PhotoSketch (Sketch2Photo): The real Photoshop for Dummies

Imagine a web-based application that allows you to make awesome pictures from hand-drawn sketches and text annotations. Would you like to use it? I’m sure you would, come and get to know PhotoSketch (Sketch2Photo), the real Photoshop for Dummies. :)

PhotoSketch (Sketch2Photo): The real Photoshop for Dummies

When I first heard about this, I was skeptical. I kept asking myself, how in the world can a program makes awesome pictures from hand-drawn sketches and text annotations?



Instead of watching the video that I have also included down below, I went straight into the details and here’s what I have found out about PhotoSketch:

“…a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition…”

So, that’s how it works. PhotoSketch doesn’t really create new pictures; it just merges different pictures sourced from the World Wide Web into a single picture that best fits a hand-drawn sketch (with text annotations). Awesome indeed! The fact that PhotoSketch is intelligent enough to select and merge suitable pictures into a new picture even makes it even more awesome! This is truly the real Photoshop for Dummies!

Too bad I couldn’t test drive PhotoSketch. I’ve been waiting for hours but the site is still down as of time of writing. My only hope is that we haven’t been taken for ride. I would have congratulated those programmers from China's Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore that have developed PhotoSketch but I guess we need to actually use PhotoSketch couple of times before we can truly say that we have something great here. In the meantime, please watch the following video to know more about PhotoSketch.

Note:

I wonder what some people will do with existing pictures of the late Altantuya. This is just a thought but with PhotoSketch, they can easily merge pictures of Altantuya and you-know-who! When that happens, all hell will break loose here in this country!

Updated on December 15th 2009 3:20 AM:

Take note that PhotoSketch is now known as Sketch2Photo. The people behind it said that they have to change its name in order to avoid a potential conflict. Take note that the old link pointing to PhotoSketch is no longer working, so please try Sketch2Photo instead.