How Photoshopped Is That Picture? 226
Freddybear writes "Digital forensics experts at Dartmouth have developed software that can analyze digital photos to rate how drastically they have been altered by digital editing techniques. 'The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be "hugely important" as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered.'"
Revert? (Score:4, Insightful)
Photoshopped (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It Can Tell by the Pixels (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole term is dumb. You don't photoshop something in GIMP, for instance... just like you don't xerox on a Cannon.
Oh noes: the anti-victoria's secret law! (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean they're promoting a law that would make Victoria's Secret disclose the endless belly-fold-tucking and (B to D) breast enlargements they love so much? As a doc, looking at those anatomically-impossible bodies it makes me sad, because they change our perception of what should be seen as attractive to a standard that is literally impossible to meet. And at times even I have caught my own perceptions as being skewed, despite knowing full well how it happened.
Re:Oh noes: the anti-victoria's secret law! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why amateur porn is the best.
Celebrity culture... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's certainly interesting, but also pointless. I mean, if you don't know that anything out of Hollywood is heavily retouched then you're embarrassingly naive. And even before photos are loaded up in Photoshop the celebrity has already been loaded up with a pound of makeup, sat under carefully positioned lights and been photographed by a professional. That's why those sexiest people lists are so stupid. Almost anyone subjected to that amount of effort will look great.
It's like those stupid articles where some celebrities fitness "secrets" are revealed. I'll tell you what their secrets entail: enjoy an immense amount of leisure time, make it your job to look good and pay a fitness trainer six figures to accomplish that.
American society is more influenced by the entertainment industry than any other culture on Earth.
Re:Having a little experience here (Score:4, Insightful)
If by "HDR rig" you mean software like Topaz Adjust, then no. That software typically produces the sort of sliders-to-the-right, grainy, neon-lit abortions that people on Flickr call HDR but tend to be referred to by photographers as PCS, or pastel colored shit.
When you're doing high dynamic range in an attempt to present more tones and contrast in an image than your camera is capable of reproducing, you're almost forced to take multiple exposures and combine them. Once you've done that, there is still work to be done to ensure that it doesn't look artificial or retouched.
Just like with human skin, you can grab the clone stamp tool and smooth someone out so much they look like a porcelain doll, or you can dodge and burn until the skin tone is even and you've preserved the texture. One looks obvious, the other is very subtle. Magazines prefer subtle and pay for subtle.
Re:Revert? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would be more entertaining would be if someone took this algorithm, then rewrote it (or wrote a parallel successive approximation algorithm to feed into it) so that it generates photos that, although heavily doctored, pass this test. Put another way, this sort of methodology is only effective if the details are kept secret....
Yeah, basically my first thought on the process was that this is also an algorithm to tell you how to make better looking fakes.
Re:Having a little experience here (Score:5, Insightful)
Counterpoint: The property owners aren't the market for these images, their potential tenants and customers are the market.
For example, when you're viewing images of hotel rooms on-line:
http://www.fourseasons.com/ [fourseasons.com]
Even the image on the landing page has been retouched. If you were taking a picture down an outside corridor like that, you would either blow-out the highlights and have a dark grey blob where the tree is, or you would under-expose the shadows and not see the corridor at all. That image is a composite of at least two images taken with different f-stops and probably different shutter speeds.
http://www.fourseasons.com/accommodations/ [fourseasons.com]
See that room? See the Hong Kong sky-line? Notice how the exposure on both the room and the outside are perfect? Notice how the exposure on everything in that room is perfect? Even with good lighting equipment you can't get that sort of perfection with a single exposure. Go look at any other hotel site and notice their pictures too. That takes time and expertise.
The point of all of this? Marketing and advertising. Even paying someone like I've mentioned a couple of thousand for some really excellent images is worth it when you're selling million dollar condos or multi-million dollar office spaces. If you can close on a property even 10% faster due to a really well done image, that's 10% more time you have to find and move other properties. Time==Money and people are swayed by advertising images all of the time.
When was the last time you ordered food because it looked damn good on the menu?
When was the last time you listed after a car, or gun, or other piece of hardware because it looked so god damn cool?
When was the last time a picture of someone in a magazine or ad got your blood pumping and hormones raging?
Advertising.
Re:Oh noes: the anti-victoria's secret law! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes: the anti-victoria's secret law! (Score:4, Insightful)
I refer to this as "burning your eyes out" on impossibly great beauty. Sadly, it raises our overall dissatisfaction.
It's a similar kind of desensitization to what you get more generally from absorbing years of hyper-real broadcast media. TV = mind candy. Most folks = mentally prediabetic.
Re:Revert? (Score:5, Insightful)
You actually can uncrop some images, as some image formats/applications save a thumbnail in the metadata and that thumbnail might not be updated properly if the image gets edited, leaving a low-res original in place. Other images formats like JPEG allow you to uncrop up to 7 pixel around the image, as the format only supports width/height that is a multiple of 8, thus the crop to the final image size happens at the decoding stage and data might be left over (depends however on the encoder).
Re:Oh noes: the anti-victoria's secret law! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It Can Tell by the Pixels (Score:5, Insightful)
Is xerography not possible on canon hardware?
Is this not trivial nitpicking over semantics?
Re:It Can Tell by the Pixels (Score:5, Insightful)
I Photoshop with GIMP all the time. I Xerox with an HP scanner. I use a non-IBM PC, as well, and I Google using a couple of search engines. My Band-Aids aren't. My Aspirin isn't made by Bayer. My Chap-Stick is made by Blistex, not Chap-Stick. The Crock-Pot and Saran Wrap in my kitchen aren't branded as such, either.
Names fall into common use. Words get new definitions. New words are made all the time (ask Shakespeare about that!). Get over it.