IT MAY seem crude to reduce aesthetics to number crunching, but software can now manipulate an amateur’s photographs to make them more pleasing to the eye.
Algorithms score a photo’s aesthetics using simple composition rules widely used to guide budding photographers. The image is then automatically cropped, or parts of it moved and resized, to boost its score.
“The image is automatically cropped, or parts of it moved and resized, to boost its aesthetic score”
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Developed by and at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, with colleagues at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, the software spots the key features of an image based on their colour and shape. The positioning of those elements is used to judge a photo, then tweaked to improve it, says Wolf (see below). “In regions without key features, any distortion is not so noticeable so there’s more freedom to alter the size.”
In trials, the team manually cropped professional photos to destroy their aesthetics. When the software processed the images, the results were similar to the originals.
at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore says the new software fits with a recent trend for easy-to-use creative software. “This is a high-level example. Doubtless we will see such things in future versions of Photoshop.”
