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Panasonic Launches Beautifying Camera
The new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 camera can take the red out of your eyes and add it to your lips and cheeks. Released last Friday, the camera has a "beauty re-touch" feature that can whiten your teeth, change the size of your eyes, and can apply rouge, lipstick, or eye shadow. From the article: "There has been huge customer demand for such a product, said Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera. 'According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,' she said. 'So we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don't like about their faces after they've taken the picture.'"
I like to remember the world the way I think it was, not the way it really was. I guess this fixes that, but I still don't like pictures :).
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Does it have a "Take image at amazingly tilted angle" feature?
Maybe it's Photoshop
Wow! A camera with a built in "beer glasses" circuit!
Wrong solution.
Most people don't like the way that look in pictures because the picture is poorly taken. Taking photographs is more than just pointing a lens at an object. The brain compensates for a number of things that a camera does not-- the 3D nature of the human face, strange lighting (yellow indoors, strange shadows on the face in the dark, sharp light, etc). When you see the image from the camera it is not "the real image" it is a straight impression of a dumb lens that can only capture a small spectrum of the lighting conditions, and makes no compensations. There is a reason that a good photographer costs money. There is also a reason their camera's cost 10x the amount of a point and shoot and have far less built in helpers.
This is a "lipstick on a pig" solution. If they really wanted people to be happier with their pictures, they would build in some basic rules to the camera to warn people when the contrast is low, when the face is being lit poorly. This would likely result in pretty sterile images, but at least your friends wouldn't look like greased up edward james almos look alikes. (Of course, they could suggest the picture takers realize that the camera is not at fault... but I imagine this may be bad for business)
Makes criminals darker
Makes political figures evil looking,
Give women huge racks.
Adds tentacles to any pictures of a Japanese person,
When taking a picture of Soviet Russia, it shows you.
Any picture taken of Natalie Portman shoes her petrified and covered in hot grits.
When taking a picture of a Sony products, it roots itself.
When taking a pictures of Anyone at valve, it shows them wearing a hat.
When taking a picture of Micheal Bay, it shows explosion in the background.
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Why not just make a mirror which is essentially a screen with a camera and have it do it real time so you can truly pretend you're someone you're not.
Ridiculous concept? Well according to data we've acquired, around XX percent of our mirror clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a mirror"
People need to take a long hard look at their self-images (no pun intended) if they even consider buying this camera.
In pictures, the beginning of our century may be looked back on as the time when everyone was happy (smile detection) and people had perfect looks (retouch).
We look at old photos of frozen lakes and giant crowds and consider them accurate. Tho, it turns out people took photos of the lake being frozen or the crowded streets because it was exceptional rather than that being the norm.
According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph, so we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don't like about their faces after they've taken the picture.
Take it from a professional photographer, 90% of the time, the angle and lighting are all that matter between a good and a bad photo.
8% is mistakes and blemishes that can be corrected in Photoshop/Corel with a bit of cloning (probably going to be bloody hard to do it on a camera, even with a properly sized LCD. The mouse is simply necessary here.), Brightness-Contrast-Intensity modding, gamma, and a few other simple steps.
The last 2% are those who are incredibly ugly, and can't be helped...
Anyway, it's pointless for me: I won't buy a new camera, since my Canon 300D is still in perfect order, this feature will probably be incorporated into amateur units, and I can get Photoshop for free. ;)
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
The camera can fix ugliness up to 2 anti-milliHelens (in other words, the amount of ugliness required to send 2 ships' crews running in terror).
I am officially gone from
An article about a "beauty re-touch" function without pictures? How useless is that!
I found two examples on the internets and the most obvious difference is a blurring/smoothing filter applied to the regions with skin tones. I'm not convinced this makes anyone more beautiful (the womans white teeth look a bit creepy).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/workshop/5432481125/
http://panasonic.net/avc/lumix/compact/fx78_fx77/img/touch/retouch_image.jpg
I think I still prefer the brown-paper-bag-over-the-head approach for making people beautiful. That, or beer.
huge customer demand? Really? I have never, ever seen even one single person ever make even the most offhanded comment "Gee, I'd like a camera that can apply makeup to the subject and automatically remove hideous blemishes." Not once. Even the most stupid camera users have figured out that's what the software that comes with the camera is for, even if they never heard the term "post processing."
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Hey you insensitive clod, some people make a living retouching those sharp knees.
The days of a photograph automatically being an accurate record never existed. Just look up the work of Henry Peach Robinson or Oscar Gustave Rejlander. Even the very first photograph of a human being (Louis Daguerre, 1838 not to be confused with the first photo taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826) was not an accurate as the exposure was so long that only one person standing still (getting his shoe shined) showed up. Going by that picture you would think the streets of Paris were empty.
Photo manipulation isn't so much a lie as it is simply artistic license. It can be used to lie, but only if it's presented as such. Retouching a fashion model isn't lying because no one is claiming that it's a record of reality. Every last aspect of every single fashion shoot is contrived: from the hair, make-up and clothing (which is usually clothes-pinned on to make it look better), to the thousands of dollars of strobes designed to highlight certain features, to the hours of digital post where you give her a digital tummy tuck, boob job, and delete the sweat from her nose. Usually she's then masked and standing in blank white space, on the cover of a magazine, which attests to the fact that it's not real.
It's actually somewhat difficult to get a picture that is an accurate depiction of reality. Just by flattening something onto a screen or piece of paper you lose so much visual information that you are already seeing an abstraction.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Anyone who thinks that "devolution" is a valid concept doesn't actually understand evolution.
The most interesting aspect of this is that they are putting the retouching software in the camera, not as post-processing software done on the PC. This is indicative of how multiple devices are converging into a single device, and how the CPUs in them are becoming significantly more powerful. It wasn't too long ago that the idea of wasting your camera's battery life by having it modify your photo would have been silly. But today, people expect the devices to do things for them. They no longer want the general-purpose PC that lets them do this stuff. Now they just want it to be automatic.
Unfortunately, all the demo photos are shown as postage-stamp quality images on a mediocre LCD panel so you really can't tell what it is doing.
One really good thing here is is that this might promote awareness of how much Photoshop is overused. I find it amazing that so many people think that magazine covers are even close to the real thing. With some critical thinking you can look at the image and see "Gaussian blur here... warp tool there..." Hopefully, after a generation of these cameras everyone will be able to see how fake they are. It might make the Photoshop fad go away. It is so bad that many people ask for a photo to look Photoshopped! They don't want it to look better - they want it to look faker. That's sad.