Faking it with Windows Live Photo Gallery

 

I was intrigued this morning by a tweet from Michael Arrington where he said “saw something pretty amazing at Microsoft today. very pleasantly surprised”…I see impressive things all the time but for Michael to say so got me interested.

His latest post Microsoft Rolls Out Impressive Enhancements To Windows Live Essentials Suite held the answer as he met with my buddy Brian Hall (top right up there) and some folks to look at the forthcoming version of Windows Live. Personally I love Writer and Messenger in the suite but Mike zoned in on Photo Fuse in the Photo Galley application. What it allows you to do is build a final photo from a range of similar photos – perfect for when you have 3 photos but someone is looking away in one and someone else has red eye in another. Photo Fuse takes the best of the 3 photos and creates one final photo. Check out Mike's post to see why I called the image above a “fake” (in a good way) as it was never actually taken 

Arstechnica dives in to some more detail on Windows Live Essentials and gives some more detail on the other feature that had Mike interested – facial recognition. The new version of Photo Gallery finds pictures with people in them and deduces who is in those pictures based on who you have tagged in past pictures. see below as an example

I’ve played with this a little and it’s remarkably clever.

More soon on Movie Maker and Windows Live Sync but here’s a quick video in the meantime

Release date? soon :)