Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell

A proposed software tool is intended to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. The New York Times reports.

... Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”

Dr. Hany Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said.

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic.

Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Introduction to their paper:

In recent years, advertisers and magazine editors have been widely criticized for taking digital photo retouching to an extreme. Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers.

The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children. In response, several countries have considered legislating the labeling of retouched photos.

We describe a quantitative and perceptually meaningful metric of photo retouching. Photographs are rated on the degree to which they have been digitally altered by explicitly modeling and estimating geometric and photometric changes. This metric correlates well with perceptual judgments of photo retouching and can be used to objectively judge by how much a retouched photo has strayed from reality

Read full article.

Retailers Use Mobile Devices to Shorten Checkout Lines

Staff in retail outlets are ringing up customers with mobile devices in larger numbers this holiday season, and are integrating in-store shopping apps to facilitate sales as brick-and-mortar retailers aim to better serve customers and streamline a sometimes combative shopping environment. Mobiledia reports.

Apps and software used in-store also enable consumers to pre-order and pre-pay for merchandise with their mobile phones, bypassing long lines and massive crowds. The merger of apps with actual browsing marries the tactility of in-store shopping with the convenience of e-commerce.

Sears, for example, has created "shopping walls" in high-traffic stores such as O'Hare Airport that feature its top-selling products. Camera-enabled phones let customers scan the Quick Response, or QR, code on products, which sends them to a shopping site to purchase the item and have it shipped to their homes.

Read more.

Pocket Projector for iPhone

Spotted on The Red Ferret, a new Pocket Projector will work with iPhone 4 and delivers an image up to 50” at 640×360 at 15 lumens.

Granted, that’s not a resolution that’s going to get you a lot of fine details, but it’s enough to watch videos on, and it’ll be better than looking at your screen.

Add-Ons Make Smartphone Cameras Nearly Picture Perfect

The New York Times on the companies producing inexpensive smartphone attachments that can easily convert a mobile phone into a mini-professional camera. These products include zoom, fisheye and ultra-up-close macro lenses — all designed to snap onto a smartphone and make photos look as if they were shot with an expensive single-lens reflex camera.

Above: A photo taken with an iPhone camera; left, and with a telephoto lens attached to the phone.

Witnesses’ Recordings Help Explain Air Accidents

With more people carrying devices like camera phones, events both benign and disastrous are being recorded by civilians and finding a wider audience — not just in the news media and online, but also in accident investigations. And while these documents are often a boon to investigators, they can also be a burden. The New York Times reports.

... Citizen documentarians are in danger of overwhelming government agencies with all their digital data. Over the last five years, the safety board has seen a 400 percent increase in material coming into its recorder laboratory. Extracting data from hundreds of different kinds of electronic devices that were never intended to be flight data recorders is time-consuming and expensive.

Read full article.

Facebook Is the Final Frontier in Amateur Porn

The cutting-edge of online smut is stalker porn: private sexy pics posted without their subjects' consent, paired with a screenshot of their Facebook profile. Gawker reports.

That's the model that's made IsAnyoneUp.com an increasingly popular destination in online porn, with 30 million pageviews a month. The site features nude pictures of young men and women, along with their real names and their Facebook account. Most of the pictures look like they were meant for private sexts with a lover, not the entire internet, and that's because many of them were.

... There's not much subjects can do to get their pictures taken down—all the pics are user submitted, so he's protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In fact, attempts to evade IsAnyoneUp's attention seems to get fans off even more. When one of IsAnyoneUp's subjects tried to vanish online, a "hoember alert" is put out.

Read more.

Of Cellphones and Street Photography

For street photographer Misha Erwitt, it's becoming harder to get a picture of people in New York that are not holding a cell phone. [via The New York Times]

A slide show of New Yorkers glued to their phones is featured on his blog, alongside Mr. Erwitt’s quiet rant.

... These days, it’s completely normal to see someone totally oblivious to his or her surroundings yakking away on crowded sidewalks. Cellphones and digital cameras have become ever smaller and commonplace. Inadvertently eavesdropping on someone’s private conversation or being bumped into by someone busily texting and walking is part of the urban landscape.

Read more via The New York Times.

Related: - Cell Phones and NYC Street Fashion.

Apple Takes iTunes to Other Kinds of Payments

This week Apple introduced a new feature for the iPhone in its Apple Store app. The feature, called EasyPay, allows people to take a picture of the bar code of a product with the phone’s camera and then buy the product on the spot, using their iTunes account.

[via Bits]

In Japan, 'Up-skirt' photos increasing

Upskirting, down-blousing, the first evil side of cameraphones to make headline news in 2003 are back with an article in today's Daily Yomiuri Online.

According to Japan's National Police Agency, the total number of identified cases of up-skirt photos and videos taken in stations and on trains and illicit filming at public baths and bathrooms was 1,087 in 2006. The number jumped to 1,741 cases in 2010. Of those, 1,702 were cases of up-skirt photos and videos, accounting for about 98 percent.

... Especially noteworthy were videos taken using cell phones. Fifty percent of arrests made by the prefectural police on suspicion of violating the public nuisance ordinance involved filming using cell phone video cameras.

Read more. Image from aware.

New app called ShoeBox lets you use iPhone as a photo scanner

A new smartphone app will help you transition your old paper photos into the digital age. Called ShoeBox, the free app lets you use your iPhone’s camera as a photo scanner.

The app lets users rotate, crop, date and tag photos and share them with friends and family either through Shoebox or Facebook. The photos are also stored on 1000memories.com, the website of the startup behind ShoeBox.

Read full review in The Washington Post.