Undo iPhoto effects?

May 23, 2008 1:29 AM

Is there an automated (or "simple") way to undo iPhoto effects? Some look difficult, but the "pop art" effect in particular looks like if should be fairly easy to get something like the original image back.
posted by d7415 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Right click on the image in the library and click "Revert to Original", and you'll have you original photo back.
posted by SansPoint at 1:42 AM on May 23, 2008

If you are talking about reverting a picture in your iPhoto library to its original, pre-edited state, that's trivial; right-click it in iPhoto and choose the last selection in the contextual menu: "Revert to Original".

I suspect, however, you mean Photo Booth, and pictures taken using its built-in effects, in which case it's not as simple. Taking a picture in Photo Booth with an effect / filter means the information simply isn't there to reconstruct what a "true" picture would have looked like. The "Pop Art" filter, for example, involves jacking up the contrast a huge amount and (deliberately) losing detail in the process, so accurately reconstructing what the picture would have looked like without any effects is infeasible. Your best bet would be to color-correct it by eye with a tool like Photoshop and take the limited results you can get.

Or just re-take the picture.
posted by churl at 1:51 AM on May 23, 2008

Mac?
Press Control & click on image. Select Revert to Original.
posted by artdrectr at 1:53 AM on May 23, 2008

I think the poster was referring to a situation where the original was not available.

Something like this story.
posted by lodev at 6:21 AM on May 23, 2008

lodev has the idea - recovering without the original e.g. on a different machine. Any ideas?
posted by d7415 at 10:34 AM on May 23, 2008

If you know the transforms applied to it, theoretically you can reverse the effect (assuming the transform is lossless to begin with). This is the theory behind some filters in cameras to remove motion blur.

The trick is that Apple doesn't provide the inverse filters. With the Developer tools there is an example called FunHouse that lets you play with the various CoreImage effects. Maybe you can use that to undo them.
posted by sbutler at 11:15 AM on May 23, 2008

The filters are almost certainly lossy (all the warps and color shifts will be) so without being able to create information (such as using a baseline image with a color space you can manually reconstruct) the answer is, simply: no.

The pop art filter, as noted, removes contrast and adds color. If you layered the pop art images over one another at appropriate channels you would not get what you imagine (a composed full-color image) but rather a very gray outline as the colors add up to just a luminance.
posted by abulafa at 3:50 PM on May 23, 2008

Ok. Thanks for the help.
posted by d7415 at 5:02 PM on May 24, 2008