Jim Lind Photo

If you’ve been in the photosphere recently than you’ve probably heard of Photosketch. For those of you who haven’t then be sure to look at the video below. It’s a prototype software from students in China that grabs images from the web and then composites them according to any sketches that you provide. To be honest Tao Chen does a much better job at describing the project so I will quote him from his site on Vimeo…

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Along with a lot of other people, I too am excited about the idea of this software. Not only does it speed up the proofing process but it also gives the opportunity for the client to sketch out something for you to work with. I don’t see this as a job taker but rather as an aid to get to the finished piece quicker. Any thoughts?