I love twitter and how it brings me brilliant discoveries like this one. You see, I like to consider Adobe Photoshop as my friend. I use it so much to create designs of all sorts, I’ve had the hardest time letting go of past habits to learn how to use Illustrator.
But even using Photoshop and Illustrator involve a fairly steep learning curve. A group of 4 students from Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore recognized a growing need for even simpler graphic design solutions and developed Photosketch. What does it do? You basically sketch out what kinda picture you want and label the individual elements. Photosketch then searches the internet for images to match your text label, ‘cuts’ them out, and puts them together… like so:
That’s pretty darn cool if you ask me. I can definitely do all that manually in photoshop… but that would involve some intricate magic wand and masking work just to separate the couple from the original background in the first place. I’m amazed that photosketch can do this in the click of a button. Many thanks to computer science and complicated algorithms i’ll never understand.
I’m excited to watch how they develop this further. It would be pretty nice if they could apply the same technology to video. Imagine being able to put different elements from different movies together easily in one track without the need for complicated compositing. :)
So there you go. No more worries for those of us who slightly lacking in design ability. Now all we’ll have to worry about are copyright issues of using content from the internet. mmph.
To read more about Photosketch and to watch a demo video, click here.
Shuling Yong 