Modding: August 2008 Archive Page

Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps.  This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT)

Ellen Robinson, a volunteer college trustee in Denver, commissioned Sara Frances, a local photographer, to shoot a formal family portrait to hang prominently in their new house. Working for $150 an hour, Ms. Frances changed expressions of family members and swapped the dog's head between images. She slenderized bodies, adjusted skin tones and changed the color of several outfits to make for a more unified palette. She even straightened the collar on one son's shirt.

"You're spending a lot of money on these portraits," Ms. Robinson said. "They're supposed to last a lifetime -- generations, really. So why not get a helping hand to do it right?"

Photography has always represented, to some degree, a distortion of reality, said Per Gylfe, the manager of the digital media lab at the International Center of Photography in New York. A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

"We've always taken photographs as proofs of events, and we probably never should have," Mr. Gylfe said.

McSweeney's:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a little better.)