's GUI has received another facelift with this update! The following elements have been changed:
  • Redesign:
    • Along with a streamlined layout, buttons & settings have been moved to categorized tabs
  • Accessibility:
    • PIM now includes a Help manual for new users! Check the Help tab in the GUI for more.
    • Minimum size of the main window has changed from (878 x 809) to (788 x 690)
  • Miscellaneous:
    • Added dedicated value boxes for each of the triangle color sliders
      • Changes in value will no longer be announced in the notification bar
    • Alpha is now initialized at 50% instead of 0%

Fixes

• Fixed an ugly bug where zooming in to only one image could reshape the GUI
• Fixed a notification bar bug regarding mouse clicks when only one image was loaded

See here for the full list of changes.

Known Bugs

• The GUI can sometimes become unresponsive during morphing calculations (but eventually returns to normal)
  • QtCore.QCoreApplication.processEvents() is a potential workaround but currently produces buggy results

Added

• Image Zoom - Because sometimes, it's hard to get that one point just right.
  • The user can now right click on either [or both] of the input images to toggle zoom for more accurate point placement

Removed

• As of v0.3.0.1's hot pixel fix, PIM's image smoothing feature is deprecated and will now be removed
  • Removed Morphing.py's smoothBlend() method as well as the "smoothMode" parameter in getImageAtAlpha()
  • Removed Morphing.py's sub-module import for SciPy's median_filter
  • Removed all code related to smoothing in MorphingApp.py (a reduction of 77 SLOC)
  • Removed self.smoothingBox from MorphingGUI.ui and MorphingGUI.py

Changes

• Improved morphing performance (a huge 90% speedup) by modifying Morphing.py's implementation of getPoints() as well as tweaking interpolatePoints() to utilize RectBivariateSpline's .ev() method instead of manually interpolating the image data
  • Huge thanks to GitHub user zhifeichen097 for his source code which can be found here - excellent work!
• Optimized the conditional logic found in MorphingApp.py's displayTriangles()
• Optimized point assignment in Morphing.py's loadTriangles() by utilizing np.loadtxt()
• Optimized conditional logic and list pop statements in MorphingApp.py's keyPressEvent()
• Changed the loop in MorphingApp.py's autoCorner() to be less C-like and more Pythonic
  • "i = 0; while i < 4: ... i++" → "for leftPoint, rightPoint in zip(tempLeft, tempRight): ..."
• Moved autoCorner()'s invocation of refreshPaint() out of it's loop (i.e. the GUI is now updated once instead of up to four times)
• Changed the notification message displayed when autoCorner() adds one point pair
• Removed a conditional in MorphingApp.py's resizeLeft() and resizeRight() that was unnecessarily reassigning their image type variable
• Converted the syntax of all instances where lists were being reset in MorphingApp.py
  • "self.blendList = []" → "self.blendList.clear()"

Fixes

• Resolved an oversight where .jpeg images couldn't be loaded into the program
  • Comment: To clarify, while it can probably accept other types, PIM is specifically written to work with .jpg, .jpeg, and .png images.
• Corrected unintended behavior in mousePressEvent() where points could also be drawn with the middle and right mouse buttons

Fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where hot pixels frequently appeared in blended images [before and after]

See here for the full list of changes.

Known Bugs

• The GUI can sometimes become unresponsive during morphing calculations (but eventually returns to normal)
  • QtCore.QCoreApplication.processEvents() is a potential workaround but currently produces buggy results

Added

• Freestyle Point Placement
  • QoL: The user can now place point pairs on the images in whatever order they wish
  • Keyboard/mouse input logic has been rewritten to maintain previous behavior with Undo, Delete, OUT, etc.
• Redo (CTRL+Y) Functionality
  • The user may now redo any point placement that was previously undone or deleted
    • Points are recovered in the order they were undone or deleted
    • The cache is cleared whenever a new point is placed by the user

Changes

• Added logging that was previously missing from MorphingApp.py's Undo logic

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the alpha slider and auto-corner button were not enabling when new images were loaded
  • Comment: Just an oversight that spawned from the changes to the image loading methods in v0.2.9.0

Known Bugs

• The GUI can sometimes become unresponsive during morphing calculations (but eventually returns to normal)
  • QtCore.QCoreApplication.processEvents() is a potential workaround but currently produces buggy results

Added

• Source Image Resizing
  • Since PIM requires the user's images to be the same size, it can now create and hotswap resized copies of the left/right images at the click of a button
  • For simplicity, one button resizes the left image to the right image's dimensions and the other button does the opposite
    • Both images must be loaded to enable this functionality
    • Additionally scales any added/confirmed/chosen points to the new image dimensions
    • Buttons will be set to bold whenever the user's images aren't the same size
  • Resized image files are stored under: ROOT_DIR/Images_Points/filename-[width]x[height].filetype
  • Resized text files are stored under: ROOT_DIR/Images_Points/filename-[width]x[height]-filetype.txt

Changes

• The program now locks out usage of point placement as well as the Add Corners button when the user's images aren't the same size
• Text files are now stored under: ROOT_DIR/Images_Points/filename-filetype.txt

Changes

• resizeEvent() has received a performance boost
• Memory Optimization: Removed all instances of the variables used to:
  • Flag when the GUI was being resized: self.resizeFlag
  • Flag when left/right images were loaded: self.leftOn, self.rightOn
  • Flag whether left/right images were PNGs: self.leftPNG, self.rightPNG, leftTypeRegex, rightTypeRegex
  • Flag whether the smoothing box was checked: self.smoothBoxSetting
  • Flag whether the transparency box was checked: self.transparencySetting
  • Flag whether the full blend box was checked: self.blendBoxSetting
  • Flag whether the user has performed a morph in the current session: self.blendExecuted
  • Store triangle color slider values: self.redVal, self.blueVal, self.greenVal
  • Store an additional copy (!!!) of each image's chosen points: self.startingText, self.endingText

Fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where .jpg blends could sometimes appear in the GUI to be wildly distorted and - occasionally - grayscale
• autoCorner() now checks that neither image contains each corner point before adding it

Fixes

• Hotfixed a bug where verifyValue() for the frame time textbox was accepting 0 as a valid number

Added

• Morphed Image Saving
  • Normal blends can now be saved as their respective image types; full blends can now be saved as dynamic GIFs
    • Generated GIFs are subject to the user's preference for the amount of time (default: 100 ms) given to each frame

Changes

• To accommodate this update, the following elements in MorphingGUI.ui and MorphingGUI.py have been changed:
  • Added a "Save Image(s)" button alongside a smaller frame time textbox
    • A fairly air-tight Qt mask is used to restrict letter and symbol input - format is "[0-9][0-9][0-9] ms"
    • The program handles other invalid inputs (000, no input)
  • Minimum size of the main window has changed from (878 x 797) to (878 x 850)

Added

• Morphed Image Smoothing
  • A toggleable median filter is now applied to every blend and full blend
    • This filter attempts to remove hot pixels in morphed images by utilizing neighboring pixel values instead
    • Very little to no impact on program performance

Changes

• The GUI now displays the current image frame being generated when full blending is enabled
• Removed two sub-module imports (Qt's QGraphicsScene & QGraphicsView) that were no longer in use

Fixes

• Corrected an instance where the notification bar stated that the program was blending was in RGB mode instead of RGBA

Changes

• Optimizations to Morphing.py's loadTriangles() and getPoints() functions
  • Declarations, re-assignments, loops, and return statements have been streamlined to be more efficient
• Optimized MorphingApp.py's blendImages() function to no longer have to [repeatedly] deepcopy each array slice
  • Initialization of a Morpher object will now deepcopy the passed arguments to its left and right image variables
• Removed more unnecessary module dependencies

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where .png (RGBA) images could only be morphed into .jpg images (RGB)

Python Image Morpher is a program that can take two images and blend them to whatever extent or precision that you like! So far, it has only been tested on separate Windows environments; later releases are likely to support Mac and Linux.

Installation:

This program has dependencies that do not come packaged with Python 3.8. For each module below that your machine does not have installed, enter the respective command using the terminal supplied by Windows or your choice of IDE (such as PyCharm).

PyQt5 - pip install pyqt5 SciPy - pip install scipy NumPy - pip install numpy Matplotlib - pip install matplotlib

If pip, for whatever reason, is not installed on your machine, enter the following line in a terminal:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

Then navigate to the folder where get-pip.py was downloaded and enter the following line in a terminal:

python get-pip.py

Usage:

• Run MorphingApp.py either through the terminal or using an IDE
• Use the graphical interface to select your two images to morph
• Click on points of interest in your images to create correspondences
• When satisfied, click on blend and observe the result!