Dynamic Image Stacks

The traditional photographic process has been guided by a relatively fixed workflow: capture, develop, and print. With the advent of digital photography, however, the photographic print has largely become a relic of the past. Yet modern digital photography continues to focus on creating a single, final still image suitable for printing. This implicit association between a display pixel and a static RGB value constrains a photographer’s creative agency. In this work, we present dynamic image stacks, an interactive image viewer demonstrating what photography can become when this constraint is relaxed. In response to simple touch gestures on the image, our interactive viewer displays the best available image at the user’s focus of attention. The image may have suboptimal exposure, focus, or white balance at other locations, but the local image quality parameters are not compromised at the selected location. Dynamic image stacks offer a new photographic paradigm that turns photograph viewing into an interactive, exploratory experience that is engaging, evocative, and fun.