“It may seem crude to reduce aesthetics to number crunching, but software can now manipulate an amateur’s photographs to make them more pleasing to the eye.
Algorithms score a photo’s aesthetics using simple composition rules widely used to guide budding photographers. The image is then automatically cropped, or parts of it moved and resized, to boost its score.
Developed by Daniel Cohen-Or and Lior Wolf at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, with colleagues at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, the software identifies the key features of an image based on their colour and shape. The positioning of those elements is used to judge a photo, then tweaked to improve it, says Wolf (see video).”
Read more at New Scientist
What happened to good old craft..?
To say that the application of an algorithm that uses the equally basic principle of the “Rule of 3rds” will “fix bad photos” is like saying that a Robot driven car could win a Grand Prix.
There are so many more creative variables than the application of this simple rule that come into play including exposure and aperture allowances for depth of field, focus issues, filters and processing etc. Then lets not get started on the actual rearrangement of pixels to move key elements to these “3rd” of frame reference points – this might work for images of low noise and high resolution – but for for your average happy snapper!
Artificial Intelligence should be be confused with real human creativity.
Cool. It’ll turn portraits into images of Quasimodo
reminds me of bar coding…drive the technology down to the most whopping moron.
I can see this catching on in the professional fields until there are more significant advances. From what I can see, these changes can easily be made with a program like photoshop, which offers much more versatility. It might be nice for beginners though…
It could be also good for comparison. You can look what the program would do with your photo and then try doing it better.
Can see the slight point of the software, possibly being used as a training/ teaching tool for amateur photographers. They could take the pic put it in software and see the ‘better’ result and then learn to take photo’s in a way that the software makes less and less changes to the original image. But surely the software can’t please everyone. What some people find appealing might not be appealing to others, much like art not everyone likes the same kind we all have our own opinions.
That’s interesting, be fun to play around with it and explore its potential /limits. It’s intriguing to think how aesthetics might evolve if we all have these automated tools to find the optimum composition.
There’s a golden ratio calculator at calculator blob com for example, and I think a new version of Corel Painter has a golden section grid tool.