Photo fix

[HarveyDarkey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyN5R0T_HIU

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.

Developed by Daniel Cohen-Or and Lior Wolf at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, with colleagues at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, the software identifies 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 video).
Power points

The software uses colour and shape to isolate objects in an image. It then decides which are most important, or salient, to the image. "For example if there are many lines or contrasting colours in a region then it would have a high saliency score," says Wolf.

The positioning of those most salient features is judged against a handful of composition rules commonly included in camera manuals.

For example, the rule of thirds divides the image frame into nine equal parts using two horizontal and two vertical lines. The four points where those lines intersect are "power points" where important features are best placed, while the lines themselves act as guides to the alignment of linear features like the horizon.

Read more at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18497