More on photo editing and cgi

Given that our celebrities often have their images cleaned up, why shouldn't we clean up our own images? How far is to far?

Portrait Professional Studio is a popular photo editing application tailored to clean up portraits. Basically, if you are a portrait photographer you want to present your client at their best. Perhaps even better than their best... Check out their gallery of before and after shot. I find it disturbing.

Alien Skin's Image Doctor is a similar program, though the examples are much less egregious.

I showed you lots of fashion images that were edited with a heavy hand. They were edited to the point of barely resembling the real person. Taking this one step further, if we edit photos to the point that they no longer look like the people that were photographed, why bother to even start with a photo? Why not just use computer generated models for everything? It would save a lot of money in terms of the model and the photographer and you could make everything 'perfect' from the onset?

Poser is a very popular 3D figure modeling application. Check out their gallery. People with create a figure in Poser than bring it into any number of 3D modeling applications to make it more realistic. Daz3d is a free 3D application. Victoria is a free 3D model first created in Poser than refined in Daz3d that you can modify and use freely. Is the image of Victoria any more 'fake' (or 'real' for that matter) than the images cleaned up using Portrait Professional Studio?

Silestone -- 'Above Everything Else' from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

This video is made entirely using cgi (computer generated imagery). No lenses or cameras involved. Actually, 3D programs often use 'cameras'. They are used to position the view and composition of the still image or video to be rendered. Here is an article about the artist's short film. It includes a video on his working methods. It is nuts.

This blurry of the line between cgi and photography may still a little far fetched to some (not me), but there is already work being done in the field of computer science to create programs that can differentiate by means of data analysis when they can't be differentiated visually.

Follow up- I showed you the Tron Legacy trailer last week during class to show you how digital imaging techniques were used to create a de-aged Jeff Daniels. Here is an article about how this technology will change the face of movie forever.