New Panasonic Camera Replaces Your Face With a More Attractive Version of Your Face

Beauty-enhancement mode puts a cosmetic kit right in your camera

By Clay Dillow Posted 03.02.2011 at 4:22 pm 6 Comments

The Panasonic Lumix FX77 Lets You Manipulate Your Mug Smile! Or don't. We can add the smile later.

In this socially networked age it can be tough to manage your personal brand, what with all those hastily snapped pics from last night ending up on Facebook (and Twitter, and Last Night’s Party, any number of Tumblr feeds). What if your hair wasn’t right? What if, heaven forbid, someone captured a pic that wasn’t of your “good side.” The new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 has the answer: a "beauty re-touch" function that tweaks your skin tone, whitens your teeth, adjusts your makeup, and otherwise replaces images of you with a more attractive person that looks like you.

"According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,"Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera, told Reuters. The other half, presumably, are already stunningly beautiful, and the FX77 aims to level the photographic playing field.

The Cosmetic Mode allows users to manipulate their images in a variety of ways, removing dark circles from eyes, smoothing wrinkles, increasing translucency and tone of the skin (Summer Look!), and even shrinking the size of faces and enlarging eyes. It even lets users apply or adjust makeup, adding rogue, eye shadow, and lipstick to an image.

A testament to human vanity? Absolutely, but the Art Retouch function also lets photogs tinker with the saturation of color and brightness of images right on the camera, features that many might find useful beyond doctoring their own visages.

There’s certainly something very uncandid about snapping that candid shot only to manipulate the faces into something that they’re not. Then again, if you’re really particular about putting your best foot forward in each and every Facebook photo your friends never see, you now have an option. Until we all have beautifully sculpted, personalized robotic doubles to pose in all of our photos for us, this will have to do.

[Reuters]

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6 Comments

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ptv83

03/02/11 at 11:04 pm

what's next, a web cam that makes your penis look longer?

human vanity indeed.... social failure all together

cheers, eh

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B.V.

03/03/11 at 11:58 am

This is hilarious!

Seems like this would make social networking much more awkward... suppose I doctor my facebook image to make myself look like a stud, some girl I knew in high school makes herself look like a goddess, we see each other on fbook and decide to meet up... then what?

Are we gonna wear paper bags on our heads with the doctored images printed out and glued on to them?

Seems like it would just lead to disappointment and embarrassment...

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HBillyRufus

03/03/11 at 1:31 pm

Go take a picture of your least favorite male politician, turn on the Cosmetic Mode "adding rogue, eye shadow, and lipstick", the results would be hilarious! Or you could exaggerate or negate the makeup of your least favorite female politician.

Eventually this tech will have to be applied to motion pictures. No more makeup needed, it would all be done in the camera. Results could be televised instantaneously (to all of your political opponents)!

Of course it won't really take off until it can take thirty pounds off of your image. But then again, it could also be used to add fifty.

Oh, how every new technological development can be abused!

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suddenmischief

03/03/11 at 1:49 pm

@HBillyrufus,

Have you already forgotten this from a few months ago...

www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/new-software-could-digitally-alter-actors-bodies-post-production

Now we can all have the good looks and athletic build we've always wanted other people to think we have.

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misterbee

03/05/11 at 10:30 am

WOW! I'd love to stay and chat, but I need a new camera. Especially one that "enhances" certain areas.

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Durge

03/06/11 at 6:00 pm

Me got one, you like my pic?

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