Aesthetic Role Of Transparency And Layering In The Creation Of Photo Layouts

Even though technology has allowed us to measure many different aspects of images, it is still a challenge to objectively measure their aesthetic appeal. A more complex challenge is presented when an arrangement of images is to be analyzed, such as in a photo-book page. Several approaches have been proposed to measure the appeal of a document layout that, in general, make use of geometric features such as the position and size of a single object relative to the overall layout. Fewer efforts have been made to include in a metric the influence of the content and composition of images in the layout. Many of the aesthetic characteristics that graphic designers and artists use in their daily work have been either left out of the analysis or only roughly approximated in an effort to materialize the concepts.Moreover, graphic design tools such as transparency and layering play an important role in the professional creation of layouts for documents such as posters and flyers. The main goal of our study is to apply similar techniques within an automated photo-layout generation tool. Among other design techniques, the tool makes use of layering and transparency in the layout to produce a professional-looking arrangement of the pictures. Two series of experiments with people from different levels of expertise with graphic design provided us with the tools to make the results of our system more appealing. In this paper, we discuss the results of our experiments in the context of distinct graphic design concepts.