ACQUINE: Automatic Photo Rating - Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine

As I've been trying to decide on my final portfolio, I needed some criteria other than my personal preference. I have some friends with good eyes, but sometimes they are sympathetic to my plite.  I've already stripped what I have down, and what is left can subjected to others preferences. I'm always looking for more feedback of my photos because I have moments of brilliance, and sometimes not so much. Everything I've uploaded to my flickr account has been reviewed a few times before I think it's "reasonable", not all of it is perfect, but I liked it.  

Introducing ACQUINE, one of the most useful, and most frustrating things to happen to my photography. ACQUINE is a software based aesthetic engine;  in effect a software based photo critic.  The software scores an image out of 100, 50 is considered a portrait by a typical quality professional photog, but anything over 40 is considered an above average image.

I've uploaded a number of images and while my average is in the 40s, my highs are in the 90s and my lows are actually in the single digits!! I know it's not the final word on what is a good photo, and the designers have challenges with the engine; it is a work in progress after all.  They mention limitations of the system, but it still is frustrating.  It shows me some gems, and then totally disses some of mine and some others favourites.

If your curious about your own work give it a whirl....



More Later....
G.

Happy New Year!!

Well it has been far too long since I graced the pages of my blog, or updated my photo gallery.  Well that is about to change (at least I hope).

On the photo front, I've broken down and have a new laptop (a Dell XPS), and most importantly Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Ligthroom.  Let me start off with saying Lightroom rocks. No knock to gimp and dcraw, but I never quite got the juju for messing with RAW files on my FreeBSD boxes. Additionally not have any real colour management has been an issue.  Now that I've been shooting RAW and comparing to the JPEG output, it's making me kick my ass that I didn't shoot RAW all the time.  To use a photographer pun

Now I've seen the light!!

Low Cost Image Processing Software

While I don't see the fuss about noise reduction in images. (Come on people did you ever use high ISO film... I have shot a couple rolls of 1200 iso and it looks like the image was on a stucco wall). There are a couple of interesting, low cost, high performance pieces of software.

• Picture Cooler
• GREYCstoration

GREYCStoration I've been playing with in gimp and does a pretty decent of many things. One large images it takes quite a while to process though. Yes I need faster machines at home my lil' ol' pIII isn't cutting the mustard any more.

Haven't played with Picture Cooler yet, (it's windows and I normally don't have a box running any M$ OS). I will soon though and will see what it's all about.