It was just a memory

June 4, 2010 by pmelcher.

And you thought that the new features in the new release of Photoshop CS were impressive. Microsoft apparently does not want to be left behind and just showed to Techcrunch a sneak peek of the next release of Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery upgrade, something called photo fuse.

In a nutshell, Photo Fuse will take the best head shots out of series of images in order to create the best final composition . For photojournalist covering a summit, or red carpet photographers shooting a group of people, this tool, while quite not ethical, is a life saver. No more images where one member is blinking, or looking away. Now, as long as you had pictures of all the members not making a stupid face and looking at you at one point or the other, you can quickly compose the perfect frame.

The technology already existed but done manually, it could take a lot of time and end up not very good. Now, it seems it can be done in seconds and looks perfect. As photographers around the world use this tool more and more, photo editors will no longer have to find the one gem image where everyone is looking at the camera. Those images will no longer exist.

Is this ethical ? Well, according to the eternal rules of photojournalism, no. But if the result is invisible and the change can mean the difference between a sale or not, we can be sure that, considering the high level of competition,a lot of photogrpahers will use it.

Obviously, this is also very useful for stock photography, where truthfulness of the event photographed is not a matter.

Video here :

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