The Post’s tech column has a review of cameras that will automatically Photoshop your pictures so you look better.
When they work, both can generate a photographic likeness that looks more attractive than the real you -- a SuperYou that you can post on Facebook, MySpace, Match.com or any other site. HP’s photo alterations are more ambitious than Fuji’s (and probably more in demand, given the hefty state of many Americans). To use the slimming mode, you take a picture as usual, then switch to the camera’s playback mode.
Bring up the photo, tap the "Design Gallery... " button on the screen, tap "Enhance Photos," and then choose "Slimming." There, you can then select one of three levels of shrinkage to determine how much narrower the person in the shot will appear. The camera will save a new copy of your shot, allowing you to compare the original and the edited version back on your computer....
The camera will then slightly soften the appearance of any faces that it detects in the image. This doesn’t always work out: In many of my tests, either I couldn’t see any difference, or the "enhanced" shot merely looked a bit out of focus.
With the right kind of photo, though -- a close-up portrait with the subject centered or nearly so -- this mode made people’s faces look slightly smoother and younger. Think of it as the reverse of what high-definition TV does to actors: Where one adds five years to a person’s appearance, this feature can knock five years off...
So why not build cameras that know more of the editing tricks creative
photographers have used on their computers? If a camera can make people
look thinner and younger than their physical selves, why not have it
also whiten their teeth, dye their hair and blot out their birthmarks?
On the whole, I’m willing to chalk this up as a good thing. We’re constantly bombarded by prettied up images of people that are already beautiful. Meanwhile, almost everyone feels they look bad in photos. I think this is in part because they do, on average I think people look better in person than in snapshots.
The ability to edit our own pictures with incredible ease will both make people more attuned to the edits on magazine covers and let them have pictures that look as good as they do in person, if not better. Admittedly, this is a rather bourgeoise solution and in present form it won’t be available to those with self-esteem issues but not money. However, if this works, I’ll bet we’ll see it in photobooths and disposable cameras within a few years. The techniques are widely known and the software should be fairly cheap to replicate.
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