Those MS Research folks are so darn clever!

Check this out.

MS Research has made their experimental “Group Shot” photo editing tool available for people to play with. 

“So?”

Okay… let me explain what it does.  Let’s say you’re at your brother Carl’s wedding in San Francisco last November, and someone has used your brother Paul’s really really nice digital camera to take several photos of your three families plus Grandma and Grandpa.  Problem: Your little niece, who ordinarily is adorable and agreeable in every way, decides that she’s not going to be in the mood for a photo at this very given once-in-a-lifetime moment.  In fact, here are the various shades-of-niece we had to deal with:

Now.. suppose you could take the best of those and easily include it in a composite photo… and even other bits as well.  Example: Grandpa’s smile was just a little better in this one than that one, etc…  It would be nice to have a tool that would easily and quickly let you build this composite from various regions of “good photo”, and leave off the “bad photo” bits.

GroupShot does that.  Download it from here.

“Kevin, what were your results with the group shots taken at your brother’s wedding?”

I’m glad you asked.  Here is the result. Click on the photo to see the full picture.

Note: If the photos or the areas being merged aren’t similar in enough ways, you may have some items not work.  I actually have added several faces here… many worked quite well. However…

My poor niece now has three legs.

Oh well.  Serves her right. 

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Have you tried out this tool yet?  Try it out and comment here to let us know what you thought.  Personally, I thought the interface was a little vague at first.  And I would have liked to have a bigger real-time view of the current composite, rather than having to save it to a separate file to view it.