Photographers, You're Being Replaced By Software

Mrs. Grundy writes "CGI software, even open-source software like Blender, continues to improve in quality, speed and ease-of-use. Photographer Mark Meyer wonders how long it will be before large segments of the photography industry are replaced by software and become the latest casualty to fall to outsourcing. Some imagery once the domain of photographers has already moved to CGI. Is any segment of the photography market safe? Will we soon accept digital renderings in places where we used to expect photographs?"

Comments

CGI wishes

[crazyjj]

CGI has a LONG way to go before it can replace a good photograph. A well-composed, well-lit photograph can say more than most 3D animations ever could. And a photo is a lot easier and cheaper to produce. Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?

The software to do 3D may be getting easier and cheaper. But good 3D artists aren't. And a single picture of a wounded, crying girl in Syria will always have a helluva lot more power than any 3D rendering of the deployment of Syrian forces. Photography isn't going all-CGI any more than movies are.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

That and I think there will be backlash against it as consumers find out. Some things you just don't care. Other things you really want to see the real thing, even if it were inferior to a rendering.

What I'll be curious to see is how many places we're okay with digital renderings in lieu of human models. It could have real advantages, you could actually see clothing on a model that you load up that looks like you (instead of the same 25 stick figures with exchangeable faces).

Re:CGI wishes

[Jetra]

Most of the populace are getting dumber as more electronic toys come into play. Also, most people have become lazy and welcome in the easy machines as well as those who work themselves half to death.

Re:CGI wishes

[rubycodez]

romantic bullshit, CGI replacement of photography and motion pictures is already happening. You think a person with artistic talent in 3rd world who will work for 1/100 the rate of your "pros" has less talent? The ever more powerful cheap computer will level that field fast and soon.

Re:CGI wishes

[idontgno]

Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?

Someone who wants a "picture" for evidence of an event which never actually happened. If the synthesized image is good enough, it will gain all the credibility that apparently-untouched photographs have. If the viewer can't tell it's 'shopped, it would take remarkable skepticism or some inherent distrust of whomever's presenting the image to disbelieve it.

Re:CGI wishes

[SoupGuru]

Photography as art is going nowhere soon. Same with photojournalism, most likely.

Commercial photography is what's going to be replaced.

Re:CGI wishes

[NeutronCowboy]

CGI is replacing actual photos in the stock picture business, and in the catalog business. I haven't seen an office catalog in years that uses actual pictures. It's all semi-competent CGI.

Re:CGI wishes

[rufty_tufty]

Were painters redundant when photography was invented?
Yes, many of the portrait painters were. But those skills of composing a shot, working with people were still needed. New opportunities were created, the photography + painting business ended up as being bigger than what had been the painting business alone.

Things change; this is good.

Re:CGI wishes

[JoeMerchant]

Put another way: we've got another 10 years or so.

The 3D models are getting easier and easier to build, they can be captured from photography.

So, when Syria blows up again in 2025, you use some stock footage from 2012, compile it up, and blend it into a recent cityscape render of wherever you want the injured little girl and her family to appear.

Saves a trip around the world, and safer than putting a professional in a war zone.

Re:CGI wishes

[vlm]

CGI is replacing actual photos in the stock picture business, and in the catalog business. I haven't seen an office catalog in years that uses actual pictures. It's all semi-competent CGI.

I know for a fact, err, trustworthy heresay... that almost all electronic catalog "pictures" are 3-d CAD renderings, sometimes with a bit of photoshop. I'm talking about real EE component catalogs, not best buy consumer catalogs.

From trying to take pictures of things I've built, its an unholy PITA and depth of field and reflections and lighting are agonizing. You can look at the pic of a PCB, lets say a stereotypical switching power supply module, and try to figure out how I could get that depth of field and lighting without reflection issues and suddenly realize, this was done in Solidworks not a camera.

If you want to see how bad "real pictures" of electronic devices/components look, try trashy photos of that stuff on ebay. Some of those guys are obviously not even wiping the human grease off the cellphone camera lens first.

Re:CGI wishes

[0100010001010011]

You mean like all those pinup photos from WWII? Here's a before and after. (NSFWish, they're pinups). People have been photoshopping since before photoshop was invented. They still paid a team of analog artists to fix up all those photographs.

Re:CGI wishes

[cpu6502]

The U.S. should outlaw the use of photoshop by corporations in advertising and reporting.

Re:CGI wishes

[JimCanuck]

So, when Syria blows up again in 2025, you use some stock footage from 2012, compile it up, and blend it into a recent cityscape render of wherever you want the injured little girl and her family to appear.

Saves a trip around the world, and safer than putting a professional in a war zone.

Which not only makes it not news, it makes it at best discreditable that the fighting in 2025 as you say is actually happening, at worst, its simply propaganda designed to make foreign intervention easier.

Either way, the fighting, the injured little girl, and her family do not exist.

There are reasons, especially for some important cases, that even today the FBI, and other developed nations national police forces still take out the film cameras instead of digital cameras. Because even the suspected photoshop of a digital picture is grounds to throw it out and make it inadmissible to be used as evidence.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't tell the difference between FIFA 2012 and a real game, you're legally blind. But more importantly, in the news coverage of a soccer game, do you want to see a picture of the winning goal, or a rendering of what the winning goal may or may not have looked like? Yes, CGI will slowly replace things like stock photography, but the vast majority of professional photography cannot be replaced, as the entire point of it is a snapshot of what happened, not a rendering of what may have happened.

Re:CGI wishes

[squidflakes]

Real pictures look trashy on eBay because real professional photographers aren't taking them. Getting rid of glare and getting the proper depth of field are beginner level, and most people don't even have that. A good light box can be home built for a few dollars. Most of the really good depth of field comes from a large format camera with motions, and while the digital ones are expensive they can be rented for cheap.

Still, you're right in that a lot of component pictures are CGI, but it isn't because competent photographers can't get the shots, its because someone decided it was cheaper.

Re:CGI wishes

[plover]

The balance point comes when the cost of creating and rendering the model to an adequate degree equals the cost of photographing reality.

So for things you're going to reuse in a lot of scenes, such as a car that turns into a giant robot, yeah, the 3D model is way cheaper. For a revolting uncanny-valley version of Tom Hanks on a steam train in a blizzard, 3D is cheaper (but not better.) For a one-off modeling job to create a beautiful person using a product for an advertisement, the effort required to create the model and environment still takes a lot of human work to make it happen. Not that it doesn't take hours of makeup and lighting and staging to photograph the beautiful person and the product, just that the balance is still on the side of the photographer.

Are you imagining a future where an advertising agency has thousands of pre-rendered models they can toss into an environment, slap a couple of boxes of product images onto the virtual tabletop, and click "print"? They do some of that today. But a lot of them have to be careful that they aren't misrepresenting the products. You can show a virtual package under a virtual christmas tree making a virtual kid virtually happy. But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!" The FTC does have regulatory authority there, and will investigate misleading imagery in advertising.

The thing about 3D modeling (or even 2D art, such as painting), is that a good rendering takes a tremendous amount of talent. I'm not talking about abstract art, or crayon-outlined cartoons, but creating photorealistic imagery takes a trained eye, requiring roughly the same skills as the photographer. A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance. That only comes as input from the human operator.

Re:CGI wishes

[njen]

As a CG artist, I can tell you that I have been producing photoreal imagery for almost a decade now. We are already past the point where CG can replace a good photo.

For example, in The Avengers, during the final battle sequence, most of the shots in the city are 100% CG, background buildings and all. Even in many of the "non FX" type films, I can assure you there are lot's of CG going on. Which is why I love it when people tell me that they hate CG films because it's so obvious, then I give them a quick list of films they have seen and give them examples where they have watched CG without even knowing it.

Re:CGI wishes

[squidflakes]

Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?

Professional photographers, even freelance ones, don't work for a pittance. Newspapers and news websites LOVE croud sourced images because they are free. Most people get warm fuzzies when their terrible point and shoot picture of a cat appears in the paper or some big site and they'll gleefully hand over the rights to whoever asks. This is in stark contrast to all of those pesky photographers who demand funny things like money and credit for their work, and sometimes even recognition that they've just risked their life for that half-page full-bleed, full-color image you just ran on page 1.

Re:CGI wishes

[yotto]

It could have real advantages, you could actually see clothing on a model that you load up that looks like you (instead of the same 25 stick figures with exchangeable faces).

No, it'll be your face on the stick figure model.

Re:CGI wishes

[vlm]

Here's a "eh" solidworks PCB. Give it a bit of cleanup, but it on a background like a model's palm/hand, put it right side up so you can read (how did that slip thru?), work a little on the textures, and its all good.

http://bdm.cc/projects/zigboard/zigboard3d.jpg

Here's a "eh" real photo of a PCB which may or may not link properly. Lets list the faults. Bad lighting leads to shadows, half of each resistor is illuminated and half in shadow. bright camera flash reflection in the center and off some solder joints. The focus plane is obviously near the camera... look at the solder joints holding the two PCBs together, you can see whats going on but they're not in sharp focus.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRX2GcAILgBYtnWR-Lc8zHzMjLZthhM-m4knUhtKxZEs82qOQlbuFqHXXCLqw

Now you have to realize the solidworks example is at least an attempt at a marketing mock up, and the genuine pic is merely trying to show a manufacturing fault to someone else, not create a work of art. Still, they're fairly typical examples of what you easily get with CGI vs pics.

Re:CGI wishes

[jedidiah]

> CGI has a LONG way to go before it can replace a good photograph.

The problem is that most aren't, or they are something that can be replicated by amateurs.

When you've got a billion amateurs taking a trillion photos, chances are that a lot of what professionals do will become unnecessary. Photography will likely still thrive. It's the professional work that will become marginalized.

Re:CGI wishes

[durrr]

That's an awsome idea, why hire a wedding photographer when you can outsource it to a chinese 3d rendering company, and the results will be so much better!

Re:CGI wishes

[Ceriel Nosforit]

The U.S. should outlaw the use of photoshop by corporations in advertising and reporting.

In the name of what? Certainly not freedom.

If your leanings are as I suspect they are towards the lack of need for a totalitarian regime due to high moral standards and solidarity, you should rather than oppose one thing support its competition. On the government level in this case it can be for example be subsidies for advertisement that inform rather than build image.

Re:CGI wishes

[Trepidity]

All of painting wasn't obsoleted, but photography did greatly reduce the size of the portrait-painting market, which used to be important and lucrative. Rich people paying to have their portraits painted used to be the main way a lot of artists made a living, but that occupation took a real nose-dive in the early 20th century.

Re:CGI wishes

[Reverand Dave]

Really? All the data I've seen indicate that average people keep getting smarter.

I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. I'd like to see some data proving your claims.

Re:CGI wishes

[Githaron]

That is a little extreme. Besides. that will just cause them to use a different program.

Re:CGI wishes

[jythie]

Example: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-smart-people-getting-smarter/ It is actually a pretty well documented occurrence.

Re:CGI wishes

[undeadbill]

I'd agree. In fact, people trained as professional artists and photographers are in demand by the same companies that make their living on 3D rendering and imaging. All of those "realistic" lighting effects in CGI come from people with an extensive background in film and photography creating virtual light rigs, etc, to create the realism people think is so easy to achieve.

Re:CGI wishes

[mcgrew]

Hand-rendered artwork has been fooling people into thinking it was photography since before photography existed. I doubt CGI will ever replace photography completely, but I can see pro photographers needing to learn CGI.

Note the link is about photorealism, but artists have made paintings that you'd swear were photos since the ancient Roman times.

A photographer is a painter without eye-hand coordination. He needs the same compositional skills and knowledge of color, light, etc. that a painter does, but doesn't have to need the skill to render it by hand.

Re:CGI wishes

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Everything else is fake, why not your wedding and graduation?

Re:CGI wishes

[kubernet3s]

The reason photographs are authoritative is because we believe that the only way to secure a photograph is to actually snap a camera in front of the event. If photorealistic images can be generated without this, then why should we lend photographs any credibility? Already, people's reaction to photographs showing things they don't want to be true is "that's totally photoshopped." Photography's saving grace has always been that it is fairly easy to tell the real from the fake for all but the highest quality forgeries, and then an expert can usually uncover it. Once people simply "don't know" if a picture is true, then the age of the photograph as a means of record will be dead. They will carry all the journalistic weight of engravings or portraits.

However, as the parent suggests, if something DOES happen, and you desire a record of it, it will be cheaper to secure that record by photographing it, rather than rendering it.

Re:CGI wishes

[h4rr4r]

Why should the government pay for advertising?

You do not have the freedom to lie to sell a product without repercussions. We have plenty of laws against that. All that should be done is those laws strengthened.

Re:CGI wishes

[jythie]

Well, for advertising at least it might already be covered under rules governing fraud or false/misleading advertising.

Re:CGI wishes

[budgenator]

Your probably correct for news photography, but you might be surprised at other areas. My boss's Little Brother is a 3D artist and in a previous employment they were working on a project for an automotive company, he was literally editing out microscopic details of laser scans of car bodies to get the files down to a reasonable size. The project was to build a library of Production cars that included every part, so they could "fly" the camera through the car and you would see the engine, transmission or even the CD player from the inside. Marketing was loving this as they would no longer have multi-million photo shoots cancelled due to errant clouds when you could just CGI it. A surprising secondary benefit was the building a searchable database of car parts which is allowing the company to prune out redundancy and icreasing interchangeability amongst different lines (Volkswagon-Audi is the interchangeability King).

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Article is hyper hyperbole, bording on bullshit.

Let's see, I can pay an photographer a couple grand for thousands of pictures in a day, or I can pay a digital artist ten thousand and a week for one. And that's assuming its a product which lends itself well toward digital composition. There are still many things which don't.

Re:CGI wishes

[Penguinisto]

Exactly.

Right now, even the absolute best efforts don't fail to completely escape the uncanny valley, and the few that almost do usually require days of postwork and effort after the main render, just to get them that far. I won't even mention the hundreds of man-hours required to get up a proper mesh, get the lighting and composition just right, and then to wait out the render times (LuxRender, one of the better ones out there, will consume endless hours on end just to get up a complete render on a small image.)

As someone who has had a lot of fun in the CG realm for over a decade now, I know that it is *almost* possible, but won't be for a long time - especially not to the point where fully photorealistic images can be rendered out of thin air by some CG sweatshop in China.

Re:CGI wishes

[stewbee]

Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?

My dad is a photographer. While you might think that you could just hire any old "Jimmy Olsen" to capture some pictures, your quality will usually suffer if you go for the lowest bidder just like in anything else. The going rate for most professional photographers is probably greater than the $100/hr. I honestly don't know how much my dad bills per hour. If I recall he typically bills by day or by half day. But what you do get when you hire him is someone with years of experience doing photo shoots, where you need to balance the needs of the customer and artistic director, knows all the lighting tricks to emphasize or de-emphasize attributes of the object being photographed, and someone with a deft hand at Photoshop to fix things that were not caught on the day of the photo shoot.

To make a comparison, I know how to point my camera and take pictures. However I usually just let the camera figure out the aperture and speed settings. This typically results in a picture that has so much flash that it wipes out the backgrounds of most photos, for better or for worse. My dad on the other hand would go through the motions of setting his own aperture and speeds to convey the proper mood of the entire setting and still have them turn out properly without much trial and error. And as you might expect, his pictures are much, much better than mine.

Re:CGI wishes

[cpu6502]

>>>In the name of what? Certainly not freedom.

In the name of "You do what the government tells you to do, otherwise we will revoke the incorporation license you were granted." Just the same as a driver loses his/her license if she doesn't buckle a seatbelt or drinks alcohol while driving.

Re:CGI wishes

[jythie]

True, but it was not wiped out. Specific segments of the painting industry were significantly reduced, but there is still a pretty solid luxury market for portraits. A smaller one yes, but not gone.

Which is probably what will happen with photography too (and many argue that video has already wiped out things like photojournalism, but I think they are being a bit hysterical or at least paying way too much attention to new toys).. some types will migrate to hobbies, some types will be reduced, some will probably be fine.

Re:CGI wishes

[ScentCone]

The U.S. should outlaw the use of photoshop by corporations in advertising and reporting.

What about businesses that aren't incorporated? Should a dog groomer who uses a photo of the front of her house as part of her promotional web site be allowed to 'shop out the overhead power lines that distract the eye from the otherwise pleasant, relaxing scene? Yes? Great. How about next year, when her accountant convinces her that it will make more sense for her to incorporate her business. Will she have to put the power lines back in, now that the photograph is being used by an Eeeeevil Corporation in its ads?

How about the four college buddies who get together in an Eeeeeevil Corporation and form a landscaping company? Should they be allowed to show a photograph of one of the yards they maintain, but use Photoshop to clone out the pile of dog crap they didn't notice when they took the photo? So, if you're free-lancing by yourself as a landscaper, that would be fine, but an Eeeeevil Corporation of four college guys would be more evil by doing so? Or is it still OK with you, if it's four guys? How about when they join up with 40 other guys, to do more work? Is cloning out the dog crap or the piece of trash in the photo only evil depending on how many people are communicating when they do it? Really?

I suppose you're also opposed to Eeeeeevil Corporations using wide angle lenses, or special lighting, or make up artists? And photographs used by businesses should only be allowed if the photographer never crouches down to improve the perspective distortion, or to favor the light on a foreground object? Only Eeeeevil Corporations would do something like that. Honest, innocent individual humans would never resort to favoring the subjects they photograph through the use of skills and experience and good tools.

And, of course, it's safe to say that you would completely criminalize the use of watercolor paintings, sketches or any other bit of whimsy that lends itself to artistic license and illustrative techniques meant to emphasize, visually, some particular part of a message. Right? I mean, if people start using artists' renderings in ads, it's probably the end of civilization, right?

Think about this for a minute, OK? Yeeesh.

Re:CGI wishes

[Penguinisto]

romantic bullshit, CGI replacement of photography and motion pictures is already happening.

Yes and no.

I sincerely doubt you could get some guy with a copy of, say, Poser to whomp out something that an ordinary Joe would look at and go "neat photo!" (I picked on Poser because it doesn't cost thousands of bucks to get, unlike most of the high-end packages).

Most CGI replacements in motion pictures happen either with non-human figures, or with massive crowds in the background where detail is a low priority, and most of it is fuzzed by motion or distance. Also notice that I only said motion pictures - still photography requires a hell of a lot more attention to detail; it's something that requires a shit-ton more skill than the average Dave of Mumbai is going to have, even with a script to guide him.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the eBay guys...
If you don't know how to set up a soft-box, you're doing it wrong! And no, it doesn't cost much. Nor is it complicated to make. Takes maybe 10 minutes to assemble from scratch.

Everything you need should be found at a local dollar store.
Appropriately sized cardboard box: $4
Box cutter: $1.50
Tape: $1
Matte poster paper, various colors: $5
Tissue paper: $2
Half-decent desk lamps: $15 (Optional if you don't have these already. Daylight from a window can work too. Maybe not at dollar store, but thrift store.)

Tape one open end of the box shut securely. Set box on side, leaving one end open. Now top and sides (as box is laying on its side) should be cut out leaving 1" borders or so. Affix tissue paper over cut out holes one at a time. Taping corners of tissue paper in place first makes it easier to get taught and smooth. Then tape securely. Add another layer of tissue paper if light coming through isn't diffuse enough. If your poster paper doesn't fit width, then cut to size. Push poster paper so it curves covering both the back and bottom, it shouldn't have a hard crease. Use a black or a dark color poster paper for things like glass or jewelry to catch surfaces and highlights, plain white works well for other stuff. Tada, you've got yourself a working soft box.

Or just go to a photography store and try to buy one in the right size and spend at the minimum twice as much as the dollar store special.

Now to take the picture. Place item to be photographed in soft box. Position lamps around tissue paper sides of box to get even diffuse light spread. Disable your camera's flash. Nor is any fancy flash rig needed, a longer exposure does the job. Just use a tripod with your camera and remote or the 2sec timer. Take really nice photos of item with even lighting. Load pics onto computer. Adjust white balance and levels in post software if desired. (Household lamps aren't so great at being color-correct, but are very easily compensated. Levels are more or less to match lighting of other items for consistency, such as in a web store or catalog.) Done.

Now as much work as that sounded like, if you don't have access to CGI models to begin with - CGI tends to be a lot more work than this. Although 3D modeling can be fun for some people, it still takes experience to get the mats and lighting right, etc. As where the soft-box is dirt-simple and easily re-used once you make one. Also if you have a lot of items on inventory, it tends to be faster to simply photograph than batch rendering them.

Re:CGI wishes

[Opportunist]

Actually, I think painting is far more "threatened" by CGI than photography.

Before photography, painting was both, an art form AND a way to recreate reality. Photography took over that second part. And not only because it is more reliable.

CGI can do that first part, though. And CGI offers a few effects that are hard to recreate in painting, especially when it comes to animation.

Re:CGI wishes

[TheRaven64]

$100/hour? Maybe in the USA, but I know a very competent 3D artist who lives in Thailand and makes about $2/hour. The cost of getting a photographer on site, and then a day of his time will easily cost more than a month of his time. That's the point of TFA - a photographer in the USA isn't competing with 3D artists in his home town, he's competing with 3D artists in the whole world.

Re:CGI wishes

[Penguinisto]

Well...

First, the lighting sucks - as in there is no lighting: No shadows, ambient color is all cranked to maximum, no gloss (even on the shiny bits), no reflectivity (any surface that has a shine will reflect even a little). Next, the rez is way off. After that, the 'handles' are still showing (those white lines moving off at right angles).

If that's going to be a drop-in replacement, at least render it first. Problem is, you'll have to light and render it so the lighting matches (perfectly!) with whatever scene you intend to drop it into. Then you'll have to work very hard on making sure that the item's own shadows cast on the model's hand matches perfectly in strength, contour, and blur (or lack thereof). Oh, and you'd better hope that it still doesn't look like it's floating off the hand, instead of resting on it. ...that was just a little 2-minute review of it, and I likely missed a lot more.

Re:CGI wishes

[Archangel Michael]

Most people don't trust "Photojournalism" because of how easy it is to "stage" a photo to get the desired "effect" (propaganda)

http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/

http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/faking.html

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!"

But I guess you can show 3D rendered oranges (in the context of a more complex, rendered scene) and say "our orange juice is made from the best oranges." You are not claiming that the "oranges" you show are the oranges the juice is made from, after all.

Re:CGI wishes

[Colonel Korn]

All of painting wasn't obsoleted, but photography did greatly reduce the size of the portrait-painting market, which used to be important and lucrative. Rich people paying to have their portraits painted used to be the main way a lot of artists made a living, but that occupation took a real nose-dive in the early 20th century.

This seems intuitively reasonable, but I'm going to stick a big fat "citation needed" here until someone comes back with some numbers. I know some painters who make a tidy business out of portraits today.

Re:CGI wishes

[Gunnut1124]

Here's an idea for your libertarian brain... Let's make them liable for any images that would mislead a customer. If you offer a picture of a big, juicy, appetizing Whopper in your ad, you better deliver something that is very close to that when I walk in to your store.

The system you so hilariously defend depends upon customers with accurate information. Lies break the "free market" and cause it to be skewed in favor of the lairs. In most cases, it favors the company/corporation.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, painting (e.g. oil painting) also creates 3D structure. That one isn't as easy to reproduce with CGI (yes, not even with 3D screens). Also, I don't think any screen has the full colour range of painting colours (yes, the claim that you can mix every colour from just three basic colours is a myth; note that none of the spectral colours can be mixed).

Re:CGI wishes

[dwye]

You mean like all those pinup photos from WWII?

The pinups were painted using photos as a guide, not actual photos. The paintings were then redone as prints, not photos.

More relevant to the original point, Playboy used airbrushing from very early issues. I cannot say for certain about the first two (featuring one of the secretaries, and Marilyn Monroe by an outside photographer) but certainly by the end of the year.

Re:CGI wishes

[Kjella]

A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance.

Yet. As processing power goes higher and higher, I'm sure you can model not just the outside but innards too. Muscles flexing, tendons stretching, joints bending, the weight of your body shifting - you'll not simply wave it around like a doll but it'll actually simulate the body working to effectuate the movement. Give it a push and it tries to stay on its feet. Make it stumble and it'll recover on its own. We already have military robots that more or less do this, not bipeds but certainly four-legged ones. Essentially this is virtual robotics, we're looking to make something that could have been a real robot obeying the real-world laws of physics.

But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!"

No, but you can pick the most perfect oranges you can find, scan them and use them pretty much any way you like... did you know most food in advertising is completely uneatable? They add tons of additives to it to make it look prettier, the colors more vivid, they arrange it so all the tasty bits of a mix are on the outside and there's usually a generous dose of photoshopping afterwards too. Look online for comparisons of the photo on the package with the food as prepared per the instructions and you'll see what I mean. Outright fraud isn't permitted but misleading is just par for the course.

Re:CGI wishes

[dwye]

Quit complaining. I spent $14.50 for IMAX 3D (via Fandango, for the last dollar).

But seriously, who DOESN'T realize that it is a CGI extravaganza? And seriously, if you can see that it is CGI (as opposed to realizing afterwards) then the non-CGI parts of the film are usually to blame.

Re:CGI wishes

[lordmetroid]

Replacing photographers are already being done. I know from friends of mine who work in IKEA PR-department as 3D-artists, that they have been constructing scenes instead of photographing for least the past 3 years as they have been employed at IKEA. Arranging furniture, decorating, photographing the lot and then retouching it takes longer than just doing it in 3D software from scratch.

Re:CGI wishes

[gorzek]

The use of Photoshop does not automatically imply lying.

Re:CGI wishes

[ScentCone]

Let's make them liable for any images that would mislead a customer

False advertising is already illegal. Individuals and businesses are each regularly hauled off to court for BS-ing in one way or another about something they're saying, selling, charging for, etc. Holding their feet to the fire is entire industry and career path.

If you offer a picture of a big, juicy, appetizing Whopper in your ad, you better deliver something that is very close to that when I walk in to your store.

And this has what, exactly, to do with banning the use of Photoshop by Eeeeevil Corporations? I can make the same burger look average or look more appealing just by moving the lights, changing the angle from which I photograph it, and getting the shot in before the lettuce wilts.

The system you so hilariously defend

The use of attractive people and objects in advertisements, which you so hilariously are unable to mentally process as advertising communication, depends on people engaging in critical thinking. I'd hate to be around when you find out that some love letter you received might have been over-selling things just a bit. Or that someone who brushes her hair out before going on a date doesn't look like that every other minute of the day.

Re:CGI wishes

[JoeMerchant]

So, when Syria blows up again in 2025, you use some stock footage from 2012, compile it up, and blend it into a recent cityscape render of wherever you want the injured little girl and her family to appear.

Saves a trip around the world, and safer than putting a professional in a war zone.

Which not only makes it not news, it makes it at best discreditable that the fighting in 2025 as you say is actually happening, at worst, its simply propaganda designed to make foreign intervention easier.

Either way, the fighting, the injured little girl, and her family do not exist.

There are reasons, especially for some important cases, that even today the FBI, and other developed nations national police forces still take out the film cameras instead of digital cameras. Because even the suspected photoshop of a digital picture is grounds to throw it out and make it inadmissible to be used as evidence.

All very true, but in another 10 years or so, discriminating between a digitally generated image and a real one is going to hinge on things like "see this building here in the background, see the style of windows? That's not actually the style of windows on the real building your honor, here's pictures of the actual building that an agent took last week, and some reference photos from a year before the incident. No, look close, see how the muntins are a little too wide in the submitted evidence? Yes, those are the PPG standard muntins, but the building actually has Andersen windows in the identical style..."

IOW - the rendering will be indistinguishable. Film grain has resolution limits, RAM does not.

And, whether credible news agencies will use rendering tools or not, un-credible ones (the majority of the market) will.

Re:CGI wishes

[lgw]

What the hell are you taking about? It certainly isn't the post you're replying to, which was simply making the point that whether an action is something a business should be allowed to do has nothing to do with whether that business is incorporated.

To your unrelated point, every libertarian I've ever met has been in favor a government's role in fraud prevention, contract enforcement, and standardizing of weights and measures (those three things overlap a lot, of course).

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

Really? All the data I've seen indicate that average people keep getting smarter.

Obviously you've never worked a job where you were facing the general public.

If you had, well....you start to realize how stupid the general public is, and wonder how they managed to not drown looking up at a rainstorm with their mouths open.

I hate to say it...it really comes off as an elitist attitude, but man...if you're ever worked retail, or food service, you just see things that amaze you....and are not isolated incidents.

After years of working retail and food service decades ago when in school...I came to the frank conclusion that likely 80% of the general population is fucked in the head and stupid.

I sadly, think..it has likely gotten worse in the years since I had to face and deal with them....

Re:CGI wishes

[zlives]

"Still, they're fairly typical examples of what you easily get with CGI vs pics"
only by camera noobs

Re:CGI wishes

[ColdWetDog]

Photography's saving grace has always been that it is fairly easy to tell the real from the fake for all but the highest quality forgeries, and then an expert can usually uncover it.

Read up on your history of photography a bit. Like the Crimean War pictures. Photographs have always been altered. And people have argued whether or not a particular photograph has been altered since the beginning of photography. Photoshop only made things easier and lowered the bar.

Way lowered it.

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

Just the same as a driver loses his/her license if she doesn't buckle a seatbelt or drinks alcohol while driving.

Hmm..never heard of anyone losing their license for not having a seat belt buckled...

I've been wondering...when exactly, did they change the laws to where they can now PULL you over for not having a seat belt buckled?!?!?

I remember when they first brought that law out, they said "It will only be a secondary offense, we can't pull you over for just not having a seatbelt buckled".

Now...they can pull you over for that as a primary offense...when did this happen, anyone know?

That's the reason I'm skeptical for ANY new law they do....it starts off reasonable, then, scope creep comes in...then, they just try to stretch it to catch other offenses that there's no law for...

Re:CGI wishes

[lgw]

Depends on the price of the screen. "Full color gamut" monitors can reproduce anything but the extremes of the spectrum (and colors very close to those), which would be quite hard to get in paint as well (and not particularly artistically interesting).

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

What about businesses that aren't incorporated?

Any business out there is is NOT incorporated in some fashion..is stupid.

At the very least...you should be incorporated to protect yourself from liability in this grand litigious society we find ourselves in.

Also...tax breaks...do it to try to save as much of your own money as you can.

Re:CGI wishes

[nitehawk214]

You mean like all those pinup photos from WWII? Here's a before and after. (NSFWish, they're pinups). People have been photoshopping since before photoshop was invented. They still paid a team of analog artists to fix up all those photographs.

According to this, the duck-face look has been around for generations.

Re:CGI wishes

[91degrees]

If you had, well....you start to realize how stupid the general public is, and wonder how they managed to not drown looking up at a rainstorm with their mouths open.

That just means they were previously even more stupid.

IQ test certainly seem to be showing a gradual increase, as do other tests correlated to intelligence. The thing is, the really stupid people stand out.

Re:CGI wishes

[DanTheStone]

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml

Re:CGI wishes

[ColdWetDog]

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison (same with TFA). You hire the photographer to 1) set up the shoot 2) do the shoot and 3) display the shoot. You give him (her) a idea and direction and you get a product.

The $2/hr 3D artist might be a great 3D guy but does he know rigging / lighting / shader and all of the other disciplines needed to get a shot going? Perhaps if your goal is to have photorealistic nuts standing up on a ground plane, perhaps less so for your product shoot with a local landmark in the background.

It's really going to depend on the desired end result. Want nuts and bolts - get somebody on Blender. Want a generic picture of somebody who looks vaguely industrial staring off into space, well Shutterstock is your friend. Want something detailed with local, specialized information or oddball output requirements, call in the pros.

Now, a lot of photographic pros made generic pictures of nuts / bolts / people as a significant part of their business in the past - that's changed. But the upper end is still there and will be so for a while.

Re:CGI wishes

[ColdWetDog]

Again, for relatively simple things like Ikea furniture (just boxes), this works well. Especially since the designers likely used a 3D program to design the thing. Then it's a simple matter to put the little in a generic room and fiddle with the lights. I can think of few things more generic looking than an Ikea furniture catalog - nothing wrong with that but it's hardly the leading edge of GCI realism.

Complicated things, not so much (at least cheaply).

Re:CGI wishes

[CrackedButter]

I'm not stupid by any means, but I certainly have asked some stupid questions; with me believing the store assistant will probably think I'm stupid as he mentally adds our situation to his memory bank of other encounters. Sometimes people aren't stupid, they just don't know, or they over think the situation and end up looking like an ass.

Re:CGI wishes

[cpu6502]

I don't know what state you live in so I don't know WHEN it happened, but in my residence not haivng a seat belt == 2 point and when you get 6, they take your license. You obey the rules that are "attached" to the license, else you lose it. We should apply the same reasoning to corporate licenses.

Re:CGI wishes

[plover]

I assure you that our photography department is very thoroughly busy taking actual pictures of actual products. Their strobes can be seen flashing from the building lobby. And it also explains why every so often the lobby has people transporting portable kennels full of cute cats and dogs.

The company I work for is very careful about spending money on anything that could be replaced with a system. If it were cheaper, and there were no legal or regulatory issues, I know we'd be using rendered images instead of human photographers. So either it's not yet cheaper, or it would be unethical to use rendered models instead of photographs. Or maybe, just maybe, the artistic director is convinced that photos are still better at conveying emotion than a rendered model.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

A quote from George Carlin that has stuck with me over the years: "Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that."

Re:CGI wishes

[h4rr4r]

I did not suggest it did. Besides much the same lying can be done with camera tricks and lighting.

Re:CGI wishes

[Solandri]

You forgot the big one: photo-documentation. Nobody is ever going to get away with, "It's ok honey, we don't need to pay for a wedding photographer. I can just recreate it with CGI." Sift through anyone's photo collection and only a small fraction is of places they've been and sights they've seen. The vast majority is of people they know and the things they did together.

Re:CGI wishes

[plover]

Sorry, I meant the artistic balance of a scene, not the sense of balance you use to remain upright. Although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone has created an image generating program that applies various composition techniques such as the rule of thirds, principles of the color wheel, etc., but that's not necessarily guaranteed to make a model look "sultry" or "innocent" or "happy" or whatever emotion the marketer is looking to convey. A talented human still has to run the show.

And I think the words you were looking for are " * Serving suggestion " :-)

Re:CGI wishes

[epp_b]

From trying to take pictures of things I've built, its an unholy PITA
and depth of field and reflections and lighting are agonizing.

No, it's not. You just don't have the right equipment and/or knowledge to create a good, detailed macro photograph. It's really not that difficult, and certainly easier than painstakingly etching out every detail in 3d modelling software.

If you want to see how bad "real pictures" of electronic devices/
components look, try trashy photos of that stuff on ebay. Some of those guys are obviously not even wiping the human grease off the cellphone camera lens first.

Cell phone camera lens. Right. There's part of the problem. The other problem is, of course, that almost nobody knows how to use even a good camera properly, including yourself, evidently.

Re:CGI wishes

[mcgrew]

In the name of what? Certainly not freedom.

You should NOT be free to lie to me when selling me a product. Your rights end where mine begin. You should certainly noit have the right to defraud. That said, if they outlaw photoshop, advertisers have other sneaky tricks (like photorealistic paintings).

Re:CGI wishes

[JimCanuck]

Film grain has resolution limits, RAM does not.

And, whether credible news agencies will use rendering tools or not, un-credible ones (the majority of the market) will.

Depends on how much money your willing to spend, transparency film is rated for 120+ MP equivalency, and that isn't all that expensive film ($15 a roll or so). Even cheapo police film ain't that bad:

Gorilla
Taken 60 feet away and then zoomed in, with "cheap" buck a roll police film.

At about $30 a roll you can get film that is just utterly amazing (document film, that is converted to be used with outdoor cameras) which boasts a impressive ~400 MP equivalency.

Girl on a building
Also things like this are possible with the original image:
Boat, full frame
And zoomed in to see the ship itself, using the same picture frame from the film (not a zoomed picture but the original film negative):
Boat zoomed in

And this is just regular film, 35mm, let alone the 4x5" and otherwise that people use for fine resolution landscapes that blows any digital out of the water.

Regardless, film, especially the negatives are easier to spot editing, and will remain for quite some time, even in news photography, especially of the topic (war zones) film negatives are worth more then their weight in gold over the digital pictures taken, as news outlets treat the negative as the original work, but there is no such "original work" from a digital camera that can be duplicated with relative ease compared to the film negatives.

Re:CGI wishes

[nelsonal]

That's because a strong jaw, high cheekbones are attractive and plump red lips are a sign of arousal. Duck facing, while silly, maximizes all three. For a similar reason starlets frequently strike the same pose (it's their most photogenic look):
Exhibit A:
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/889/lohan8zj.gif
Exhibit B:
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/2042/paris2iz.gif

Duck face is like taking the trick too far, ruining the illusion.

Re:CGI wishes

[JoeMerchant]

I liked film, I still like the idea of film, I had a roll of Illford 35mm sitting next to my old SLR for about 5 years (2005-2010) until I finally realized that I was just never going to use it.

$30/roll will just continue to increase as film becomes a smaller and smaller niche, at some point (maybe 2022), high quality digital will surpass high quality film in performance/price ratio, and then what little remains of the film based industry is going to crash completely.

Can you still "send out" police film for developing, or do the agencies already have to maintain their own darkroom machines?

Still, I love some of the old spy satellite mongo-plate films - gigapixels in a single (fast) exposure.

Re:CGI wishes

[Algae_94]

My photo collection is mostly all places I've been and sights I've seen, but this is still photo-documentation to me. I can look at a landscape photo I took somewhere and think back to the time I was there. Rendered images will not replace someone's personal memorabilia. It may replace commercial photography, but individuals will still take pictures of people and places.

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

I'm not stupid by any means, but I certainly have asked some stupid questions; with me believing the store assistant will probably think I'm stupid as he mentally adds our situation to his memory bank of other encounters. Sometimes people aren't stupid, they just don't know, or they over think the situation and end up looking like an ass.

No...not really even that. If you work public facing jobs long enough...you know the difference between someone intelligent asking a genuine question, that's no problem and part of the reason you're there.

It is the idiots that can't seem to even seem to speak coherently. You run into so many people that you seriously wonder how they're even able to process oxygen.

Re:CGI wishes

[mcgrew]

You get the depth of field you want by using the right f-stop. The wider the aperture, the narrower the depth of field.

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

The average public is not stupid.

When you are dealing with them. they are generally out of their element. Sure You have seen the same thing happen every day because it's your job. You are confusing ignorance with stupidity.

You are short sighted, and blame it on everyone else under the guise of 'They' are stupid.

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

Yes, it certainly can't be you~

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

For a one-off modeling job to create a beautiful person using a product for an advertisement, the effort required to create the model and environment still takes a lot of human work to make it happen.
This is less true everyday.
And that was a horrible sentence.

"But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!""
You can if it's a reasonably accurate image.

"That only comes as input from the human operator."
For now. But it isn't magic, it is reproducible so someone will find away to make it easier, and the next person will make it even easier, and so on. Until its automated.

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

In the name of accuracy.
They should have a clear notice saying it's been artificially generated.

Re:CGI wishes

[squidflakes]

F-stop is only part of how you control depth of field. If you're shooting landscapes and you don't have an aperture small enough to get the depth of field you want, the only solution is to do a front tilt. This extends your plane of focus beyond the depth of field and allows you to get your foregrounds and backgrounds in sharp focus, even if the required DOF is huge. This is built in to LF cameras, but you can also get the same effect on medium format and 35mm equivalents by using tilt-shift adapters.

Product and architectural photographers make extensive use of large format cameras and their abilities to either control or distort perspective, focus areas, and DOF. Typically, these options aren't available to cameras that have their lens elements in fixed barrels.

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

Who is 'they'? Each state has it's own laws regarding that.

Stop making it seem like one big government. It isn't, never has, and never will be. People who want to scare you into thinking their way treat it as one entity

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

" in this grand litigious society "

Myth. But hey, you continue to be the insurance companies and libertarians bitch are parrot what ever they put into your mouth.

Re:CGI wishes

[geekoid]

"but photography did greatly reduce the size of the portrait-painting market,"
hmm. I'd like to see some numbers. It seems to me that photography opened up getting picture on the wall to people with lower income.

Re:CGI wishes

[foobsr]

I came to the frank conclusion that likely 80% of the general population is fucked in the head and stupid.

You may well come to a similar conclusion if you analyze how advertising is supposed to work (which I do).

CC.

Re:CGI wishes

[GrumpySteen]

Are my girlfriends boobs "real" just because the implants haven't failed?

A failed marriage was still a marriage while it lasted. Nothing fake about it.

Re:CGI wishes

[crakbone]

I would say it's not even ignorance it's lack of common sense. There seems ( I have no facts to base this on.) to that common sense has flown out the window in the last 30 or so years. Even worse with kids now. But then again it may just be that I'm growing old.

Re:CGI wishes

[JimCanuck]

$30/roll will just continue to increase as film becomes a smaller and smaller niche

Actually, good quality film has been getting cheaper compared to the purchasing power of a dollar, when you consider that the same $30 roll 20 years ago is still just $30 a roll.

Can you still "send out" police film for developing, or do the agencies already have to maintain their own darkroom machines?

There are a number of places that will do the better quality (but very cheap, cheaper then what you'd buy as standard ISO film stock for regular photography at a dollar or 2 a roll) police film. Its not that difficult to process and I know here in Ontario there are a couple of labs that will do it for you.

Re:CGI wishes

[cpu6502]

>>>What about businesses that aren't incorporated?

They can lie all the want, because the business is an extension of the individual (as direct owner) and individuals have the innate, natural right to lie. Corporations on the other hand are extensions & inventions of the government (via the license) and should be restricted by that same government.

Re:CGI wishes

[JazzLad]

I guess that's one way to get people to use Gimp ...

grin

Re:CGI wishes

[ScentCone]

No. A sole proprietor lying about his goods or services is just as subject to legal trouble.

Re:CGI wishes

[ScentCone]

Never been sued, huh? Enjoy the peace and quiet.

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

Yes, it certainly can't be you~

It isn't just me.

I get the very same feedback from many of my friends who have worked public facing jobs...or at least did back before they got a 'real job' as we used to term it.

Re:CGI wishes

[cayenne8]

I would say it's not even ignorance it's lack of common sense. There seems ( I have no facts to base this on.) to that common sense has flown out the window in the last 30 or so years. Even worse with kids now. But then again it may just be that I'm growing old.

I would say I have to agree with you largely on your comment.

And from a service point of view...man, has THAT ever gone downhill these days....people just don't seem to care anymore. Food (unless you're dining fairly high end) often seems slopped together.....forget about fast food.

I honestly wonder why people go to eat that crap...it isn't even appetizing anymore when presented to you, just looks like wadded up crap with out any color...

But customer service, for the most part...on all levels is just not what it used to be.

Re:CGI wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish this were true. However, "most people" are not nearly cynical enough.

Re:CGI wishes

[uncqual]

It appears George Carlin was smart enough to realize his audience wasn't smart enough to know the difference between Median and Average.

Re:CGI wishes

[24-bit Voxel]

Except we don't etch out the small details in a 3D model, we just use a normal, bump, or displacement map. Usually created from a photo, or at least using parts of photos.

Re:CGI wishes

[geminidomino]

Or smart enough to realize that intelligence measurements are normally distributed, and left a legacy in the form of the knowledge that, whenever that quote is uttered, some pedantic putz is going to say the same goddamn thing and out himself for the douchecanoe that he is.

Re:CGI wishes

[PhunkySchtuff]

CGI has a LONG way to go before it can replace a good photograph. A well-composed, well-lit photograph can say more than most 3D animations ever could. And a photo is a lot easier and cheaper to produce. Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?

The software to do 3D may be getting easier and cheaper. But good 3D artists aren't. And a single picture of a wounded, crying girl in Syria will always have a helluva lot more power than any 3D rendering of the deployment of Syrian forces. Photography isn't going all-CGI any more than movies are.

Good photographers charge similar rates, if not more than CGI artists.
Sure, pressing the button on a camera may only take a fraction of a second, but there's the setting up of the shot, selecting the equipment, getting the lighting right, taking a number of shots, selecting the shots for retouching, processing the RAW images, retouching the images etc...

The real telling fact that photography is (in some situations) getting replaced with CGI is that it's already being done and you and I can't tell when it's done properly.

You can only tell if it's CGI when it's not done well.

I know a company that does photography for the auto industry. They mix their real photos with CGI. They receive CAD models from the automakers that are modelled down to the detail of the threads on a screw that holds an assembly in place. They render and/or raytrace imagery, using advanced shaders for things like the metallic paint on a car and caustics to project realistic lighting patterns from headlights and then these rendered images are blended with actual photography. You simply can not tell that the image isn't 100% real.
Why go to all this trouble? In this case a vehicle produced for a domestic market may have, say, different tail lights. They'll shoot the foreign import model, render the domestic tail lights and stitch it together.

Re:CGI wishes

[Dahamma]

1/100th the rate? Where on earth did you get that number? CGI is currently the most time consuming and expensive part of most major movies these days. The reason they do it is not because it's cheaper, but because they can do things that are impossible or impractical with traditional film making. Sometimes because it's cheaper, as well, but a lot of times the real thing is still cheaper and of course looks better.

Watch a car blow up in a cheap cable TV show. Looks fake, like CGI? Yep, it was, and they paid crappy artists to do it quickly. Watch a car blow up in a $100M action movie. Looks real? That's because it was, and blowing up a bunch of cars was still cheaper and more realistic than what it would take to render a CGI scene of remotely similar quality...

Re:CGI wishes

[An anonymous Frank]

Examples (pretty) please?
Just curious to see what the fuss is about.

Re:CGI wishes

[lance_of_the_apes]

Won't stop the complaining. I'm also a CG artist, but from the games side. I always find it funny, and a bit annoying, when I hear all the complaints about the use of CG in movies. Sometimes they grumble even when there really is no practical alternative. There is a great deal of nostalgia for old movies that use practical effects because it is the theory of some that if it is made in "real life," it must look more real. As if golem had been created thirty years ago, it wouldn't have looked as bad as ET!

Re:CGI wishes

[Jetra]

I have volunteered for a summer event. In an attempt to have some fun, a woman with a heart condition was walking around...on the hottest day of the month, near water which reflected the sunlight, creating more heat. Me and another guy were worried she'd faint and offfer her some help. Her friend told us she skipped a doctor's appointment for the event.

Stupidity is probably not the best word for this situation, but it sure wasn't the greatest idea. That is one example of the general stupidity I had to deal with. Due to a shortage of people at the beginning, I was placed as temp security to guard this tiny walkway that was actually the end of the pier. I didn't stop everyone since I was not paid to do so. After about an hour some suits came and said they'd position a guy. Another hour later, tired of playing defender, I told one of the highers to guard it and was going on break

Not only were the general public stupid, but I have been proven that also the heads were also not the brighest bulbs of the box.

Re:CGI wishes

[dbIII]

I'm impressed by the Japanese animation efforts where there is a huge amount of photorealistic background detail with a lot of refelction and water effects but uncanny valley is averted by having people that look like animation cells.

Re:CGI wishes

[findoutmoretoday]

'til death' refers to the mariage I think. Otherwise we wouldn't have widow(er)s and many tombstones mistaken.

Re:CGI wishes

[im_thatoneguy]

Yep, this. A photographer places cameras and lights to compose an image. A 3D artist places virtual cameras and virtual lights to compose an image.

The artistic skill-set is identical.

The large advantage of CG is that your stage is immortal and tweakable. To go back and do a reshoot of a product would cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. To open back up the scene and render off a slightly different angle takes seconds. And since you can do your "touchups" using data passes instead of hand tracing your touchups can 'travel' with product as it moves and turns.

H&M is already cutting models out of their product shoots. Everything is getting faster and cheaper and an astounding rate. Anyone who says "such and such will never happen" are either idiots or think "never" means within a a decade or two.

Live action photo shoots are going to go the way of using film. Photographers in 2000 said they would never shoot digital, now film is practically dead.

Re:CGI wishes

[gomoX]

How is this possible? Isn't IQ normalized? The average is always 100.

Re:CGI wishes

[jaymemaurice]

I've seen quite a few people who seem to purposely present themselves as dumb or ignorant to get what they want. Just the other day there was a guy at the car rental place argueing that his B class vehicle had an engine flaw (that the staff couldn't find) - after making a big huff and presenting as a complete idiot to everyone in the building he drove away in a C class vehicle (no extra charge). I guess in his case you can still question because he caused such a commotion that he insulted people and the police followed up. I've seen people sucessfully return merchandise they themselves damaged and send back food that they mostly ate. Never over-estimate the stupidity of others.

Re:CGI wishes

[stepho-wrs]

Ours was done in 1995 with a variation on front projection.
The photographer inserted large slides into a special attachment on his camera and took pictures of us in front of a white screen.
Apparently we went to France, Italy, Japan, etc during that 2 hours.

Re:CGI wishes

[91degrees]

Yes. I put it badly. I'll link to Wikipedia's page on the Flynn effect instead

Re:CGI wishes

[Wescotte]

Usually this is true. However, on set the crew is so much larger that the total cost to shoot it isn't worth it. Not to mention digital effects scale well. You can just give tons of artists different shots and split up the workload. You only have one main crew when actually filming it. Often it's just easier/cheaper/faster to do more CG.

Re:CGI wishes

[drkim]

Average I.Q.s can't get 'higher' -- The mean I.Q. (for any given age group) is always 100 points by definition. In a population of 'Einsteins' the average (mean) I.Q. would still be 100.

Re:CGI wishes

[MaskedSlacker]

Fair point, bad choice of words on my part. The average RAW scores on the same IQ test are rising over time.

Re:CGI wishes

[renoX]

>Not that it doesn't take hours of makeup and lighting and staging to photograph the beautiful person and the product

You forgot: "and photoshopping the result", nowadays computers are used even when the base material is photography.

Re:CGI wishes

[MrNemesis]

There are even services that allow you to hire stupid people on your behalf in order to win arguments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n677ZbzC24

"Thick people are very good at winning arguments because... they're too thick to realise that they've lost."

Re:CGI wishes

[cpu6502]

Yes he's subject to being sued in a court of law by his ripped-off customer, but it's still not illegal to lie right from the get go. Ebay, Amazon, and other individual sellers do it all the time, and the government never fines them for it.

Re:CGI wishes

[ScentCone]

Ebay, Amazon, and other individual sellers do it all the time, and the government never fines them for it.

You're confusing laws against fraud (which, by the way, include all sorts of ancillary no-nos like wire fraud, and - if you used the USPS to deliver the incorrectly described item - mail fraud, etc) with having the resources to chase down and prosecute every instance of it. Which is another reason (besides the main one, which is that it's intellectually absurd) why banning the use of Photoshop in advertisements is ridiculous. Thousands of ads are created and printed/displayed/broadcast every day. Some guy selling a used car is no less an offender for 'shopping out the scratch in the paint job than is Target for 'shopping out a blemish on a model's cheek. Banning Photoshop is absurd. It's a tool. Ban fraud, instead. Oh! We already did. Right.

So, your main complaint has nothing to do with the tool or media being used. For example, it's just as fraudulant for a car manufacturer to suggest that a consumer is really going to get 50mpg out of their new hybrid car. Those words are written with a word processor. Should we ban the use of word processors in advertising production?

Re:CGI wishes

[rastos1]

When you get bored have a look, how stupid the average public is.

Hell yeah!

[lxs]

I know that when I get married, I won't be hiring a photographer. Instead I'll hire Pixar to make a 15 minute short commemorating the occasion.

Re:Hell yeah!

[scubamage]

I wish in that case it isn't like Up. Most heartbreakingly beautiful 7 minutes ever rendered.

Re:Hell yeah!

[youn]

Brilliant :)

Re:Hell yeah!

[rubycodez]

spend the money, and your official honeymoon footage could be world class porn!

Re:Hell yeah!

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I know that when I get married ... I'll hire Pixar to make a 15 minute short commemorating the occasion."

Hey ... if your going for fantasy, you might as well take it all the way, right!

Re:Hell yeah!

[Idbar]

Darn! I got married already.

But I guess I won't be needing children if I can render them. No student loans for my non-existent kids! I can also make my babies look cuter and anyone else!

Re:Hell yeah!

[vlm]

Video is a big problem for photographers and not in the way you specify.

A big part of being a photographer is getting just the right moment for the shot at the perfect angle. An instant in time.

Now you just run a high def video camera, walk around and wave the camera, and pick the best individual frame later.

Aside from weddings, this is also causing license chaos because people used to purchase and pay separate photo and video rights at sporting events... why pay for photo rights if you can just use a single video frame, and why miss the action if you can just use a video camera. So enforcement is all confused about that. The fairest way to charge for "rights" at sporting events seems to be by ounce of gear hauled into the venue. I know there have already been court cases over video camera guys selling single frames to newspapers, but I don't know how they've turned out.

Re:Hell yeah!

[dAzED1]

wit with a point should be modded "insightful" instead of "funny," mods. Just sayin.

Re:Hell yeah!

[unami]

makes me sad just thinking about it

Not outsourcing

[scubamage]

Not to be semantic, but this is not outsourcing. Outsourcing would suggest that they'd hire a photographer overseas to do the job at a lower rate. This is elimination of the job by technological advance (not sure if there is a buzzword synonym or not).

Re:Not outsourcing

[Coisiche]

Ah, what this means is that instead of hiring a local photographer at local rates you can get a cheaper overseas person to remotely take photographs via a, soon to be ubiqitous, drone.

None of which will be quite the same as having an experienced photographer right in front of you; but such is progress.

Re:Not outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be semantic, but this is not outsourcing. Outsourcing would suggest that they'd hire a photographer overseas to do the job at a lower rate. This is elimination of the job by technological advance (not sure if there is a buzzword synonym or not).

Sorry, you are referring to "offshoring" not "outsourcing." You can domestically outsource something. Outsource does not equal moving functions to another country.

Re:Not outsourcing

[Anubis IV]

(not sure if there is a buzzword synonym or not)

"Made redundant". "Replaced". "Consolidated".

Yeah, come to think of it, I have nothing great either. They're all just generic terms for, "we're laying you off because we don't need you any more". Even so, it's not outsourcing, and I honestly doubt photographers are in any more danger than singers are from vocaloids. In fact, they're in less danger, I'd wager.

Re:Not outsourcing

[njen]

No, what it means is that instead of hiring a local photographer at local rates, you hire a local CG artist at local rates.

Re:Not outsourcing

[SirWhoopass]

Dr. Alan Grant: It looks like we're out of a job.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don't you mean extinct?

Jurassic Park (1993)

Re:Not outsourcing

[hrvatska]

This is more like becoming unemployed due to structural changes in the economy.

Re:Not outsourcing

[paintballer1087]

Not to be semantic, but this is not outsourcing. Outsourcing would suggest that they'd hire a photographer overseas to do the job at a lower rate. This is elimination of the job by technological advance (not sure if there is a buzzword synonym or not).

Not to be semantic, but this is not outsourcing and neither is your definition. Outsourcing would suggest that they'd hire a a 3rd party company to do the work instead of doing it in house. Offshoring would suggest that they'd hire a photographer overseas to do the job at a lower rate.

Re:Not outsourcing

[scubamage]

Ah, great point! I got my buzzwords mixed up - can you tell I'm not a manager? :)

Re:Not outsourcing

[Attila Dimedici]

Not to be semantic,...

Not to be pedantic, but I believe you meant to say, "Not to be pedantic,..." I am not sure that a person can be "semantic" by any reasonable usage of the word.

Re:Not outsourcing

[scubamage]

You are correct :) See above post!

Re:Not outsourcing

[RoccamOccam]

What if your country doesn't have a shore?

Re:Not outsourcing

[internerdj]

I'm not going to belabor the points stated below. Rather I'm curious about other slashdotters opinions on whether it is bad or not. I'm of the opinion that human labor conserved to produce the same product is beneficial to humanity has a whole, but there are many under the impression that the loss of jobs to automation is just as debilitating to the American worker as outsourcing.

anxiety is not necessary response to everything

[laudunum]

Agreed. Why do people feel the need to be anxious? It's just not necessary. Besides, what really matters is composition. And as crazy has already noted, this really only applies to heavily composed photography, not spontaneous. So, yeah, stock photographers might need to be on the lookout, but photojournalists? Not so much.

Re:anxiety is not necessary response to everything

[jythie]

That still uses a photograph as the source material. The suggestion here is that CGI will replace the source material with some type of super AI editing tools or database of easily modified scenes/models/objects.

Re:anxiety is not necessary response to everything

[ColdWetDog]

That still uses a photograph as the source material. The suggestion here is that CGI will replace the source material with some type of super AI editing tools or database of easily modified scenes/models/objects.

Like this?

Why stop there?

[American AC in Paris]

"Everyone: You're Being Replaced By Software"
From the and-by-small-purpose-built-robots dept.

Re:Why stop there?

[Mindcontrolled]

We could start by replacing the /. "editors" by very small shell scripts...

Re:Why stop there?

[ColdWetDog]

We could start by replacing the /. "editors" by very small shell scripts...

We did.

Last week.

Hasn't helped so far.

No, Yes.

[niftydude]

No it is not, Yes we will.

get real man

[Anonymous Coward]

do you know how long it takes to make a photorealistic sneaker, motorcycle or wristwatch in blender? now compare that with how long it takes to take a picture of a sneaker, motorcycle or wristwatch with a camera....

Musicians, You're Being Replaced by Keyboards

[rodrigoandrade]

This is the same LOL as before.

Digital Blasphemy

[overshoot]

I have my desktop set up to use Ryan Bliss' art as wallpaper, and a lot of people see the nature scenes and think they're photographs. And, frankly, some of them really are that good.

On the other hand, good as Bliss and others may be, I really do prefer the actual photographs that $HERSELF takes. It's hard to compete with Mother Nature.

Re:Digital Blasphemy

[CannonballHead]

a lot of people see the nature scenes and think they're photographs

I can see thinking they started with photographs, but really? They need to get outside more. :)

Re:Digital Blasphemy

[mcgrew]

Wow, those were really bad examples he gave. They looked like covers to SF novels. But have a look at this and this.

They're paintings.

Re:Digital Blasphemy

[CannonballHead]

#1 is remarkable. #2 is pretty clearly not a simple picture, it would have to at least be filtered/digitally edited. Both are good though, and I could see being confused with those hehe.

Re:Digital Blasphemy

[mcgrew]

Nope, not edited at all. They're airbrush, and if you think the photos look good, the actual paintings will blow your mind. They had a Flack painting at the St Louis Art Museum, I'm not sure if it's there but it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. They had other photorealistic works there as well. One was a very large (maybe 8x10 feet) pencil drawing that you would swear was a photograph.

I'm sure they're quaking in their boots

[TorrentFox]

Ignoring the technical aspect... there is (amazingly!) an artistic component to getting a good shot. It's not as simple as pointing at what you want to photograph and hitting a button. You may replicate this if you have an eye for composition, but a human still has to make that decision at some point, and that person may well be (or have been) a photographer.

"Even" Blender?

[Sachant]

Having used both Maya and Blender for major projects, Blender isn't the one we need to make excuses for in terms of usability.

Too late

[koan]

"Will we soon accept digital renderings in places where we used to expect photographs?"

We already do, car advertising in particular, but soon, very soon, SITCOM's, movies, and other forms of "entertainment" will be done entirely in the digital domain, why pay for an actor when you can render him/her and get a perfect shot every time? NO attitude, no drug problems, no million dollars paychecks.

Did anyone catch 2Pac's return to the stage? As cheesy as it was it is the holy grail, a performer in demand that never dies or creates other issues and is under total control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
Omar N. Bradley

Re:Too late

[Lumpy]

"Did anyone catch 2Pac's return to the stage? "

Yes I did, and it was hokey at best. The Gorillaz are more convincing on stage than that badly rendered 2 pack. All the closeup images look like he is a video game character..

No

[Hentes]

Creating a 3D representation of a scenery is much harder than clicking your camera.

Yeah, Right.....

[Lumpy]

Call me when you can render the Wedding party in Blender. Or the Latest NFL game shots in blender. OR better yet, Any journalisim photos in blender.

Maybe the useless inanimate object in a studio for advertising photographers have no more job, but the rest of us that actually capture reality have nothing to worry about.

Replace?

[avandesande]

Companies already do cgi marketing campaigns in addition to photographic ones- and they will continue to do so in the future.

What?

[denmarkw00t]

> "easy-of-use"
> software replacing photographers = outsourcing?

I'm not bothering to RTFA, as from my standpoint I'm not too worried about software replacing photographers. Some conveniences will come into play - an automated system at Rite Aid to take your photo, maybe a kiosk downtown that takes your picture and then makes a caricature. But then, the summary seems to focus on rendering vs actual photographs, which I think we won't really see much of - sometimes it's easier to render, but most of the time you pay a lot less to have someone go out and snap 20 photos vs having a 3D designer toil away on sketches, mockups, renderings, etc.

I work in both worlds

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done all sorts of photography professionally - from fine art, documentary, photojournalism, weddings, to commercial (not at the same time). And by professional, I mean, actually getting paid for it and making a living and renting cameras, grip, lights, assistants - the whole gamut. I have since switched to 3D and I tell you it's slower because I have to do everything myself. It's not like animators or modelers are clamoring for still image jobs. I have to model, texture, build the shader, and light the scene everything myself (which isn't hard with my background - but radiosity is another matter). That's at least a 2-3 week additional work time for a project.

Photography won't be replaced by CGI any time soon because the former is faster. I can hire a crew and equipment and finish a shoot in 10-12 hours tops. CG supplements it with set extension or environment/ object replacement, but to create something CG from scratch takes a very long time. I give CG this: it's easier to setup lights whereas in real life you need an electrician or a generator for larger projects, especially if it's on-location outdoors. You also need a lift and an experienced assistant to operate them, and an impeccable sense of where the wires are of course, have safety in mind at all times. With CG, I just click a light node and bam, I can duplicate 2k lights down a tunnel for a car shoot. Obviously, the downside is the render time, particularly when you have to bounce and diffuse it but if you can segment the 6k image to different quadrants per render node, and rent a render farm, it's efficient.

Overall workflow, photography is faster in my experience only because there's people available to hire. Where I'm at, there's not too many freelance CG artists, or artists who knows lighting (because it affects the shader and vice-versa), and almost no photographer/ assistant know how to do CG. I seriously doubt CG will overtake commercially produced still photography (as opposed to wedding, event, documentary, etc).

Once the data is there, yes

[russellh]

A photograph requires a subject - similarly, a cgi render requires scene data. If you have the scene data, such as a product model, or a mountain, then you can take a virtual photograph by setting the lighting, framing the scene, etc.

So let's say I want an image looking up a tall skycraper from the ground. I could go out, find a location, wait for the right weather and lighting conditions and take my traditional photograph. Or, if I happen to be able to find a skyscraper model, I could easily compose the exact scene I want in my computer. Faster, probably. And maybe with Google's or someone else's increasingly accurate data, it could be an actual skyscraper and not just some stock model. So yeah, this will replace a lot of traditional photography, without a doubt.

But art is always up to the artist.

Re:Once the data is there, yes

[Telvin_3d]

Or, if I happen to be able to find a skyscraper model, I could easily compose the exact scene I want in my computer. Faster, probably.

This sentence is how I know you are a programmer. First, finding a premade photo-realistic model of anything that happen to match the image in your imagination is worse than a needle in a haystack. But let's say you do.

You still need surrounding buildings, if only to create the right reflections and shadows. You need realistic trees and stop lights and power lines linking everything. You need sidewalks and roads with the right geometry. And everything needs matching textures with similar levels of dirt/colour tone/littler etc.

And render time on anything measured in mega-pixels is going to be a bitch. For a magazine quality full page image the render tIme might be measured in days for a complex scene.

Faster to wait a couple days for good weather and take a picture.

Re:Once the data is there, yes

[lgw]

Right now stock photos are far more common than stock render models of any given object, but that will change over time. And rendering right now takes longer and is more expensive than at any time in the future. For a magazine quality full page image the render tIme might be measured in minutes, if done by my cellphone X years from now.

Re:Once the data is there, yes

[russellh]

I agree with everything you wrote. But a lot of commercial "photography" is already intensely photoshopped, essentially collages of lots of other material with impossible lighting (eg the intense orange/blue effect), impossible focus. And we already see what I'd call optimistic renders in marketing material instead of photographs of a real object (which might not exist yet). So that sort of thing is not a huge reach. Historically, actual straight optical photography will probably occupy only a minor span of time. Previously dominated by drawing and painting, and will now and in the future be dominated by digital compositing. 3D of course is just one technique, which is simply getting more and more popular.

What we're seeing is the vast expansion of technique, and very little of the final product will be "real" – if it ever really was. I like these popular animated gifs of famous movie scenes (the term for which I can't recall just now) because they remind us how unrealistic an actual still photograph actually is - we never perceive the our world the way a photograph shows it - instantaneously frozen in time. Except maybe for landscapes.

It's all about money

[Nethemas the Great]

It's simple to understand really. You the human, performing {x} task will be replaced when it is economically advantageous to do so. If replacing you with someone living in a foreign land or even locally provides an economic advantage. You will. If replacing you with a robot, or other synthetic construct provides an economic advantage. You will.

If your goal is to not be replaced then it will be necessary for you the human performing {x} task to stay ahead of your competition with regards to ensuring that it provides an economic advantage over alternatives to employ you. This is the most valuable lesson anyone living in a capitalist society can receive yet it seldom is taught. Dear employee, you are not an entitled individual, you are a cog in a machine. If you do not fit you will be replaced.

Re:It's all about money

[lgw]

Eventually this will lead to all our basic needs and many luxuries being produced entirely by automation, with no further need for repetitive mindless toil by anyone. Oh! The Horror! How will we survive the fate?

Re:It's all about money

[lgw]

I am not against automation. I am saying that our economic system that is based on every able-bodied person earning a livelihood by having a job that pays them a wage has to change.

That, my anonymous friend, is the key economic truth of the 21st century. We don't know what we're doing; we don't know how to solve this problem yet. Isn't that cool! Mankind has a nontrivial problem to solve, rather than inventing BS reasons to chage our lives simply out of boredom. I think that's cool.

Re:It's all about money

[Nethemas the Great]

If "Americans" truly recognize that fact then the only conclusion one could derive from observation is that they are irrational people with a unhealthy disregard for their future. While most American corporations act like they're in a competition with the rest of the world. The overwhelmingly majority of American citizens do not. The only real kind of competition the average American citizen understands and actively participates in is social competition as expressed through sports and possessions. It is my suspicion that this holds true to some degree or another for most of the western world.

There is no greater testament to this than the undervaluing of education and scientific pursuits and the overvaluing of hedonistic ones in the American culture.

Re:It's all about money

[Nethemas the Great]

Hedonism is a poor model upon which to base a society. It sounds good on the surface but it only leads to implosion. The expectation that every citizen must earn their keep is good and healthy for a society. Entrepreneurship will ensure that there is never a lack of things to do for the motivated. But, there will always be a lack for those whom refuse to adapt and meet new challenges. Obsolescence is not the fault of progress, obsolescence is the fault of those who stand still.

Re:It's all about money

[Hatta]

The expectation that every citizen must earn their keep is good and healthy for a society.

Great, so how do we ensure that every executive earns his keep instead of pillaging?

Re:It's all about money

[Nethemas the Great]

You can't, welcome to capitalism. Everyone is given the ability to make poor choices and little recourse is available to those with less money than the one making the poor choice. Nobody said it was the fairest model. It just happens to keep the most sheep running in the right direction.

Re:It's all about money

[Nethemas the Great]

The beginning of your statement has no connection to the latter except and unless you didn't actually read and comprehend my statement. Regarding the former, Americans--and to some extent the western world generally--have a general conceit about themselves that they are so far ahead of the game that from a practical stand point there is no competition. They believe themselves to be entitled to their station by dint of their citizenship alone. This is why I assert that they are not being taught and do not realize that they can become obsolesced and replaced. As to the later I believe I did apply it to other nations. You might have realized this while reading had you been less interested in trolling. However, the primary thrust of the response was in answer to your comment about how "Americans" already recognize themselves to be in a competition of value as a resource rather than entitled. It is quite believable even if not very understandable that others too, not just Americans are in possession of an over-inflated self-regard.

wrong, photographers like pilots can't be replaced

[k6mfw]

When you hire (or have a friend do it for free) a photographer, they concentrate on taking pictures of people and the event. Before they have to gather equipment and plan for the occasion (will extra lighting be required? are there specifics not to take pics?). Then after the event, job is not over as photog needs to distribute the images (how many of you have a friend who took all kinds of photos but nobody ever sees them?). Like pilots (which some can be replaced by Otto or some other software program) do more than just fly the plane. There is planning and organization that is done before each flight.

People that say photogs will be replaced by software are the ones selling the software! A good photog is extremely valuable. I don't care if you are doing an engineers week banquet, ballroom dance showcase, wedding, 75th anniversary of whatever,.... you gotta have a person assigned to do just one thing: Photography. Otherwise it won't get done. And as you all know, pics or it didn't happen.

just tools...

[mbaGeek]

what all of the software tools do is make the amatuer photographer better (my point and shoot photos look a lot better than they did 20 years ago), they don't threaten "professional photographers."

I'll point everyone at the excellent CNBC documentary on Pixar if you want to see the impact computers have had on the animation industry (just different tools for the artists, you still need artists). "Waking Sleeping Beauty" is also a good look at the traditional animation industry. compare and contrast :-)

anyway, a huge part of photography is what the photographer "sees" not the tools that they use, that fact isn't going to change anytime soon

yes, the profession has been changed (when did "photoshop" become a verb? Kodak declared bankruptcy) and is being changed by technology but photographers won't be "replaced" anytime soon.

Re:just tools...

[Overzeetop]

I think photographers will become luxury services, even moreso than they were a decade or two ago. When the barriers to entry get too low, you see a flood of poorly trained practicioners who don't have anything better to do with their time. It degrades the median quality significantly and pushes people to do it themselves. The top will always exist, but the middle and lower market may start to fail, leaving nothing but $10,000/day jobs and hobbiests.

Re:just tools...

[mbaGeek]

good points - but would that be bad? is the person taking pictures at the "Walmart portrait" studio a "professional photographer?"

What about a wedding where they forego the "professional photographer" and just give guests digital cameras? A professional job would be easier, I'm sure the median quality of the pictures would be terrible, but they get a unique (and memorable) wedding album (anyone ever been part of a wedding that did that?).

the Jimmy Olsen's of the world probably don't have to worry about their job - if their job is going to dangerous places and documenting what is going on (which is the point that the article eventually gets to) - but then we are on the whole citizen journalism/blogging vs "old media" argument

Attention whoring done right

[broknstrngz]

Because simply saying "look, I can do mediocre stuff in Blender" is so passé.

Is any segment of the photography market safe?

[Anita Coney]

Weddings, school pictures, family pictures, journalism, mugshots, and nearly any other specific event that people want a visual record.

Re:Is any segment of the photography market safe?

[the eric conspiracy]

Exactly. For lots of commercial applications like advertising the photographer is definitely under pressure.

But for capturing the moments of your life it is hard to see a substitute to being there.

Examples

[RLBrown]

Yes, many specialized photographic tasks have been and are being transformed into graphic designer tasks, with CGI. Examples include automobile advertisement photography. In the past, there were photographers based in Detroit, where the mainstay of their business was to photograph new (and usually yet to be publicly announced or shown) automobiles. To do this, they had barn-like studios, with car sized turntables and ramps. Now, this is primarily done by CGI. In fashion, sets are now CGI around the model. Sometimes, even the clothes! Remember the famous "water dress" photos of Giselle? The water dress was all CGI. The business is still "photography", drawing with light, but it is expanded well beyond capturing reality. Professions change with technology and time. While this is not in line with the cited article of the original post, wedding photography as a business is drying up because even amateurs can get decent results with modern automated cameras, and the magic "fix this" buttons in many photo editing programs. Mind you, they may not get great results, but they will get "good enough". Lower your standards, then you will not need to hide a professional photographer. The low and mid level professional photographers will lose. The high end, where the photographer does his or her own CGI will survive. Perhaps also we will see a continuing if tiny market for the high end formal sitting portrait.

Copyrighted landmarks

[Picass0]

Chalk another one for the lawyers.

One advantage of CG is the elimination of concern over buildings and landmarks that must be licensed to appear in film or advertising. Movies and TV shows filming in NYC (especially Times Square) commonly replace buildings and advertising with computer images to avoid licensing and copyright concerns. It can be expesive when something falls between the cracks. An example - The movie poster for Spiderman featured a reflection of the Chrystler Building in Spidey's lens. The owners of the Chrystler Building sued and the poster was recalled, reprinted with a photoshoped image, and redistributed.

When starting from scratch with a full CG image all parties involved can be sure there will be no such FUBARs. Advertisers want eye popping images. Most are pretty flexible about the source.

Re:Copyrighted landmarks

[k6mfw]

Excellent mention, which is too bad because "landmarks" can also be free advertising, but lawyers seem to make a stink about everything.

Already being done

[lordmetroid]

Already being done, I know from friends of mine who work in IKEA PR-department that they have been constructing scenes in 3D modelling software instead of photographing for at least 3 years already.

Re:Already being done

[gmhowell]

Already being done, I know from friends of mine who work in IKEA PR-department that they have been constructing scenes in 3D modelling software instead of photographing for at least 3 years already.

That's only because nobody could figure out how to put the real furniture together to actually take a picture of it.

Creative Destruction

[Dast]

I believe the correct buzzword is Creative Destruction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

Cheap'n'Easy?

[Tommi Morre]

There's a lot of variations on "realistic human 3D models are difficult and expensive, therefor CGI software is unlikely to replace photography anytime soon" in the posts above. Wanted to point out: DAZStudio4Pro is currently free (along with its companion programs Bryce and Hexagon) and comes with an androgynous free human figure (called Genesis) that can be easily worked into a wide variety of realistic men, women, children, aliens, and demons:
http://www.daz3d.com/i/products/daz_studio?

The site (and several others) sell presets to easily make Genesis into various realistic characters, also lots of 3D clothes, props, and scenery -- but, like Blender, DAZStudio4Pro is free (unlike Blender it's not open-source, has been paid software in the past, and almost certainly will be again).

Plenty of examples on the site's forums of extremely photo-realistic 3D human renders, too: http://forum.daz3d.com/ , try starting with http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=189377 and http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=165191

Re:Cheap'n'Easy?

[KickAir 8P]

There's already plenty of photo-realistic 3D art on the web, this is news? I've been using DAZ|Studio since it was version 2.something, my stuff's up on deviantART -- there's plenty of Blender and DAZ|Studio users posting there.

~

What about using both?

[swillden]

I can see lots of great opportunties for combining photography with CGI. Take a bunch of still photographs (or perhaps a video) of your subject, use them to generate an accurate 3D model, then use CGI to generate the final image, free to play with lighting, depth of field, composition, etc., in post-processing.

Re:Painters

[camperdave]

Painters thought they would be replaced by photographers.

They were.

A real-world incident

[Anonymous Coward]

All joking of robots replacing artists aside, there is some truth to Mr. Meyer's concern, and I have felt the consequences. Allow me to share a brief story as my first-ever Slashdot comment.

My father migrated to the US as a young man and high school dropout and learned to make his living as a commercial photographer. He got good at it, and though our family has never seen an excess of money, we've been able to survive from his steady income from the variety of low- and high-profile clients. (Though the payoff wouldn't suggest it, some are extremely well known -- anyone with a credit card looks at one of his old photos every day. #brag)

The big, then-ugly switch to digital came and he closed his dark room and turned on his Mac. Since then, his most steady client was one of the top major US mobile phone carriers. For well over a decade (maybe two, I have a terrible sense of time), he shot all of their new phones for packaging, billboards, etc. The market slowly changed and other customers stopped asking for photos, but this single company kept our family afloat.

Last year the company hired a new marketing firm who convinced them to switch from hi-res photographs of their products to 3D computer-rendered graphics. My dad was no longer needed and after many years of nonstop work they dropped him. My dad, who is now 72 years old, with no other steady photo customers, has had to make changes. He packed up his photo studio and set up shop at home for occasional shoots, but is applying to grocery stores so he can pay the bills. (Being adaptable and resilient, he has also been teaching himself digital video editing in an effort to get into that market.)

What about the phone company's switch to rendered models? Apparently it has gone poorly for them. Word has it that the switch was a disaster -- turnaround for new images was neither cheaper nor faster -- and they have fired the marketing firm, who in turn, consequentially, has had to make massive layoffs.

So back on topic, yes, there is CG replacing some photography in the real world. But such an "upgrade" seems yet early. Maybe even premature or naively futuristic. Make what you will of its outcome.

Re:Poser compatible program...

[Penguinisto]

I know all about D|S (err, search my history, hit Google, etc...) :)

I only left it out because it wasn't germane to the discussion.

Resets the Cosmic Balance

[theshibboleth]

To be fair, photographers replaced painters around the turn of the century--many asked why anyone ought to make "photo-realistic" (of course they didn't call it that at the time) paintings if you could just snap a photo instead. If CGI replaced photos entirely in the media then it would be a sort of restoration as it seems to me the CGI artist is more like a painter than a photographer.

'replaced by software' vs. 'outsourced'

[gtirloni]

I'm wondering how the two are related here.

other fakes

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else happens? Faking data in scientific journals, or a CEO lying in his resume. It doesn't invalidate the rest of the profession. The rest of the PJs strive for the truth.

Re:other fakes

[Archangel Michael]

The "framing" of photographs is a long standing practice and almost seems to par for the course these days. When you have as many photojournalists as participants in events ... and you see it standard practice ....

http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/145812.html

Take a look there, while it captures a dramatic moment in a frame that is designed to cause "outrage" at the treatment of Palestinians at the hand of the "evil" Jews ... it doesn't tell the whole story. In the following link is a video of the entire scene and one thing you'll notice, is that these were not "innocent kids playing in the street" being run over, but part of a Photo Op setup to capture just exactly what they ended up capturing. Count the number of people tossing rocks, and the number of photographers (aka Photo Journalists) there to capture the entire event.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3966413,00.html

It is only by examining the entire scene, up close, and from a distance can one ever get the "whole picture". Mind you, I'm not talking about the plight of the Palestinians vs Israelis nor am I taking sides here, but using this as an example of how by capturing the "truth" might mislead people because it isn't "the whole truth"

Photo Journalists are not journalists. They are Photographers with an agenda (maybe even legitimate agenda) As they say, a photograph is worth a thousand words, the problem is those thousand words are left up to the Photographer and the interpretation of the viewer, and may not reflect the truth.

I've seen that movie

[Quila]

Are you imagining a future where an advertising agency has thousands of pre-rendered models they can toss into an environment, slap a couple of boxes of product images onto the virtual tabletop, and click "print"?

Looker, with Albert Finney and a very hot Susan Dey.

Re:Advising Caution

[oldmac31310]

Perhaps that was nervous laughter!

it's at least the same work to do a rendering

[unami]

so no worries - the times when everyone has access to perfect posable and modular 3d-models and enough processing power to produce photorealistic results in the short turn-around times which are common in professional photography haven't come yet. and even if - where's the difference in work to a typical photograph? sure, models will feel the impact, but for a photographer it shouldn't make to much of a difference if he uses a real or a virtual lens.

In Soviet Russia ....

[PPH]

... photograph alters you!

Time and stupidity

[Cajun Hell]

Your rant has no time dimension! All you have is an impression of stupidity, not of changes. Even when you do mention time, it's just that you sampled people "decades ago" and you imply you haven't done so, since then.

And then you conclude "it has likely gotten worse" but you don't even provide an opinion, much less evidence, for why you think it might have.

20 years ago, people didn't make such lame arguments, therefore, people are getting stu-- no wait, 20 years ago they that too! Read dejanews and you'll see it was just a bad back then.

Yes

[kikito]

It will eventually happen.

I'm not clear about the timeframe, though.