How to pick the right makeup for you!

Big date? Job Interview? Family gathering? Reunion? These are only examples of occasions when you want to look your best, you can probably think of others from your own personal experience…

But you shouldn’t have to wait for a special occasion to look good, because when you look better, you feel better. And when you do, you send out positive vibes to the people around you. And life just seems a lot better. That’s how it works. And part of looking better is wearing the right makeup!

There are hundreds of makeup foundations to choose from and while having a big selection is fine for some, others find it overwhelming. And when you are standing there at the makeup counter at the drug / department store, how will you know which makeup is right for you? Which one should you choose to look your best? And is there a real difference between a makeup foundation that costs $9.99 and one that costs $89.99? And is the beauty specialist at the makeup counter really recommending the makeup that’s best for you?

Makeup
Image: Getty Images

Here are a few ways to find out:

BUT all these are confusing, because they all depend on input from you. You are asked to enter or select your skin type or shade, or provide some other puzzling information. Who really knows the difference between a light and fair complexion, what an undertone is and if their skin is sensitive?

 

We’re here to help!

We’re here to offer a better, much more stress-free method! What if all you have to do is upload your picture to our system, and our system will use our really advanced technology (image analysis along with our facial intelligence capabilities, if you must know…) and tell you exactly the type of makeup you should be using to look your best!

 

Simple and stress free!  Want to find out more? Contact us

How to decide on the subject of your next photo shoot

Are you a photographer? An artist? One of those creative types? Bet you’ve got tons of ideas about what to shoot next!

Shooting staircases or sunsets is probably really satisfying, and you really shouldn’t forgo your artistic inclinations, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to pay those bills.

How will you know what type of visual content is more likely to sell? Analytics can help!

 

Deciding on visual content

How effective is your brand ambassador?

Well- known celebrities are often hired as brand ambassadors by companies to represent their brands in a positive light as a way to increase brand awareness and sales.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the most famous brand ambassadors in recent years:

  • Gigi Hadad for Maybelline, Penshoppe and Tommy Hilfiger
  • George Clooney for Nespresso and Omega
  • Leonardo DiCaprio for TAG Heuer and Fisker Automotive
  • Beyoncé for Pepsi, Tommy Hilfiger, Emporio Armani and others
  • John Travolta for over 10 airlines worldwide, including Qantas and, most recently, Bombardier. He is also an official brand ambassador for Breitling watches
  • Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James for Nike
  • Taylor Swift for Keds
  • And the list goes on and on..

 

Show me the brand!

Brand ambassadors are expected to do many things to promote the brands that contract them, such as appearing in commercials, and posting positively about the brands on social media. In the case of clothing, jewelry, handbags, accessories, cars or any other product that is visible when utilized, they are expected to be seen using or wearing that product as often as possible. So, for example, we should be seeing of lots of photos of DiCaprio sporting TAG Heuer watches and of Taylor Swift – in Keds clothing.

Times Square
Image: Getty Images

 

Is the brand ambassador doing their job?

It’s no secret that brands invest huge amounts of money paying celebrities to represent their brands. But, how will they know if they are getting a reasonable return on their investment? How can they determine if their brand ambassadors are delivering?

PicScout’s Insights for Business can help! Using deep learning-based technology, the system analyzes visual imagery it locates in social media, blogs, editorials and any website across the web, and delivers insights about your brand’s visibility. These insights include, for example, how and where your brand appears across the web and even whether or not and how often the appointed celebrities are actually wearing/using them! These insights help you make more informed decisions about your brand ambassadors.

 

Sounds Interesting? Contact us to find out how we can help your brand!

How Image-based anticipation* scores can help your business – a use case

There are many elements involved in the decision about how and where to market a new product, or even more profoundly, about the decision about what your next product line should be.  An anticipation score is a tool that can help you make these types of decisions.

 

Anticipation
Image: Getty Images

And here’s the why, who and how of it all:

Why?

Anticipation scores can help brands decide which of their products will be better accepted in the market and which markets are likely to be more receptive to new products

Who?

The main stakeholder who can benefit from an accurate anticipation score is obviously your business. All the “whys” can help you in your decision making process about where to market your product or about the next product line to focus on, and as a result, enhance your sales. Other stakeholders are your users – who will enjoy a product they are interested in and have a need for. This will lead to satisfied users who in return will most likely spread the word about their satisfaction.

Scope

The anticipation score can identify which product the market will be more receptive to and can provide insights on the market such as gender, age group, country/region to help aim a brand’s decision making about the types of markets to aim for. It does not predict sales.

How?

YOU define the type of product you are about to launch and the markets you are aiming at. You will need to provide a series of pictures of the new product and similar products. Alternatively, define a general category of products you are considering.

In return, you will receive anticipation scores for the various markets according to the type of product or product category. The scores are based on an in depth image-based scan of blogs, editorials and social media sites across the internet.

YOU can fine tune your business decisions according to the anticipation score.

 

 

Sounds interesting? Contact us to learn how we can provide you with anticipation scores!

 

 

* Anticipation – The action of anticipating something; expectation or prediction. (Oxford Living Dictionary )

Welcome Real Massive!

PicScout is proud to welcome Real Massive to our ever growing customer list!

 

Real Massive

Real Massive, a real estate digital marketplace, has recently installed PicScout’s visual search engine on premises. As part of Real Massive’s platform, PicScout’s engine scans each and every image that is uploaded to the company’s database (already including tens of millions of images) to ensure that all images are up to Real Massive’s professional standards.

PicScout’s visual search engine can be implemented by other companies in the real estate market who wish to locate images that are similar to the ones already in their database, in order to remove duplications or ensure exclusivity.

For more information, contact us

5 things you can do wrong with your visual content

Making money from photography can be a struggle, but there are a number of things that could help: You could get coverage in a leading photography magazine. You could be asked to display your work in a show. You could sell stock photos. You can sell prints. You could be invited to do photo shoots. You could start a photography blog. All good ideas. And there are probably lots of other great ones about what you could or should do.

But are there things you shouldn’t be doing? Check out this infographic for 5 things you can do wrong with your visual content:

 

5 wrong things you can do with your visual content

Insights for Everyone can help you do good things with your photos. Check it out!

5 Things you should know about Deep Learning

1. Deep Learning is not magic

DL (Deep Learning) covers a very large area and is very complex to understand. DL is often compared to the process of learning that occurs in the human brain. Similarly, DL is also based on the use of neural networks. Artificial neural networks actually try to imitate the brain’s activity.
A baby aged only a few months learns to identify visual content by viewing samples and from the labeling she is exposed to from the human beings around her. For example, as time passes she understands that a man usually has short hair as opposed to a woman whose hair is usually longer and whose facial features tend to be more delicate. With exposure to a growing number of examples, she learns to recognize even more refined details that differentiate between males and females.

deep learning

Eventually an adult is able to understand visual content according to the ‘training’ process he has undergone during his childhood and life. For example, if he has seen many different types of birds, he will be able to name them properly as opposed to someone who has seen a smaller sample who will be limited in his ability to classify birds.

A major problem in teaching a network using Deep Learning is providing a high quality, extensive as possible sample collection. This is actually one of the major challenges in the training of neural networks. Another difficulty lies at the basic level of deciding what the model should understand.
There are many visual examples that are similar, a few simple examples to demonstrate:

  • A Labrador is very similar to a Golden Retriever. Do we have to differentiate between them or is it enough to just identify both as hounds?
  • A drinking glass – as there are many different types of glasses, very different from each other in look and color, it will be difficult to teach the model what a glass is and we will have to split the category into wine glass, beer glass, etc.

It is very important to decide this at the beginning stages as each such decision affects what is being taught and what training set is used and this will have extensive implications on the model’s behavior and accuracy.

 

2. Good news for Deep Learning – you don’t have to start from scratch (use existing Frameworks instead!)
The DL world is evolving meteorically and there is a wide range of platforms and infrastructures used for training models. Most tools are free and the documentation is relatively comprehensive. Some central Frameworks are Caffe, Theano, Google’s TensorFlow etc. Another positive point is that both the academic world and the industry use the same tools so it’s relatively easy to use tools from the academic world.

 

3. The not so good news – GPU is better than CPU
Training a neural model for deep learning requires many hardware resources, mainly serious processing power to perform repetitive iterations in order to update the model in accordance with the samples it is working on. The mathematical calculations that take place during training are relatively simple but there is a huge number of such calculations going on at the same time.

The difference between CPU and GPU is mainly the number and strength of the processors. CPU usually has a few (a few dozen at best) strong processors as opposed to GPU that has many (thousands) of relatively weak processors. For this reason, it is better to do the parallel training on the GPU. Just to illustrate this point, training that takes only 5 days on the GPU could take months on the CPU.

The bad news is that GPUs are expensive. A GPU with thousands of processing units could cost thousands of dollars just for the graphics card. And there may also be need for dedicated servers for the graphics card, which would involve additional expenditure.

 

4. Using existing models
One of the burning questions in the field of DL is – is it possible to use a certain model to train another model? The answer is – it depends…

In certain situations a model that specializes in a specific field can be adapted to understanding a different field. The closer the fields are, the easier it is to ‘train’ a model to understand another field. For example, a model that specializes in facial recognition can serve as a basis for a model that recognizes gender. This is called ‘transfer learning’. Similarly, in the human brain, areas that are near each other understand close visual content.

The field of transfer learning is very important and interesting as it can assist in decreasing the number of samples needed train similar/close models.

 

5. The challenge: preparing the training set
The most challenging part in training a model is the collection of the large amounts of data necessary to teach the model how to understand a certain picture.
For example, if we want to teach the concept of ‘basketball’ to a model the first problem would be defining ‘basketball’, as there are many kinds of basketball – professional, children’s, women, men, street ball etc. So it is necessary to see what is it takes to understand a specific category.

Only then, we have to collect as many pictures as possible that represent the category we want to teach. This leads us to the question – which picture represents the category and which does not? The answer is not always clear.

 

Click here to learn more about Visual API

Written by Lior Cohen, PicScout VP R&D, published in the Israeli tech blog – Geektime.

How can photographers measure their popularity in the market?

‘Easy’, you might say. ‘I know how many photos I’ve sold, right? So I know how popular I am!’. Here’s a news flash – there’s a better way to measure your popularity (as a photographer, of course)!

Using Insights for Everyone, you could discover that your photos are being used a lot more than you were aware of, which will help you monetize them but more importantly, you will be able to gain the following insights:

  • Which of your photos are the most popular, e.g. do your customers favor landscape views or shoots with people in them?
  • Where are they more popular, e.g. are they more popular in France or the US? What kinds of websites use your photos more often than others?
  • How many times were they used?

These insights and others (besides giving you a great feeling about how admired you are) can help you assess your popularity as a photographer and assist you in making your next business moves; for example, what should be the subject of your next shoot, or audiences that you were previously unaware of that you can approach to promote your pictures.

And here’s an infographic just to illustrate what we are saying:

how-can-photographers-measure-their-popularity-in-the-market

How popular am I?

 

Click here to try out Insights for Everyone

Photographers just want to make a living, ask Jim Pickerell

Leading stock photo expert Jim Pickerell recently published two very articulate blog posts about the current state of stock photography. Pickerell describes the changes the field of professional photography has undergone in the past few years and the increased difficulties photographers have simply making a decent living.

According to Pickerell, it’s much harder for photographers these days because of the following difficulties plaguing the industry:

  • Over supply of photos (at least 650 million images are available for easy licensing in various databases around the world!1“) causing a serious decline in the prices of image use.
  • A huge percentage of the images in today’s stock photo collections are never used by anyone.
  • The average cost of producing an image is much higher than the price paid for its use.
  • Photographers can no longer afford to shoot whatever they like and make a decent living selling just a small percentage of their work.
  • Lack of guidance from editors or agencies as to what to shoot, for a variety of reasons.

Considering all these difficulties it’s no wonder that in his post Understanding which stock images will sell, Pickerell points out that photographers need more than ever to get better information about the images they are selling so “they don’t waste time shooting things no one is interested in buying”.  And his other recent post – Is knowing which images get the most downloads enough? goes into specifics about the same issue.

PicScout Blog - Insights for Everyone, image analytics, analytics, photographer, stock photograph

 So, where can photographers get “better information about the images” they are selling OR trying to sell?

Analytics can provide a photographer (or anyone else for that matter…) with many insights about the use of their images across the web. Using artificial intelligence, deep learning, and web crawling technology, these insights are independent of stock photo agency download numbers, subscriptions, or revenues.

How can analytics help photographers?

Insights derived from intelligent use of analytics can provide photographers with information such as where their images are used, who is using them and how, and which of their images are more popular than others. And these are just examples.

These types of insights help photographers make more informed decisions about their business – for example, about what their next shoot should be, so they don’t “waste time shooting things no one is interested in buying”.

Click here to try out Insights for Everyone

 

Photography – how to shoot based on geo data? [Infographic]

Photography – how to shoot based on Geo data?

There are so many things professional photographers worry about: from being asked to duplicate something their client saw on Pinterest or similar, through being treated like a terrorist by Police/Army /Security Guards at any public event, and up to keeping up to date with the latest gear.

Here’s one less thing to worry about: Geo data! You may wonder – how would knowing the geographical spread of my images help me?

We’ve created an infographic to help you see how geo-data can help you with your photography and enable image monetization!

photography-how-to-shoot-based-on-geo-data

Sounds interesting? Click here to try out Insights for Everyone