Ever taken what you thought was that perfect “family photo” only to develop it (or download it to your computer) to find Granny is grimacing, Uncle Joe looks like he has indigestion, baby Alice is looking the other way, your sister looks asleep or your mum looks wild eyed on some hallucinogenic drug?
For me, the idea behind the family group shot is almost always spoiled by the physical effect produced. You want to capture that happy moment for all to treasure, to try and relay to the viewer the joy of the occasion. Instead you get one (or maybe more!) scenes of sleeping, farting, spaced out grimacing.
Maybe you take 5 or 8 shots; surely Granny is getting close to a smile in ONE of them. Baby Alice decides to grace you with her smile on a couple of pictures, but not the same ones as when Granny found her grin. Mum and sister both sort their eyes out for the last picture, but fail on the rest.
That leaves you with EIGHT shots that all fail dismally to convey the core atmosphere you were trying to capture in the first place – a glorious record of the happy occasion.
Enter Microsoft Research’s “Group Shot”.
This software lets you take a number of “similar” photo’s, and later on select the best parts of each to merge into that single perfect shot. You can highlight Granny’s smile, baby’s face, Mum and sister’s eyes, all in different versions of the shot. Then the software will pull together a great faimly portrait you can be proud of.
Obviously I am only listing the one obvious use for this software, I am sure there are many more scenarios where this would be pretty useful.
I tried out an earlier internal copy of this and was quite impressed. In a later post I will try and pull out some of my own photo’s and give an example of the results this software will produce.
