A common complaint on online dating sites is that personal ad photos range from unflattering to fake. to make matters worse, in the past few years there has been an influx of photos done by professional photographers that are as disingenuous as the photos people post from 10 years or 20 pounds ago.
One photo of you looking fabulous is enough, posting 10 photos from a photo shoot is overdoing it. I want to see you with bed head, drunk, or laughing so hard you look like you’re about to explode.
Some people have friends take their photo with their digital cam, our you self-published a webcam picture, or you went the distance and hired a professional photographer.
Tommer Leyvand, who developed the software with three others at Tel Aviv University and who works in development for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., said the goal was to tackle the challenge of altering a face according to agreed-upon standards of attractiveness, while producing a result that left the face completely recognizable, rather than the product of cosmetic surgery or digital retouching.
The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.
You read about Tommer right here, in the post, Picture Cropping is So Old School, back in 2006. His website has lot’s of fascinating research to pour over. I had him analyze my face, and you can see the results in the accompanying photos. First photo is the original one of me. The second photo is my “beautified” face and the third shows the changes the system made to my mug. Kind of spooky if you ask me. Guess I’m pretty close to idea, the system didn’t change much ;-).
