So say you wanted a beautiful wedding shot with a perfect sunset, some sailboats sailing past and some lovely birds flying overhead…what do you do? Hire a pro photographer and wait for it to never happen?
Well, according to a group of Chinese developers, you can get this program called Photosketch. With this program, you can sketch out the way you want your image to appear, and then the program will scour the web for images to put together into your photo.
Impressive? Yeah I mean I applaud them if they have programmed this software to analyze photographs and pixels to the point it can do this kind of work. Remember, a computer only looks at photos as mathematical numbers, it doesn’t see the bride & groom, the birds, and the sunset. So if they got computers actually “seeing” the content for what it is, I’m impressed.
My thoughts about this:
If they aren’t concerned already, photographers around the world better wake up to the fact that any photos you upload to the Web is not sacred. Software similar to this Photosketch program is scouring your photos everyday.
You got fancy scripts disabling save features? You got meta-tracking software? Phoooey! It’s almost embarrassingly easy to get any visual matter off of the web. Anything as simple as a screenshot will render all your time and effort protecting your photos useless.
You know, no ill will towards my Chinese brethren back in the homeland, but we all know how little regard they have for copyrights of any kind. I’ve been personally battling a Chinese search bot for the past couple months as I caught it downloading gigabytes of images off of my site over and over every day.
As a graphic designer, I’m not too concerned about this kind of software competing with me. I think anybody who’s worked with Photoshop knows there’s a lot more effort to be done to make a photograph convincing than just getting photos and masking them together. Composition, lighting, color, scale, etc, all play unbelievable roles in making a photo look realistic even to the average Joe.
You got a whole generation of kids coming up now who tend to believe shots are fake before anything else? You think you can fool them with some web clip art molded together by Photosketch? Hmmmm? (via Gizmodo)
LoweStudio Inc was founded by me, Raphael Lowe, a Honolulu based illustrator and web designer. I presently design and manage a few dozen commercial websites, but my main focus these days is acting as the head developer for Kapiolani Community College and teaching