The Face Transformer

Apologies for the extra long image down the side but I thought that the output of the transformer software was so very cool that you would have to see it for yourself, and these are probably the only pictures of myself that I am truly happy to have on the internet. Hurrah for digg popping up little gems of goodness such as this.

Take an image of yourself looking straight at the camera, upload the image, specify what sex, age and ethnicity you are, box the head area, indicate position of eyes and mouth, then let this very neat little java applet transform your image in a number of ways.

You think you are hideous now, wait until you see what this baby produces.

There were some slight errors so I touched up the images a little with Photoshop but not so much that you'd notice - I can't help fiddling. I also merged a bunch into one graphic for this article and shrunk them a little. Conversions of an image of my neice came out at 398 x 466 pixels; not too bad.

Of particular interest to me are the artistic interpretations but the racial transformations are also quite good. The abstractness of the artistic images probably stray a little too far from the original to be recognisable but none the less maintain a certain similarity.

The results are ideal for avatar creation. You know - those little images you can have in online forums and chat programs.

Who needs artistic talent when you have software able to do this for you. Having an artist produce hand drawings similar to the images produced with the transformer would take the artist many hours to complete. To have something like this done in a few seconds is wonderful. Way better than the standard filters available in photoshop.

The major drawback to this software is the limited output resolution. It would be nice to have something produced with much higher resolution so it could be printed and framed ... makes me want to hunt down some of the cool photoshop plug-ins I had noted in passing and check out various effects software for something that may produce similar results.

Transformer | digg story