Automatic Digital Enhancement of Faces

[arigram]

At least there is some skill involved into shaping portraits in Photoshop, but with this new automatic method... I am not sure, but we come closer to portraiture being dead...
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/beautification2008/

 

[nsouto]

Another nail in the coffin of online photography...
Pretty much anything posted online nowadays can be expected to be digitallly processed to some extent.
It's getting to the stage where an original copy will be required before any online credibility for a
photo can be granted.

 

[Videbaek]

The first online dating company to offer this as part of the standard package makes a mint! It's just tweaking, not wholescale manipulation right? "I'm just photogenic!" I was struck by how clearly I preferred the "afters" to the "befores".

 

[crispinuk]

Ha! Another step in the average-ification of the world. It's nothing particularly new really, 'morphing' software has been around for years, and it's also been known for a long time that people are attracted to symmetry in faces and that 'beauty' is in fact 'average-nous'* . All this software is doing is automatically combining the two (and tweaking the mouths to make them a bit more smiley). When everyone looks average a freak like me will be in great demand

* Someone, somewhere, somewhen [Edit: Sir Francis Galton, 1880's : http://www.galton.org/composite.htm (there's some old photographic journal facsimiles there that might be of interest to APUGGERS) ]decided to find out what a typical criminal would look like. They took mug shots of a large number or convicts and then overlaid them all (like a huge multiple exposure) expecting to end up with a hideous evil visage, but in reality the resultant 'average' face was surprisingly attractive. So, nothing special about beautiful people, they're just average looking, whereas I am unique !