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Author Topic: Intelligent picture adjustments  (Read 4402 times)

dreed

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Intelligent picture adjustments
« on: August 25, 2014, 07:42:42 am »

When will LR be able to do intelligent picture adjustments?

What's that?

"Remove wrinkles from face"
"Remove pimples from face"
"Make the face look smooth"
"Make the sky bluer"
"Make the clouds darker"
"Get rid of red-eye"
etc

Consider that cameras can already do face detection so it stands to reason that LR should be able to detect faces too and that if it can detect faces then why can't it "fix the face"? (and make it look 10 years younger ;)

If faces can be recognised then why are manual brushes required to "fix" them?
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luxborealis

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2014, 08:03:12 am »

Ha, ha, ha – you had me going. For a moment there, I honestly thought you were serious. Your tongue is firmly planted in your cheek, right? A one-size-fits-all, push-button approach to working on, perhaps THE most individual part of a person's visual character – their face? I guess corporate homogenization is not only becoming accepted, but is being actively sought.

Gimme a break. What is photography becoming?

There is no doubt in my mind that someone or some company will come out with this (Topaz Labs and onOne Software come to mind, but maybe a new start-up, FaceEfex), as there are many picture-takers who love one-button solutions to all their woes, and it might be helpful if you have a thousand school picks of blemished, zit-faced teens; hopefully LR doesn't go down that road.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #2 on: August 25, 2014, 10:31:11 am »

How about --

"Fix my composition."

"Make my subject more interesting."

"Add 30% ambiguity to my Street photo."

and, most importantly:

"Make my photo marketable."

 :D
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digitaldog

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2014, 02:51:22 pm »

We just need a single "Make pretty" button.
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jferrari

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #4 on: August 25, 2014, 02:55:17 pm »

But what if you were trying to document real life zombies? (As we all sometimes do...)
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Daniel Salazar

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #5 on: August 25, 2014, 03:03:14 pm »

...... then you don't press the "Make pretty" button.
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dreed

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #6 on: August 25, 2014, 03:11:36 pm »

Ha, ha, ha – you had me going. For a moment there, I honestly thought you were serious. Your tongue is firmly planted in your cheek, right? A one-size-fits-all, push-button approach to working on, perhaps THE most individual part of a person's visual character – their face? I guess corporate homogenization is not only becoming accepted, but is being actively sought.

Gimme a break. What is photography becoming?
...

No, I'm serious.

Or maybe I could put it differently.

I want smart objects in LR where a smart object might be "trees" or "leaves" or "sky" or "clouds" or "faces" or "cars" or etc that I can then work with.

The brush is a dumb object and the "fuzz" around the edge is to allow for it to be used inaccurately.

Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can work on the sky's colour simply because that's the only blue component in an image. Throw in something else plus a complicated "horizon" and working with just the sky can become precarious. Again with clouds it is necessary to rely on them being grey or the highlights or ... plus sometimes the sky isn't blue.

While it works, it is a very manual and dumb way of working.

What is photography becoming?

Something that it wasn't before.

It has been doing that for about 10 to 15 years now.

And to be quite frank, whilst LR and PS have made life more interesting, neither product has really revolutionised the way we edit photos since the introduction of parametric editing.

Then again, maybe I'm asking in the wrong forum. C1 beat Adobe to a more advanced tool for fixing keystone issues (and their tool, whilst manual, is far better than LR's). Maybe they'll deliver on this first too?
« Last Edit: August 25, 2014, 03:13:25 pm by dreed »
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fdisilvestro

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #7 on: August 27, 2014, 07:39:28 am »

This is closer than you think, not sure if in LR or other software. I'll give some examples:

- Portrait Professional www.portraitprofessional.com performs automatic / configurable edits to faces. I know that the defaults look kind of plastic, but it is configurable and as any other software product, it has and will continue to evolve.

- Just a few years ago there was an interesting paper published in the IEEE transactions on Signal Processing, where one of the authors was Large Format Photographer QT Luong (he is the founder of the LF forum and has published an article here on LuLa), titled: "Aesthetics and Emotions in Images,  a computational perspective" (available here) where they cover a series of topics about using algorithms to classify images according to different criteria, including composition.

- Last April at the AWS Summit in Sydney, I saw a demo from a Start-up company called Lumific (www.lumific.com) whose product selects, groups and automatically edits the photos you upload to the site. The automatic edits are not just the auto adjust commonly used in other applications. It will select between similar photos for the best focused, will rotate crooked images and will crop the images so that the resulting one follows the rule of thirds. The company is still not ready for prime time, but the technology is there.

-The LR catalog already has few tables for "face" data: ...Face, ...FaceProperties, ...FaceCluster, ...FaceData , so I would not be surprised if future versions include some face related functionality

Regards

Glenn NK

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #8 on: August 29, 2014, 04:52:25 pm »

I'm sure I'm ready for dumbed down software - we already have cameras like that. ;)
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luxborealis

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #9 on: August 29, 2014, 10:41:16 pm »

No, I'm serious.

Or maybe I could put it differently.

I want smart objects in LR where a smart object might be "trees" or "leaves" or "sky" or "clouds" or "faces" or "cars" or etc that I can then work with.

The brush is a dumb object and the "fuzz" around the edge is to allow for it to be used inaccurately.

Then again, maybe I'm asking in the wrong forum. C1 beat Adobe to a more advanced tool for fixing keystone issues (and their tool, whilst manual, is far better than LR's). Maybe they'll deliver on this first too?

The brush is meant to be dumb so that the person using it can exercise their intelligence in selecting the various parameters (feather, density, flow, plus all the adjustments). There is no such thing as "Smart" tools, just dumb ones that are programmed to do certain things in certain situations. So that covers the majority of, often average, situations. As a photographer, I am specifically trying to avoid "average" conditions, lighting and situations. It's why exposures as the camera sees it are almost never correct without some exposure compensation.

There is nothing more frustrating to a craftsman then having their tools make decisions for them based on how the tool was programmed by some engineer who may not think like you or may be thinking "this will keep the average person happy". Take Word (yes, the writing app from MS) foe example. Microsoft has tried to program into it shortcuts so it does things when, for example, importing graphics, that I don't want it to do - frustrates me to no end.

Learn to use the tools, even finesse them and they will do things that no smart tool or smart tool programmer could ever dream of.
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Glenn NK

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #10 on: August 30, 2014, 12:32:11 am »

The brush is meant to be dumb so that the person using it can exercise their intelligence in selecting the various parameters (feather, density, flow, plus all the adjustments). There is no such thing as "Smart" tools, just dumb ones that are programmed to do certain things in certain situations. So that covers the majority of, often average, situations. As a photographer, I am specifically trying to avoid "average" conditions, lighting and situations. It's why exposures as the camera sees it are almost never correct without some exposure compensation.

There is nothing more frustrating to a craftsman then having their tools make decisions for them based on how the tool was programmed by some engineer who may not think like you or may be thinking "this will keep the average person happy". Take Word (yes, the writing app from MS) for example. Microsoft has tried to program into it shortcuts so it does things when, for example, importing graphics, that I don't want it to do - frustrates me to no end.

Learn to use the tools, even finesse them and they will do things that no smart tool or smart tool programmer could ever dream of.

OK, I'm giving my vote to Terry (Lux).  Want to know why I do not use MS word?  Oh, you already know.

Glenn
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Jim MSP

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #11 on: August 30, 2014, 08:20:25 am »

.......

What is photography becoming?

Something that it wasn't before.

.....
This has aspects of the RAW vs jpeg (out of camera) debate that flares up on other camera forums from time to time. IMHO, aspects of this will continue to evolve because there is a large market that will use it, and it will become a point of product differentiation.
It is sort of the 80/20 rule in marketing - if 80% of the market wants it, it will come.

What I am seeing is that photography is reaching the point where >80% of the OOC jpegs are "good enough" for most people for 4x6 prints, and for Facebook and other social media. If you develop more advanced software capabilities, they will need to be easy and quick - I think that Google with its voice recognition and smart software could develop this successfully.

We will always have artists who will want the personal control of their art. But if their tools become easier to use, they will use them.

Jim
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Keith Reeder

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #12 on: August 30, 2014, 10:30:22 am »

I don't think it's anything to do with "art", Jim - speaking personally I simply don't see the case for slapping someone else's idea of an "improvement" over any images I've made.

That's why I remain baffled by the appeal of downloadable presets - their ubiquity really does dumb down and homogenise everything to the extent that in some genres, having a personal "style" or "look" to one's images is not only no longer desirable, it's positively exclusionary - there's often a clear pressure to be conformist, so if you're not HDRing, or Orton Effecting, or Dave Hill Looking, or Lomoing, or Instagraming, or Bleach Bypassing, or Cross Processing, or whatever this year's "cool" gimmick is, you're doing something wrong.

Glad I don't have to deal with this nonsense in my wildlife and sport shooting.  

« Last Edit: August 30, 2014, 10:36:49 am by Keith Reeder »
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Glenn NK

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #13 on: August 30, 2014, 12:32:50 pm »

I don't think it's anything to do with "art", Jim - speaking personally I simply don't see the case for slapping someone else's idea of an "improvement" over any images I've made.

That's why I remain baffled by the appeal of downloadable presets - their ubiquity really does dumb down and homogenise everything to the extent that in some genres, having a personal "style" or "look" to one's images is not only no longer desirable, it's positively exclusionary - there's often a clear pressure to be conformist, so if you're not HDRing, or Orton Effecting, or Dave Hill Looking, or Lomoing, or Instagraming, or Bleach Bypassing, or Cross Processing, or whatever this year's "cool" gimmick is, you're doing something wrong.

Glad I don't have to deal with this nonsense in my wildlife and sport shooting.  



I foolishly bought some LR presets - fortunately they didn't cost much because I found that they were pretty well useless (T- - - 's LR Presets).

The only thing dumb about it was that I fell for it and paid for them.  :'(

The continuing addition of tools to LR has greatly improved its functionality since it first came out, but I don't feel that they have dumbed the program down.   For example, using the gradient tool, a good understanding and feeling for the play of light in an image is essential, or the result will look as bad as an overly done and garish HDR.

Glenn
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Bryan Conner

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #14 on: August 30, 2014, 01:00:04 pm »

We just need a single "Make pretty" button.

For many of my photos, it already exists....delete.   ;D
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Chris Kern

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #15 on: August 30, 2014, 05:28:40 pm »

Getting into this late, but LR's "Upright" automated perspective correction strikes me as pretty intelligent.  Doesn't always work to my satisfaction, and sometimes not even at all, but when it does it usually saves a lot of time -- and even when it doesn't do precisely what I want, it often serves as a good starting point.

It's not a Lightroom function, but Photoshop's content-aware fill is really smart.  Smarter than I am, at least -- it often accomplishes things better than I would be able to do them manually, no matter how much time I invested in the effort.  There have been times when it seemed to be bending the image capture to my will.  "Photoshop: get rid of those pesky tourists who walked between my lens and that building."

eliedinur

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #16 on: August 31, 2014, 03:38:10 am »

If the "Pretty Button" works as well as Auto Tone, I think I'll pass.
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LawrenceBraunstein

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #17 on: August 31, 2014, 07:17:00 am »

“Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can work on the sky's colour simply because that's the only blue component in an image. Throw in something else plus a complicated "horizon" and working with just the sky can become precarious. “

Though this might be a bit off-subject, ‘dreed’ has hit upon something which I personally have missed in LR so far, namely the ability to apply HSL adjustments selectively, not just globally.  I’m hoping that a future LR version will allow the adjustment of HSL values while using any of their selective tools, like the graduated filter, adjustment brush, or the radial filter. I don’t know if this would qualify as an ‘intelligent picture adjustment’, but it certainly would show Adobe’s intelligence if they put it in their next LR update!

Larry
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Glenn NK

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Re: Intelligent picture adjustments
« Reply #18 on: August 31, 2014, 02:14:31 pm »

“Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I can work on the sky's colour simply because that's the only blue component in an image. Throw in something else plus a complicated "horizon" and working with just the sky can become precarious. “

Though this might be a bit off-subject, ‘dreed’ has hit upon something which I personally have missed in LR so far, namely the ability to apply HSL adjustments selectively, not just globally.  I’m hoping that a future LR version will allow the adjustment of HSL values while using any of their selective tools, like the graduated filter, adjustment brush, or the radial filter. I don’t know if this would qualify as an ‘intelligent picture adjustment’, but it certainly would show Adobe’s intelligence if they put it in their next LR update!

Larry

Yes,  The adjustment brush is useful, but it's power would be greatly increased if the HSL values could be modified in a brushed area.

I would be a WOW development I think.

And no, I don't think this has anything to do with intelligence on the part of the software - maybe on the user's part. ;D

Glenn
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