Group Shot is a photo combining program developed by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. 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

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at the 2007

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. 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 release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

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 Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...

's Photomerge, though not packaged as a separate feature. It is available as well in the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 The Samsung Galaxy Camera is a point-and-shoot camera which is an Android based mobile device. Samsung announced the camera in August 2012, with the slogan "Camera. Reborn." The device was officially released on 8 November 2012, with web sales begi ...

. In January 2012, a GroupShot mobile app was released by

Macadamia Apps ''Macadamia'' is a genus of four species of trees in the flowering plant family Proteaceae. They are indigenous to Australia, native to northeastern New South Wales and central and southeastern Queensland specifically. Two species of the ...

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 Deve ...

. 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