Microsoft is not known for developing social apps or for having a role in the world of social media, but on more than one occasion has shown an active interest in image analysis and social images like selfies. Now, the company has released an app that helps users automatically enhance portraits and selfies.
Also Read: Snapchat Launched “Lenses” To Spice Up Your Selfies
During 2015, Microsoft launched How-old.net, a site that promised to guess a person’s age based on an uploaded image of them. At some point, the company also released a tool that detected emotion in images. Then came Twist, Microsoft’s foray into group chat and image mashups. Its latest development is the imaginatively named Microsoft Selfie – an app also for iOS (like Twist), which was made to help us enhance and edit selfies and portraits.
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Microsoft Selfie allows you to touch up your images and edit them easily with it’s intelligent processing power that can judge a person’s age and gender, as well as skin tone and lighting. The app will use this information and “many other variables” and automatically finish enhancement in order to make your selfies shine. It also has different themes that you can choose from, to achieve a different desired effect. Microsoft explains
[quote]Users can transform average photos into more presentable portraits in seconds. Key features […] are noise reduction, intelligent enhancement, automatic exposure and color theme.[/quote]
If you want to touch up specific areas you can airbrush them separately, but the idea is to give your image an overall makeover and not just spot touch ups. From How-old.net Microsoft must have gleaned a lot of information from users, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the new app uses some of this data to automate its processing functionality. The question is though… Are these apps and “tests” isolated parts of a general strategy by Microsoft to get into a image-sharing? Do these recent moves hint at something much bigger from the company? Is it preparing it’s own social network?
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For now, it just looks like Microsoft is playing around a little, dipping its toes into something it doesn’t quite understand yet.
Download Microsoft Selfie on iOS today to give it a try!