Creative artists and designers use computer graphics and image processing effects on still photographs in application areas such as advertising, entertainment, broadcasting and the arts. Most of the effects available in research work and commercial products are two-dimensional in nature, for example image processing filters (blur, edge enhancement) and creative effects (tilings, reflections). There is almost no usage of information taken from the 3-D world in which the objects depicted in the image are located.
In this paper we present a novel method for creating 3-D effects on photographs, or in general on any image created by rendering a 3-D world. The artist interacts with the image using a set of intuitive direct manipulation interface objects. These objects let the user define a 3-D model, display it and manipulate it in a 3-D space which is correlated with that of the input image.
The generated model can be an arbitrarily complex 3-D polyhedron. Any texture, including texture taken from the input photograph, can be mapped into any of its faces and used for special effects. We discuss and show examples for effects such as copy and paste, motion blur, model editing and deformations, and lighting effects.