And Now, a Remake of Your Life, Brought to You by Kodak

P icture this : flawless photos, every time, no matter who takes them. Perfection on a print. Smiling tots wide-eyed with happiness; family and friends gathered around holiday tables; gorgeous sun-dappled ocean views from intimate vacations. Memories are made of this, right?

Well, they should be. But too often our photographs are made of blinks and blurs, smirks and shadows: images that betray our best moments rather than truly reflect them. Even worse, they’re filled with people we don’t want there and missing ones who really should be in the picture. They cheat the reality we explicitly asked the camera to remember. So instead of trying so hard to capture and preserve those golden moments, why not make the effort to perfect them?

Now it’s not at all unusual for women’s magazines today to use computer image processing techniques to perform digital rhinoplasties and tummy tucks on their models; it’s just outrageously expensive. Technology has been transforming photographs from finished products into imagery ingredients for years.

What a Richard Avedon or Bruce Weber can’t achieve, a halfway competent art director with digital scanners, optical printers and Adobe Photoshop software can. But just like everything else processed by computers, all these big-ticket technologies are getting faster, cheaper and more accessible. Editing color photographs is becoming as easy and inexpensive as editing boring memos. Digital image processing is turning into a mass medium.

So who needs to be an Avedon if the real creativity can take place after the picture is taken? Why worry about f-stops and lighting if we have technology that forgives us our technical transgressions and gives us the option to polish our memories?

“We have the opportunity to give people a second chance to make their pictures more perfect,” asserts Paul Walrath, Kodak’s marketing manager for photo impressions. For all the media hype surrounding the Internet and multimedia, the next multibillion-dollar consumer market in digital technology is going to be making memories just a little more pleasant.

Consider Western Pro Imaging Labs in Vancouver as a model for tomorrow’s photography. In July, the Canadian photo processor launched DivorceX--a service that lets divorced people digitally excise their ex-spouses from treasured family photos at $75 a slice.

“This started out as a joke in my speeches,” says company President Ken Guelpha. “Now it’s becoming a nice little business for us.”

In fact, reports Guelpha, there’s now just as much call for digital insertions as deletions. “The wedding party photographer blew it and grandmother was missed,” he recalls, “so we spliced her in a few of the pictures. . . . At another wedding, there was a great boat shot of the entire family but one of the family had turned the wrong way--so we inserted another shot of her head. . . . At a university graduation photo, the girl blinked: For $75, we simply put in her eyes. Memories are very powerful; pictures are very powerful,” says Guelpha. “We’re helping people erase those negative aspects.”

Please, no discussion of ethical qualms here: Is it any more unethical to give someone her eyes back than to pose people around the table and then ask them to say “Cheese!”? This isn’t about photojournalism verite; it’s about using technology to enable people to better design the life images they want to preserve.

There were more than 2.3 million weddings in America last year. How much extra would most newlyweds pay to assure their cherished images of the event were without blemish and that every member of the family looked good? Over the same time, there were more than 1.2 million divorces: what percentage of embittered ex-spouses would pay a premium to have their now-insignificant others erased from a few of the photos? There are more than 17 million high-school students in America: how many gawky adolescents and their nervous parents would pay an extra $25 or so to digitally smooth down unruly hair, computationally remove zits and cut down the horrible glare from the braces in order to prevent the child from being photographically enshrined as the geek a tutti geek in the high school yearbook?

Indeed, according to the authoritative Wolfman Report, Americans took more than 18 billion photos last year--roughly half of the world’s picture-taking. If Americans would pay to enhance but 5% of those pictures, we’re immediately talking about an enormous multibillion-dollar marketplace, comparable in size to the video game software and consumer CD-ROM markets.

Don’t forget those billions of photos now shuffled in shoe boxes and desk drawers that were almost perfect. What happens to the family photo album as image enhancement and alteration gets better and cheaper? A “Kodak moment” may indeed become the photo one makes as well as the photo one takes. The challenge isn’t in the technology; it’s in packaging the technology in a form that makes people want to bring in their photos for enhancement.

Ironically--but appropriately--the most appealing aspect of these digital technologies may be less in how they let us create the future than how they enable us to recreate our pasts. Everybody has an “If only. . . .” photograph; everyone wants photos that capture the spirit of the moment as well as its image. Increasingly, that’s what image processing technology empowers us to do. Isn’t that something to smile about?