Need Selfie Tips? Ask a Neural Network Question
On my salad days, I posted some highly unflattering selfies. I was new to photography, a bearded lover of camera robbery. I’m happy to say that the results of my self-portraits (which are presented below, of course, purely for educational purposes) have improved through experience, but if I had a ruthless robot telling me where I was wrong it would be much easier. Fortunately, the magic of machine learning is now upon us, and it’s here to tell us how to take a good selfie.
Thanks to Stanford Ph.D. student Andrey Karpati and with the help of a neural network you can see what distinguishes a good selfie from a bad one, and find out why some selfies appear and others do not last.
Carpathia began with a convolutional neural network , an artificial neural network that mimics the visual cortex. He then fed the networks 2 million selfies, dividing them into “good” and “bad” selfies based on the number of followers as well as the number of likes. Karpathy then used a new dataset of 50,000 selfies invisible to the web and classified them accordingly.
The difference between the best and worst selfies is quite striking, but among each category there are patterns that you should definitely keep in mind when choosing a gram.
How to take a good selfie
Let your hair out: Photos showing your loose locks usually get a higher rating than photos missing from the hair department. The top 100 selfies in the sorted dataset don’t include any men, but the best selfies for men indicate that styled hair is definitely fine.
Fading: Photos with slightly faded and oversaturated faces appear more attractive and uniform than their desaturated counterparts. The best selfies were bright and the worst were invariably unlit.
Filters, Filters, Filters: Almost every top-rated selfie had a filter overlay, with most filters reducing the contrast and fading the image itself. Maybe this is due to the nostalgic look?
Get rid of your forehead: Whether on purpose or not, a surprisingly large number of “good” selfies miss a part of the head. Contrary to what you might think, the best selfies aren’t the most salacious. In fact, there was little correlation between the amount of visible skin and the quality of the selfies.
How to take a bad selfie
Fill the photo: we get it, it’s a selfie. But if your head looks like it’s about to cover the entire frame, perhaps move the camera back a little, but remember to tilt your head forward and down a little. Leave a little space, if only for the world to know that you have a neck.
Take a group photo: more people means more likes, right? Well, not quite. Only one group selfie made it to the top 100, while most of the top 100 were group selfies. Getting the right angle for a group photo is also quite difficult without slight human distortion.
Shoot in the dark: Poorly lit photos suck, and selfies are no exception. The worst photos were always dark or underexposed, and the result was full of noise distracting from the subject.