Introduction
The purpose of this page is to provide a brief overview of non-photorealistic rendering or NPR, with one example that enhances the quality of a photograph by adding artistic effects.
NPR and its predecessor, photorealism, are briefly introduced below. For more information on these terms, please follow the hyperlinks given in the section titles below. The linked resources contain extensive documentation on both topics.
To understand NPR, briefly consider its predecessor movement - opposite movement, if you will - called photorealism. Photorealism was popular in 1960-1970. Photorealists transferred images from photographs to canvas, using mechanical or other means to maximize fidelity to the original image. But the new version of the image was rendered in traditional media such as oil on canvas, often many times larger than the original.
Today, the discipline of computer graphics employs an extensive set of photorealistic, and as we shall see, non-photorealistic techniques. |