Software photo-doctor makes bad pics eye pleasing

London, Feb 10 (ANI): A software has been developed that can manipulate an amateur's photographs to make them more pleasing to the eye.

Brainchild of Daniel Cohen-Or and Lior Wolf at Tel-Aviv University, Israel and colleagues at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, the software identifies an image's key features based on their colour and shape, reports New Scientist.

The positioning of those elements is used to judge a photo, then tweaked to improve it, says Wolf.

The software uses colour and shape to isolate objects in an image. It then decides which are most important, or salient, to the image.

It also tweaks the position of prominent diagonal lines so that they lie closer to the diagonals formed between opposite corners of the image.

"In salient regions it doesn't distort the image but applies uniform scaling," explains Wolf. "In regions that are not salient, any distortion is not so noticeable and so there's more freedom to alter the size."

Martin Constable at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore says "This is a high-level example. Doubtless we will see such things in future versions of Photoshop."

A paper on Wolf and Cohen-Or's work will be presented at the Eurographics 2010 conference in Norrköping, Sweden, in May. (ANI)