Cranberry-Lemon Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology
Dust, Heat, and Cumin: Low Budget Synthetic Authentic
Mexican Atmosphere Sepia Filter for Modern Cinema
Gilligan Vincent1
1
Department of Cinematographical Studies in Color Filtering, Cranberry-Lemon University, Pittsburgh,
PA, USA
Abstract
The digital Mexican Sepia filter has been a long sought-after visual effect in American
cinematography. It’s an effect simple to imitate for the layman but difficult to create an
authentic Mexican refraction index. Due to a growing demand for more authentic Mexican
visual filters by modern audiences, studios have spent additional millions paying actors to
film in the middle of the desert of the Chihuahua and Coahuila regions where the natural
Mexican Sepia light filter occurs at its maximum state. Using basic digital image processing
techniques this paper will create an authentic Mexican atmosphere in any environment by
adjusting the refractive index, dust, and cumin levels to reach a South of the border flavor.
Keywords: Authentic Mexican Sepia Filter, Sonoran Refractive Index, Cumin Dust Spread, Yellow Heat Index, Too Much
Spice, Carranzan Mandate of 1918, Image Processing, OpenCV, Image Blurring, Dust Cloud Computational Fluid Dynamics
1. Introduction violent causes [3]. The plan worked and Mexico soon
developed a naturally formed identity around a yellow-orange
Without a serious regressive change in automotive tinted color pallet that transformed the sky into the Mexico we
emission standards, there is little chance an authentic Mexican know today.
sepia filter can be achieved in Hollywood without the
assistance of digital image processing. Even then, the
oppressive heat index, the difference in the refractive index of
light, and the cumin dust cloud make the Mexican atmosphere
one of the most unique and iconic in the world [1]. Despite a
similar effect when filming in the oppressive heat of yellow-
tinted Southern Asia, a Graham Masala finishing cloud creates
an entirely different color tint effect which Savvy viewers will
pick out instantly [2]. It is time to develop a more robust and
researched method for generating an authentic Mexican color
filter using basic functions copy-pasta’d from stack overflow!
2. Background
After the passing of the Mexican constitution in 1917, the
new government’s president Venustiano Carranza passed a
widely beloved law in 1918 to change the refractive index of Figure 1: US-Mexican Color Filter seen along the
the air in Mexico in order to instill a sense of national pride. Mexican-US Border at Big Bend National Park
With the new refractive index, longer wavelengths “…would
scatter to create a perpetual sunset to signify the diminishing Not all Mexican yellow filters are the same. Known for its
government of Diaz and a sunrise for Mexico’s future…” sea-misted Ceviche tone, the Baja region tends to diffract
according to Carranza. This law was intended to consolidate more blues into the atmosphere than other regions in stark
the remaining revolutionary factions under the newly formed contrast to the rest of the North’s predominant reddish-orange
government and make it even more difficult for rebel leaders desert color tone reaching as far down as Mexico City. As one
Poncho Villa and Zapata to maintain local support for their travels south out of the desert and into the jungles of Southern
1 [Link]
Gilligan Vincent
Mexico or the Yucatan Peninsula, more green colorful light made authentically more yellow as shown in Figure 3.
travels further as the increased flora filters the government- Comparative physics-based simulation models guided by the
mandated haze adjusting and enforcing the atmosphere to 1918 Carranzan mandate have been verified in [4] that this
Carranza’s 1918 law. transformation matrix is good enough.
Countless Hollywood and TV classics such as Breaking
Bad, Traffic, or Extraction aimed to imitate this color filter in
film to denote a change of location. However, many critics
have criticized the inauthentic visual effect until studios
forked over the funding to refilm on location, as most critics
do. Breaking Bad, in particular, required the orangest of colors
set in the cartel-ridden and desert Northern regions of Mexico
close to the New Mexico-Texan border. With TV fans
growing more annoying than ever, studios quickly became
hostage to their demands.
3. Methodology Figure 3: Yellow Filtered city
The transformation of a normal-colored image to the 3.2 Dust
synthetic Mexican atmosphere will be implemented using a
three-stage filter. First, a yellow tint filter will be applied, then Next, to transform each image with a generous dust cloud
a yellower dust filter, and then finally a cumin dust cloud. but at a level that is still visible, the image color pallet is
Each filter will be applied by transforming the BGR (I don’t washed out using the color transformation dust matrix below.
know why OpenCV does it that way and not RGB) elements
using a 3x3 transformation matrix averaged with a variable 0.9 0.0 0.0
𝐷𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑥 = .0.3 1.0 0.35
intensity using the Python package OpenCV. Each filter will
0.3 0.3 1.0
be demonstrated on the test image below taken from a normal
non-yellow-tinted city. Additionally, the blur operation allows With the dust layer applied, the original image is further
each image to be synthetically blurred as if there were a dust blurred by a 5x5 convolution matrix in OpenCV and averaged
or cumin cloud. at an intensity of 0.4. We believe these are the correct values
because it’s starting to look about right. The new dusty image
transforms the viewer into believing that they are now in a
more arid environment preventing further scene establishing
shots. The results of this filter are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 2: A normal city test image (Mexico City-Carlos
Valenzuela, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
3.1 Heat
Figure 4: Dust Filtered City
Through the combination of the intense heat of the Mexican
sun significantly stronger than anywhere else in the continent 3.3 Cumin
and Carranza’s famously mandated refracted index, even on a
Next a fine layer of brown from a special concoction of
clear day, the sky will be noticeably yellower.
Coriander, Cinnamon, and primarily Cumin creates the final
transformation matrix below.
0.6 0.0 0.0
𝑌𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑥 = .0.1 1.0 0.25
0.106 0.0087 0.756
0.2 0.3 1.0
𝐶𝑢𝑚𝑖𝑛 𝐶𝑙𝑜𝑢𝑑 𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑥 = .0.294 0.259 0.1745
Using the transformation matrix above and an intensity of 0.672 0.787 0.894
0.6 to be averaged with the original image, any image may be
2 [Link]
Gilligan Vincent
As the cloud generated using the CFD models using the
methodologies in [5] is much more exact, the numerical
certainty of this special spice blend color pallet transformation
is paramount! The image is then further blurred with a 2x2
convolution matrix and then averaged in with an intensity of
0.4. Results are shown in Figure 5.
Figure 7: Panned Down Lena-Cena
5. Results and Discussion
Each successive filter was applied to the Lena-Cena test
Figure 5: Cumin Dust Cloud Filtered City image as shown below in Figure 8. As shown, through only
the yellow refractive filter and the dust filter, Cena became far
4. Test Image too yellow which was nothing like an authentic Mexican
atmosphere. By applying the final seasoning blend filter at the
For the final test, a new test image needed to be generated
end, Cena now appears as if he was on some adventure south
using Generative AI. IEEE recently banned the use of the
of the border in a hit new TV show or movie.
famous Lena Forsén test image in their research papers
because they are not as Sex-positive as many other leading
journals such as us [6]. In order to generate a new Sex-positive
image for image processing engineers to look at and maintain
tradition, Lena was fused with John Cena through MidJourney
for a new standard test image The Lena-Cena shown in Figure
6.
Figure 8: From left to right Lena-Cena filtered successively
through the yellow refractive filter, then the dust blur filter,
then the Cumin cloud
The new filter establishes through 98% of our test
audiences that the scene was being shot specifically in Mexico
without additional screen time. The color filter found to be
Figure 6: Lena-Cena Test Image [7] authentic enough to get the most annoying fans off our backs
once again. There appeared to be no need to shoot the film on
Through the recent advancements in AI, we now could pan set in the Sonoran Desert at twice the cost. Now shoots may
down on the image; something many engineers always wished occur at Vasquez Rock as in Hollywood old.
to do. We then finalized the new and improved test image to Many different filter iterations were generated by
be adopted by computer science and image-processing experimentally dialing in the filters based on feels and vibes.
journals everywhere. Gaze into the future in Figure 7, a bold, It was important to create a variety of color pallets for moods
refreshing new look for the field. It is Lena-Cena. and differing atmospheric locations according to heat index,
wind conditions, and spiciness. Those experiments revealed a
clear line a filmmaker should not cross while applying the
spice filter as shown in Figure 9.
3 [Link]
Gilligan Vincent
[6] [Link]
ch-publisher-bans-playboy-centrefold-test-image-from-
its-journals
[7] [Link] Which Oh man if
you haven’t read up on this, back in the 1970s, to get a
test image an engineer scanned this image from a
Playboy magazine. Then it somehow became the standard
test image for image processing for decades only to just
be banned by IEEE in 2024.
[8] [Link]
Figure 9: Too Much Spice! HE CONSUMED THE SPICE. THEY DESIRE THE SPICE
If too much spice is applied in the successive filters, images
will ingest too much spice which will cause the Eyes of Ibad
phenomenon [8]. By exposing a human to a heavy diet of
Spice Melange, even just synthetically, the subject adapts to
the harsh climate of Mexico coloring their eyes blue on blue.
It is not recommended unless you prefer to symbolize your
character’s connection to the land and their enlightenment by
communing with their ancestral memories through the water
of life. Lisan al Gaib.
6. Conclusion
Finally, through the magic of matrix transformations,
OpenCV, and fiddling around with numbers, an effect that
normally requires a passport may now be accomplished using
a simple Python script. In this paper, not only have we saved
Hollywood millions of dollars per year, but we introduced a
fantastic new test image for image processors everywhere. It’s
impossible to hate John Cena so we suspect it will catch on
like wildfire.
References
[1] Gilligan Vincent et al., 2008 The Mexican Yellow Tint
Color Pallet :: Journal of Modern Western
Cinematography
[2] Sterling “Silver Screen” Stone, 2014 Adventures in Mood
Colors: Synthesizing Color Pallets Around the World ::
Journal of Post-Production Techniques, Tips, and Tools
of the Trade
[3] Veronica VonDutch 2016 A Brief History of the Mexican
Atmospheric Mandates: Revolution Gone too Far ::
Annals of Alternative Mexican History
[4] Winston “The Wizard” Whitaker 2020 Computational
Models of the Mexican Atmospheric Refractive Index in a
Post-Carranzan World :: Journal of Fiesta-Physics
[5] Melba McCormick 2023 Pink and Fire: Computational
Fluid Dynamics Simulation Analysis of My Recent
Gender Reveal Party Disaster :: Journal of Astrological
Big Data Ecology
4 [Link]