But I wonder... are tools like this to manipulate reality making really less and less interesting. Are losing our love of reality because of the dreams we can so easily create?
Most importantly, it’s not especially interesting. Figuring out what needs fixing takes a human eye, but actually cutting a distracting pole or bit of lens flare out of a picture is work for a patient robot.
> Are losing our love of reality because of the dreams we can so easily create?
Um... no?
How do you define “reality”? If it depends on what can be shown in photographs, then the time to have this discussion was around 1850.
Our dreams drive us to create a better reality.
What do you mean? It’s a 20-year-old program. If every year or two you implement 3 or 4 SIGGRAPH papers, after a decade you too will have quite a nifty thing.
> I doubt I'll ever use more than 30 minutes to photoshop an image. Ever.
Depends what your job description is. If you’re a retoucher paid by the photo, this is already pretty much true. If you’re a perfectionist artist, it will probably never be.
Surely, the latter comment was an overstatement if you're working professionally with Photoshop. But I do think it sooner or later would be some truth in my statement: If Photoshop manage to imitate realism well enough that humans don't see mistakes, then the only thing they would have to work on is speeding up the algorithm. (in that area of Photoshop, of course)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215894
(2 of the 4 authors are at Adobe Research, while the others are at Princeton Univ.)
By the way a shout to pg. I have mad respect for him and Jim Clark, both computer scientists/entrepreneurs who have worked really hard and selflessly to get engineers more equity over the wealth they create.
As a computer vision researcher, I guess it sometimes irks me when I see great research work done, but credit for which often falls on the company that commercializes it.
Glad to hear that you were yourself involved at Adobe, and it seems like you've gotten a fair amount of good publicity from this great work. Congratulations!