PhotoSketch Brings PhotoShop & Imagination Together

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	8th Oct 2009

PhotoSketch Brings PhotoShop & Imagination Together

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This one nearly passed us by, but boy are we glad to catch it...

Earlier this week Tsinghua University in Beijing, unveiled ‘PhotoSketch', a programme so clever it could represent the long term future for mass market photo editing and creation. The ingenious coders have created software which can interpret user drawings and written descriptions, find images which closely match their outlines and blend them (almost) seamlessly together.

Objects, people, animals and even your choice of background all come together via a unique blending algorithm which analyzes millions of images online, rates them against your original sketches and one another then puts them altogether matching shadows and lighting. The results could certainly be bettered by an experienced PhotoShop guru like our own Cliff Smith, but for the majority of us it opens up art programmes like never before.

The video above is included simply because the results have to be seen to be believed and also because my own PhotoShop abilities barely expand beyond crop and resize so my attempts at a detailed explanation would border somewhere between pathetic and ridiculous.

As with all extremely exciting technologies there is currently no information on a commercial (or even beta) rollout - but I can't imagine the corporate giants of the technology world sitting idly by for long without either a) snapping it up or b) attempting to recreate it themselves.

Either way, a revolution beckons...

Link:
Tsinghua Unversity Project Page