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I have recently started using Mask by colour and have found it a great way to easily mask photographic subjects. My present setup is a Canon 60 D DSLR with a 28-135 mm Canon lens with usm and image stabilisation. This is mounted on a Manfrotto tripod using a pan and tilt head. The thing being photographed sits on an ikea lazy susan that does service as a manual turntable. This in turn sits on a chest of drawers.Both the turntable and the backdrop are covered in semi matte black paper. This has worked out so far and I managed to create a 360 degree model of a chunk of rock that I was pleased with. This model was made up of 430 odd photos and these were all masked by colour.
Since that success I went on to photograph a small brass sculpture. The brass was shiny and the autofocus rendered the background as a mid grey. After shooting a run of photos these were imported into Zephyr Lite 4.530 on my windows 10 pc and an attempt was made to mask by colour using Masquerade. I adjusted the Threshold and Gauss iteration values but could not get the masking to work. It eventually dawned on me that my camera's autofocus was being confused by the shiny reflective brass sculpture.This was resulting in the black backdrop being shown as a mid grey tone rather than black. This led me to coat the sculpture in Chalk spray so as to get rid of the reflections.This gave me back my black backdrop but it did not solve the situation. Masquerade would recognise the imported images but not allow the mask to be created. I can click on the Mask by colour icon at the bottom of the screen and use the colour picker tool to select the black background and then click Apply but the sculpture does not turn red. Clicking on the b/w mask icon at the top of the screen causes the editor screen to go black and the image loaded into the editor disappears. Clicking on the b/w mask icon a second time brings back the image but it looks like I have done something to mess with the Mask by colour function. It is possible to proceed to the Sparse point cloud generation phase but although it runs and finishes, it ends up with an empty Sparse point cloud. There is nothing visible on screen, and the project panel states that zero cameras were used. I had wondered if there was a sparse point cloud produced but not visible for some reason but the zero cameras used seems to say no.
Since that success I went on to photograph a small brass sculpture. The brass was shiny and the autofocus rendered the background as a mid grey. After shooting a run of photos these were imported into Zephyr Lite 4.530 on my windows 10 pc and an attempt was made to mask by colour using Masquerade. I adjusted the Threshold and Gauss iteration values but could not get the masking to work. It eventually dawned on me that my camera's autofocus was being confused by the shiny reflective brass sculpture.This was resulting in the black backdrop being shown as a mid grey tone rather than black. This led me to coat the sculpture in Chalk spray so as to get rid of the reflections.This gave me back my black backdrop but it did not solve the situation. Masquerade would recognise the imported images but not allow the mask to be created. I can click on the Mask by colour icon at the bottom of the screen and use the colour picker tool to select the black background and then click Apply but the sculpture does not turn red. Clicking on the b/w mask icon at the top of the screen causes the editor screen to go black and the image loaded into the editor disappears. Clicking on the b/w mask icon a second time brings back the image but it looks like I have done something to mess with the Mask by colour function. It is possible to proceed to the Sparse point cloud generation phase but although it runs and finishes, it ends up with an empty Sparse point cloud. There is nothing visible on screen, and the project panel states that zero cameras were used. I had wondered if there was a sparse point cloud produced but not visible for some reason but the zero cameras used seems to say no.
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