I’ve once again bitten off way more than I can chew, and Google isn’t doing a darn thing for me (probably because I don’t even know where to begin).
You know the computer program that crime labs/FBI/missing children agencies have that can take a picture and age the person by X number of years? If I understand the technology correctly, they base it on photos of current members of the family and how they’ve aged. Is there anything in the public sector that does something similar? I’d like to take pictures of myself and age them for a class project on lifespan development.
Barring that, is there anyone out there with artistic talent who has absolutely nothing better to do and could churn out 4 sketches for me in the next week?
Bumping for the work-a-day-type Dopers, and to add a question: if I were to call my local law enforcement agency and ask for a homicide detective, would they likely share the name of their program with me, or is it one of those ‘it’s a secret and we’re not sharing’ kind of thing?
As far as I know there’s no single piece of super-software that will age photographs. I could be wrong (what with all the cool toys the FBI have) but I believe the photo aging is usually done with a more-or-less conventional graphics package.
An artist who has experience in how faces age will manually apply deformations (for sagging skin), recolouration (hair, liver spots etc) and add wrinkles.
The specific actions the artist takes will be based on statistical studies of facial aging (changes in bone structure as a person matures, how skin loses elasticity etc), comparison with close relatives (family history of baldness, greying patterns etc) and guesswork.
And if you wanted to do a quick-n-dirty version for your class project (and it isn’t for purposes of demonstrating what you thought to be a cool technology that in fact is not in use, etc — I assume not, since your second option was a willing sketch artist), grab a morphing program and get the shapes from an older relative and morph your own pic, using the options of favoring the shapes of the second image but the colors of the original.
