automated

Skylum Unveils ‘Adaptive Templates’ Coming to Luminar AI

As Skylum continues to prep for the full launch of its AI-based photo editor, Luminar AI, the company has reveled more details about how it will work. Namely: Skylum is showing off something called 'Adaptive Templates,' which are essentially next-level presets with some machine learning smarts.

Skylum Unveils Luminar AI: A Fully Automated, AI-First Photo Editor

Skylum has announced a new, AI-first version of its Lumiar photo editor. Dubbed Luminar AI, the program takes all of the machine-learning tools from Luminar 4, adds some more, and puts them all into a new app and plugin that's all about "reinventing" traditional photo editing.

These Light Painting Photographs Were Made Using an Automated Drone

German drone manufacturer Ascending Technologies is celebrating Christmas season this year by doing some light painting photography. Each of the photos they've made was painted by an automated drone that was programmed to follow waypoints in the sky.

The company believes this is the first drone light painting project of this kind.

Akiwi is a Semi-Automatic Image Tagging Website

Akiwi is a new website that's designed to help you keyword photographs with minimal effort. It's a semi-automated image tagging system that is easier than manually tagging and more accurate than automatic image recognition.

Future A.I. Will Be Able to Generate Photos We Need Out of Nothing

What will we do with all the data we accumulate from photos? On a daily basis, Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft use highly sophisticated deep learning engines to better understand the content of billions of images uploaded, liked and shared. For now, it is to better serve advertising, but what else can be done?

Lily is the World’s First Throw-and-Shoot Camera

Lily is a new robotic camera drone that aims to shake up not only the drone industry, but the camera industry as a whole. It's the world's first "throw-and-shoot camera" that lets anyone capture cinematic aerial photos and videos without needing to do any piloting.

An Automated Slide Film Scanner Built with LEGOs

This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.

Researchers Take Aim at Automatically Detecting Photo Fakes on Twitter

You might remember the photo above from last year. For a while, it circulated the web like mad, claiming to show Hurricane Sandy bearing down menacingly on the Statue of Liberty. But if you've read our previous coverage on the photo, you'll know that it is, in fact, a fake -- a composite of a Statue of Liberty picture and a well-known photo by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.

Photo fakes like this wind up going viral online all the time, often helped along by Twitter where retweet upon retweet puts it in front of thousands of unsuspecting people. Having had enough, a group of researchers from the University of Maryland, IBM Research Labs and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology are trying to do something about it.

Clever Wedding Photo Booth Made Using a Canon T3i

We've seen DSLR photo booth projects before, but usually they're just simple ways for guests at an event to take self-portraits of themselves. Kevin over at I Dream In Code actually made a fancy photo booth for his brother's wedding that prints out a nice keepsake for guests.

Light Painting Art Done Using Swarms of Robot Vacuum Cleaners

This light painting photograph was created by a group of students over in Germany using a swarm of seven Roomba automated vacuum cleaners. Each one had a different colored LED light attached to the top, making the resulting photo look like some kind of robotic Jackson Pollock painting. There's actually an entire Flickr group dedicated to using Roombas for light painting -- check it out of you have one of these robot minions serving you in your home.

Paparazzi Bot Prowls for Smiling Faces

The Paparazzi Bots are a series of robots invented by Ken Rinaldo, a faculty member in the Department of Art at Ohio State University. Each bot is autonomous, and moves about on a wheeled platform, using infrared sensors to move towards humans. It's goal is to take single photographs of people, and it makes decisions on whether or not to capture the photograph based on facial expressions of the subject. If you happen to be smiling, the bot is more likely to photograph you.