The demo of Group Photo looked really cool. It was a photo editing program that could combine pieces of many shots into one. It looked easy and seamless. Demos are meant to look impressive, and I thought, this is the next Great Thing. Photo compositing is not an easy skill to master in Photoshop, and I’m really bad at it. Hey, maybe this is a quick fix for certain problems. I was so excited I immediately wrote a blog entry on it and uploaded it.
I took the post down ten minutes later. That was as long as it took me to download the program and actually use it. First, I discovered that it wasn’t a photo-stitching program (the panoramic display demo glossed over that part). And it was a pretty dumb program. It only cropped pieces in rectangles. The part I pasted covered up something else I wanted to keep. It had no color matching or exposure matching.
I found the engineer who gave the presentation, and showed him my problems with the image. After fiddling with it for a few minutes, he admitted to me, "Well, it’s not a serious program. It’s really just a toy."
I hope the same doesn’t hold true for the Vista Beta disks they handed out yesterday.
If all you want to do is replace Aunt Susan’s scowl with a smile from another photo, it will work. Find it here.
I think this really is a toy, though, out of the graphics research group. They do some interesting research, and aren't focused on developing products. Maybe Adobe will take the idea and run (but it's probably patented).
Here's another example of a great idea, from a couple of Microsoft's graphics researchers, and others. I'd like to see how well it works in real-world use.
Photographing long scenes with multi-viewpoint panoramas
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/multipano/
It is a similar idea to the San Francisco seamless city project (http://seamlesscity.com ) -- photographing long panoramas of San Francisco streets -- except I think easier!
Posted by: Ben | June 29, 2006 at 02:35 PM