Group Photo Fixer
When you take a picture of a group of persons, it’s hard to have everybody with open eyes, with a natural face expression, with nothing to be fixed.
Of course you can take some pics and then “merge” them with an application like Photoshop, but you have also a quicker alternative: MSR Group Shot, from Microsoft.
This is little and free software can import two or more pictures of a same subject, and then merge them using only the parts that the user prefers.
Let’s see a simple example. I have these two photos I took with my girlfriend:
… what about we want to wear same transparent glasses? Well, we import the two files in Group Shot and we select her eyes in the first pic and my eyes in the second:
The application understand that we want to “swap faces”, so after some seconds we can click on “View Composite” to get the final image:
January 8th, 2007
What is this? It sucks!
January 8th, 2007
Wow, that’s nice! Anyway, Stricker… aren’t you being rude?
January 8th, 2007
How is this even possible?
January 8th, 2007
This is pretty interesting but I’d rather an application that helped me stich a panorama together. There is much more potential for something like that.
January 8th, 2007
coolness. ive watch ces live and this was of those bill gates discuss. nice…
January 8th, 2007
you look like mitnick
January 8th, 2007
Steven k, you can use Canon’s Photostich for that.
Its small, easy to use, and gives great results. You should be able to grab it from the download section of any of canon’s camera pages.
January 8th, 2007
her arm is missing
.
.
.
its just both pics cut together!
January 8th, 2007
sfty: that’s the point. Read the article again – if you had two shots of the same scene, say for instance one of the kids running around on the beach and one of you in front of the camera (would have to have been using a tripod or something I guess), you could splice them together as a family shot.
In fact, this is a very good illustration of the extent of what the program can do, and it appears quite advanced and quite seamless (look at her hair if you really want to nitpick.)
Very interested to try this out.
January 8th, 2007
i c, her face from pic1 got swapped to pic2. but whats the point of selecting his eyes?
January 8th, 2007
This tool basically slices the images into vertical segments and then merges the result. Take a look at the vertical seam visible on the result between the faces. Also take a look at his hair at the top of the result. The hair seems wrong because it is partly on the left side of the seam as well.
This seems like a simple tool for simple tasks but nothing magical.
January 8th, 2007
Hello from Ricky
In the example I selected our eyes because this application seems to analyze both the pics AND the area that user select, to “decide” what to move from a picture to the other.
January 8th, 2007
good to know. one 2 the many trick i have to learn. viva net and the free community
January 8th, 2007
I’d like to see two entirely different photos of the same subjects and let ‘em fix it.
January 8th, 2007
Can you please put Pam Anderson’s breasts on her?
January 8th, 2007
Um, this Groupshot thing is also available free from MS, without Vista..
http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/b215d477-9116-4708-a543-7ca498e6c2eb/Details.aspx
January 8th, 2007
# steven k Says:
This is pretty interesting but I’d rather an application that helped me stich a panorama together. There is much more potential for something like that.
The problem isn’t one of photostitching software so much these days as the photos themselves. You can’t just pivot it around on a tripod or spin in place and get the perspective correct. You need some specialized gear(plus the tripod) and knowledge of your camera lens to avoid distortion in the resulting stitched panoramic photo.
January 8th, 2007
Maybe this should be titled:
“Things that look better when not done in a craptastic fasion!”
January 8th, 2007
“In the example I selected our eyes because this application seems to analyze both the pics AND the area that user select, to “decide” what to move from a picture to the other”
Take a closer look, a lot more is being swapped than just the ’selection’ you made.
January 8th, 2007
Yes you’re right, Anton has wrote a good comment, saying:
“This tool basically slices the images into vertical segments and then merges the result.”
In fact this application work (more or less) in this way, also adjusting the fine-orientation of pictures. As many of you have noticed, this is not an incredible tool, but it can be helpful for people with no experience with complex graphic apps
January 8th, 2007
………and how did the software sort out the reflection of the blokes arm in his ‘new’ transparent shades? – it didn’t because it doesn’t…….
January 8th, 2007
your girlfriend looks a LOT older than you
January 8th, 2007
Hey Steven K,
And anyone else interested in stitching panorama’s together, Matt Brown from the University of British Columbia has made the easiest and in my opinion most seamless panorama stitcher available and it is free free free. Grab it at http://www.autostitch.net
I am not affiliated with the above parties in anyway and my apologies if this is construed as spam.
January 8th, 2007
Jason, not exactly true anymore regarding panoramas. While the software I mentioned above may not allow the user to create the most perfect museum print stretching 12 feet wide, alot of people who do simply handhold their shot and turn taking 4, 5, or 6 shots and maybe 2, 3, or 5, 6 rows of photos, this software is fairly adept and bringing the images together, you may well be surprised – I was, after much frustration with other “$” packages.
January 8th, 2007
# alex Says:
“your girlfriend looks a LOT older than you”
Hi Alex, maybe I look younger than I am
She’s 23.
I’m 27… I hope you thought I was 19
Here are some other pictures, just to prove our ages (LOL !):
http://www.amici.cc/album/riccardo/Maiorca_2006
January 8th, 2007
You can see from her hands that the left side of the first picture is merged with the right side of the second picture. Canon has offered an app to do this with all it’s cameras for years. I was hoping this was merging the faces.
January 8th, 2007
This Is Dumb
January 8th, 2007
Wow, big ups to Microsoft, who’s catching up to Adobe … circia 1994.
January 8th, 2007
And this benefits humanity — how? I just don’t get it — it’s completely useless for most of mankind. Thanks alot Microshaft.
January 8th, 2007
I’d hit that.
January 8th, 2007
Wow. The whiners and haters just can’t stay submerged. Thanks for no contribution.
I suspect “the rest of us” who do other things besides graphic arts all day will appreciate a tool that helps us fix images easily like this. I don’t give a rat’s butt who created it, so long as it’s affordable and works well.
January 8th, 2007
lame….
January 8th, 2007
“This is pretty interesting but I’d rather an application that helped me stich a panorama together. There is much more potential for something like that.”
Autostich does that:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
January 9th, 2007
I think that’s pretty neat idea. But I found something interesting…
Picture 1 (pay attention on the right hand side of the picture, the girl’s arm and backgroun)
Picture 2 (pay attention on the right hand side of the picture, notice the door position)
Look at the final picture now
The Left hand side from the final picture is from the left hand side of picture 1
The Right hand side from the final picture is from the right hand side of picture 2
Well….
So it can be done with photoshop easy, right? just merge 2 picture together with a very similar background.
I also notice the middle part of the final picture look a little fuzzy and not natural. I guess that’s the part generate by the program.
I have nothing against the idea and the effect, just think it will be much better if the program actually can swap the face.
Keep it up
January 9th, 2007
how about they took a third picture of them both wearing the same glasses that’s what I think. be way easier than photoshop…
January 10th, 2007
Several people have said this is just a combo of the left side of pic 1 and right side of pic 2, that its only combined vertical segments. I’ve noticed something that indicates more might be going on.
Look at the girl’s hair just below the right side of her face. On pic 2 there is a wave of shorter hair highlighted a little by the light, whereas on pic 1 it’s straight down. You would expect that since this part is on the left side of the photo that the merge pic would have inherited pic 1’s straight down hair. But it appears this part of the photo came from pic 2. Its as if the program was choosing the cut line that it went straight down, but then for some reason pick this wave of hair out of pic 2 and superimposed it. I wonder why it would do that.
January 15th, 2007
Isn’t it funny…people’s reactions. Had Apple come out with this everyone wouldn’t be able to contain themselves. Words like “innovative”, “slick”, and “groundbreaking” would be shot off like arrows while people shook their heads at poor old Microsoft and their antiquated system.
February 14th, 2007
Dana,Microsoft 4ever.!
February 25th, 2007
why does he look mad during a hug? lol
September 3rd, 2009
was sup mr. raneri. this is Fabian Pineda. i was a student of yours back in the day. i played the trumpet for two years. do you remember me?