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Aging a Portrait With Photoshop
31 July 2024
After we read a touching request for a recommendation for an "age progression photo" on Reddit, we couldn't get the idea safely out of our head. The poster explained his wife had asked for a photo of what her daughter, who passed away at the age of 12, would have looked like now "on her 21st birthday this year."
How do you do something like that?
Our first thought was to go online and find a free service because, well, that's how our era (not to mention our age) rolls. But we didn't find anything that didn't want us to log in or had daily limits or some other aggravation.
So we wondered if Photoshop itself couldn't do this. A Web search later, we had our answer. Yes, it can. With its Smart Portrait neural filter.
And it's just one slider.
The real trick, we thought, would be trying to figure out how accurate the rendering was. Our Reddit poster would have no grounds for complaint, assuming the image was realistically rendered. We, on the other hand, relish grounds for complaint.
So we had an idea.
The portrait we use on the site so you won't pick us out of a lineup was taken in 2010 (which we still consider recent). We actually do still closely resemble that image. So we thought we'd try both a younger version and an older one.
We could, you know, compare both to reality.
So that's what we did. We didn't push the Age slider all the way to each end but about 75 percent younger and 75 percent older.
Still we found it impossible to actually pinpoint how many years older or younger the image made us appear.
We couldn't get Microsoft's How-Old.net to load so we hunted around for an alterative and found Toolpie's Face Age Detector.
We sent it the three photos above for analysis.
It flattered us that the base photo itself showed a man 14 years younger than he in fact was at the time.
The younger photo came in just three years younger than that. And the older photo came in 10 years older than the base photo (which was still four years younger than the base photo's actual age).
And we have to add (parenthetically) that we don't look anything like the older photo at the moment. Which was graded 18 younger than we actually are, if you're doing the math at home.
So you can abandon all hope of accuracy and consider this sort of whimsical image editing more like theater arts than forensics.
And in that regard, you might even indulge in a little applause that such a thing is even attempted.
