EXPERIMENT THREE - Create a face

Part three to my ever thrilling quest for SOMETHING OR OTHER! Um, that is.. facial averaging and analysis of personal aesthetic of beauty.

 

My first attempt to overlay the pictures was a bit strange. I simply set every face to ‘overlay’ and ended up with this overexposed image. Hmm… try again.

I also noticed that the ears/hair/collars were turning into goop when overlaid, so I tried masking out all non-face areas except for those within a certain parameter. I set all layers to a lower opacity, and ended up with my first 3d averaged face!

I’ve learned that as you average many faces, the face becomes more babyish and chubby looking. For example in this ‘most beautiful’ set of averaged faces by professionals, they appear to be quite young and soft. I think this is due to ‘softening’ of the features by eliminating all outliers (largest and smallest features,) and an overall expansion of edges by overlays. To mitigate this I began using less faces for more variation.

I tried leaving out certain faces. Here I selected only models with poofy lips. Note in the following examples that the faces are kind of wonky looking, I have bettered my technique since this point.

Models with larger noses

Models with the largest eyes

I began noticing traits in common within the models, seemingly there were ‘types’. - For example, models with the largest eyes tended to have the thinnest lips. The thinnest lips average looked very similar to the largest eyes average. Most models had a dominate feature, with either two medium sized features, or a small and medium sized feature. Thicker lips was paired with medium eyes and noses. Big noses typically were paired with large-ish eyes, but not the largest. Large eyes were rarely paired with thicker lips, etc.

I began experimenting with more arbitrary parameters. Here these are models I’ve deemed to be ‘cutie pies,’ ones who look more youthful and babyish. (The masks are off here, you can see how strange the other edges get without them.)

the models who seemed more mature looking.

Here, all my favorite models. I noticed a feature seemed to dominate - ‘the eye capsule’ as coined by cute overload. 

Adjusted, all my favorites minus models with ‘eye capsule.’ (Looks kind of cross eyed and weird.) I tried experimenting with adding color in, my first color average! (A blurred average of all the photos set to ‘color’ mode… so inefficient. I was just starting out.)

The unwritten step in this process is carefully skewing, sizing and rotating pictures to line up the facial features. The only advice I can offer on this front is to line up the eyes (ignoring pupils,) then do whatever it takes to get the mouth into place. I’m less fussy about the noses as they tend to line up on their own, sometimes…

AUGH there’s more!? Yes baby, more than ever before…

EXPERIMENT FOUR COMING UP!