A few years back photographer Martin Evening took a series of photos…
…then used them to create an interesting tutorial on how to make the moving tourists disappear via Photoshop Extended. I wanted to see how Google Photos would handle the same set of images.
I dragged the folder of photos into Google Drive (think Dropbox, in case you haven’t used it), which I’d linked to my Google Plus account. A little while later I got a message on my phone to check out the Auto Awesome photos that had been created. In the first example Google removed the moving objects, then enhanced the color and tone of the resulting image:
This was entirely automatic: I did nothing more than back up my photos to the system. It also built an animation from the frames:
Pretty slick, eh?
I find this all deeply exciting. How can we bring imaging magic to everyone—to people who don’t know it’s possible, much less how to do it themselves?
You’ve always got interesting stuff. Stop it! I can’t get my work done by going off task to check these things out.
Seriously, though, I had an idea for a panorama in which I used essentially the same kind of very-similar shots instead of a sequence of views across an area. IIRC, the result of processing them as a Photoshop panorama was a bit like Martin’s – the common stuff was retained and the differences between shots were lost. My experimental images were made with a hand-held camera, not from a tripod, so the results were “off” in some ways.
…must suppress bad joke about neutron photo bomb.
And the (Tourist) Photographer Strikes: http://www.storehouse.co/stories/l8m7-ponte-vecchio – being essentially as per http://jnack.com/blog/2014/02/17/photoshop-vets-doing-interesting-work/, but moreso.
Note – this work is about as far across the full spectrum from the Google editing scheme as possible, but it does make big use of segmentations plus automated workflows. Where will become the middle-ground?
Works great with auto backup and iPhone 5S 10fps capture and later selection, in my testing. Note, it seems you do have to select the favorite photos from the series before they’ll be auto uploaded