Group Shot is a photo combining program developed by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to solve the problem of individuals in group photographs that might be doing undesirable things such as looking elsewhere, closing their eyes, not smiling, etc. The principle of Group Shot is that multiple group photographs will be taken in each session. Multiple images from a session are loaded into the application, and then the user selects the best parts from all of the different photos and merges them into one. It was announced in

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

' keynote at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. For a time, the software was available to download for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

users, however it was later removed from the Microsoft Research website, and the project was officially closed. Microsoft Research stated that the beta period has expired. The Group Shot engine was eventually included in Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 4 under the name of Photo Fuse. A similar feature is available in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 under the name 'Photomerge Group Shot'.Adobe documentation
/ref> Essentially the same functionality is also available in Adobe Photoshop CS3's Photomerge, though not packaged as a separate feature. It is available as well in the open-source application Hugin and the

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

Galaxy Camera. In January 2012, a GroupShot mobile app was released by Macadamia Apps allowing users to create a group image from multiple similar images on their mobile phone. The app is available for download in the

iTunes App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Dev ...

. In April 2016, DEVART, the Netherlands introduced a mobile app for iPhone called Snaptric that uses a new hi-tech seam technique enabling users to replace faces in a set of group photos with the same background and people. It does not simply replace the face but makes a nice seam through the original and replacement photos so that the new face blends seamlessly with the background. Users can preview their result in real time, without hassle with layers and traditional Photo-editor procedures.

References

External links

Group Shot on Microsoft Research sitePaul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Ultimate Extras ReviewDownload Mirror
Photo software Windows graphics-related software {{Windows-software-stub