P: Face anonymization

[SimonD_FR]

Hi

As an ethical pro-photographer, specalized in demonstration / manifestations such as pride or political events, It's important for me to control the amount of clues on a pictures which make it possible to identify people (faces, tattoos, numberplates etc...).

It's easy to use filtres in Photoshop to blur or pixelate parts of the photo, but I would need more powerful options to do it in Lightroom Classic. Until now I use masks and "clarity" / "sharpness" / "blur" cursors to blur the faces, and I often need to duplicate the effect and it's not really satisfying.

I would love to have an option to make the process faster, so here are some suggestions:

-add a new cursor or option in LRC to add blur of effects specifically to anonymize or make something unrecognizable (a more intense blur effect in one pass)

-add an option using AI to detect and generate fake faces replacing the ones in the picture (which would need to include this information inside the metadata, "AI tranforming and regenerating faces")

Everything that would make it possible to work in an ethical way, respecting the personnal identity rights 🙂

And please Adobe, you already rock the photographer's world, but please be more clear about what are the implications of using Firefly, sending our pics to its servers and working on it. It's totally okay, this is a mandatory procedure to use the technology, but we need to be able to inform our clients on what happens if we use your servers for AI with pictures of them.

Thanks !

[johnrellis]

[deleted]

[Lumigraphics]

Journalistic ethics require NOT altering photos. Just putting that out there. People in public have no legal (or commonsense) expectation of privacy.

And I vote no, or pay someone to develop a plugin. There is an opportunity cost for every new feature added, in time spent developing and testing, that could be used elsewhere.

[SimonD_FR]

Thanks for the contribution 🙂

Not sure this part of "user content downloader to the site" includes specifically the data and files send and returned to the Firefly cooking system, other sources are saying that Adobe don't have a clear position about this question (I read things like "file is send, processed, and immediately deleted if the user has not consent to contribute to AI enrichment") which is different that posting a picture on Adobe websites.

I guess the specificity of AI assisted images will change many things in the future of legal things, in Europe this is a very hot topic...

[SimonD_FR]

@Lumigraphics I disagree, don't know what are the rules in your country but here you can have legal protection if someone take a picture of you and use it for bad design or if it ends to violence or crime. Especially LGBTQI+ or politically involved people are now afraid of being taken in photo, then found on the web, harrassed and beaten in return because of this (this is my speciality, for years I teach how to be more aware of the risks triggered by people we shoot in pictures). Having a journalistic purpose doesn't mean you can act just like there is no consequences for people expressing in the street ; if people can't go in the street safely, then they can't express anymore. If you think that expression MUST be a liberty in public space, then you should understand that social media, AI and identification technologies are coming with many problems reducing this specific liberty. As a photographer, I want to do my part, and for many years I show that this is not hard to show the messages and not the people if they don't want to 😉

This is my point here, I make hundreds of pictures of crowds, most of the time with no faces visible (because of my positionning, compositing and lenses choices) but when there are some I want it to be safer as fast as possible.

[johnrellis]

[deleted]

[Lumigraphics]

Do you think that security/police/government/extremists are not taking their own photos and video of every demonstration? If you are not following journalistic ethics, then there isn't a problem. Don't use blur, just go into Photoshop and paint right over faces.

[SimonD_FR]

Is Firefly "the site" ?

[SimonD_FR]

Okay, so because there is bad people on the road killing pedestrians by driving with alcohol or drugs means that I shouldn't care about safety when I drive ? This is a nonsense, pro photographers should try to expand the better way to work, because until now most of the popular pictures in mainstream medias are taken by pros or people used to work with media (once more, this is the case here, don't know what happens in your country...)

I did use "mosaic" filter in photoshop, but I don't want to create a tiff or psd file for hundreds of pics, this is a common use for me and I think it should be easier to blur things in order to make it unrecognizable (not only faces). And I don't want to make my photos ugly by using low exposition, creating dark dots on the faces, blur can be discreet.

[Lumigraphics]

I'd be amazed if any reputable publication would publish photos that were clearly altered.

[johnrellis]

[deleted]

[johnrellis]

I discovered that the web site I was quoting from was a very well-done malware/crapware site that had appropriated Adobe's trademarks. I deleted all my previous posts in this thread to avoid any possibility for future confusion.