Interesting article I found on Flipboard today...according to this, "Xerox research labs have developed a computer program that tells you if your pictures are good or bad. In fact, it's capable of detecting if the photo has that magical, intangible quality that makes an image special. It works."
sounds all very good if you want your photos to be uniform and identical as with a machine all it can tell is a set of preferences based on what the programmer sees as aesthetical, the moment I let a computer tell me how to take a photograph is the day I give up photography.
@asrai Not so. Add enough criteria with a few bits of random sampling and there's no reason why they all must look the same. Besides which, don't we all try and take stuff with certain visual cues in them anyway? Leading lines, rule of thirds, etc? There's no reason you can't code an algo to check for such simple things and build from there something capable of determining the likelihood of a given picture being aesthetically pleasing.
@eyebrows yes there are visual cues to a lot of the shots there is positioning and lighting and as you say such thing as rule of thirds, but is every shot that does not follow the rule of thirds a rubbish shot is a perfectly lit shot any better than a moody underlit shot where do abstract and patterned shots fall into the rules of position, if you add all intergers of what makes a good shot you would make the software pretty pointless because it would ultimately depend what shot or mood you wanted to create, in the end what the software is doing is the same as a calculator it is substitute for thinking ,it is effectively taking your judgement of the aesthetic beauty that you see and affirming or disapproving photographs based on numeric beauty, what I am getting at is if I need a machine that is as yet incapable of consciously understanding the intrinsic nature of what beauty is to tell me what is beautiful and what isn't then all my work is for nothing . You can take a perfectly good beautifully lit and perfectly positioned shot and still find that it is souless , art is not always aesthetically pleasing it can also be jarring and unnearving and deep and random all of which would probably be classed as bad because they dont fall into integers. I say that all the shots become the same not because they look the same but because they fit into a set criteria. Use of a machine for this task is the difference between taking a picture and creating art and if as an artist I cannot tell what is and isn't aesthetically pleasing then I may aswell call myself a programmer because I have no right to call myself an artist.
@asrai The brain is a computer. With slightly buggy, random software. And, judging from the most expensive photos ever, completely capable of making some pretty naff choices on its own. While I'm not sure I like machines judging my work, I think @eyebrows is right. Just some guys testing what computers can do.
@lilbudhha@eyebrows I am not questioning that it is clever software and I am sure it is but in this day and age with our lives increasingly run by computers it seems the only shred of humanity that we have lies in what we create and the moment we start to judge and question art by what a cleverly designed piece of software tells us is art is the day that art looses its meaning I can accept that the software gives estimate of what the majority of people would consider aesthetically pleasing but to me it has never been about aesthetics, its never been about trying to please everyone if you have a goal of trying to do that with your artwork you are set to fail because regardless of composition, lighting and subject someone is not going to like what you do but hey if thats what some people want then good luck to them all I am saying is I know what I like and I wont be turning to a computer to tell me any time soon
@eyebrows oh.. whats the point if it doesnt allow uploads? that blows lol. They should just turn it into an app that you can just let crawl through your images
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(real answer: I wish it had an upload function so you could try your own images, but it doesn't ._. )