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Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

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Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#191

Post by [deleted] »

mock-possum wrote: post #184
jacobriis wrote: post #132

Is the problem that the photo is cropped from a woman who is nude or that the woman is beautiful or that a photo of a woman would be used at all? I watched the documentary produced by the campaign Losing Lena ( https://www.facebook.com/codelikeagirlau/videos/985614161797... ) here are the complaints: 1) Female student says high school students made jokes about the photo and made her feel that women were made to be a…

Yeah, all three points are basically the same thing - exclusion / lack of inclusion. They could have chosen any photo, and they picked one that specifically depicted a naked white woman, primarily aimed at sexual gratification for straight men.

[deleted]

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#192

Post by jtriangle »

throw009 wrote: post #42
sergiotapia wrote: post #27

"However, 46 years on, Lena is still being used as a test image. According to Creatable and Code Like Girl, this is symbolic of how women were left out and pushed out of the industry." No comment necessary.

Plenty of comment necessary. Models give up the rights to their image to be paid for the shoot. Why is it that a century of legal and moral president needs to be thrown out because someone says they don't like it? The only person with a leg to stand on here is the photographers whose copyright is being infringed and even that is debatable.

The photographers were under contract by Playboy inc, who has publicly stated that they will not seek litigation to prevent the use of the image.

So that more or less makes it public domain, and, it would be a very, very difficult court case if Playboy wanted to suddenly prevent use of the image, given that they have never tried to defend their ownership of it.

So, not even they have a leg to stand on.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#193

Post by throw009 »

drabbiticus wrote: post #146
twodave wrote: post #49

I was expecting to read some story about criminal exploitation, but this sounds like it's just... completely above-board? As a few other commenters stated, the model hasn't explicitly stated whether she supports the use of the photo or not. Even if she did explicitly come out and say she doesn't like people using it, she doesn't own the rights to it. I'm fine with (and happy for) people going above and beyond to resp…

It feels like you and many other commenters have missed the broad general point to focus on the proverbial trees. I am replying to this comment because it is at the top of the HN comments at the time of this reply. It is a part of computing history that computer scientists at a respected educational institution chose to use a cropped version of a nude Playboy image as part of a test suite for the development of JPEG.…

> As a hypothetical, perhaps you are a straight male. Imagine for a moment that computer science was instead historically dominated by gay men, and that they had decided to use images from gay pornography as part of the JPEG test suite.

If a straight man was to complain about too much gayness in the work place it would be a hate crime.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#194

Post by jacobriis »

mock-possum wrote: post #184
jacobriis wrote: post #132

Is the problem that the photo is cropped from a woman who is nude or that the woman is beautiful or that a photo of a woman would be used at all? I watched the documentary produced by the campaign Losing Lena ( https://www.facebook.com/codelikeagirlau/videos/985614161797... ) here are the complaints: 1) Female student says high school students made jokes about the photo and made her feel that women were made to be a…

Yeah, all three points are basically the same thing - exclusion / lack of inclusion. They could have chosen any photo, and they picked one that specifically depicted a naked white woman, primarily aimed at sexual gratification for straight men.

Beware of fine arts museums.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#195

Post by throw009 »

CharlesW wrote: post #94
daneel_w wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose consent? The model's, who never owned the rights to the photograph, or Playboy who does? Both parties gave consent to a million readers across the world to see the full picture .

This is not how photo licensing works. Photos don't magically become public domain because they've been published. There was never any license for it to be re-published and re-distributed in the context of test imagery.

So you're saying that we must ethically source images because it hurts playboys bottom line.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#196

Post by zzo38computer »

mock-possum wrote: post #182
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #50

It's astonishing how a supposedly liberal and tolerant society is so much hateful towards eroticism it considers the Lena pic originating from a PlayBoy magazine to have a "troubled" origin.

So imagine sitting around with your coworkers, and one of your teammates raises his hand and says, "I think we should use this naked picture of a hot white chick as reference imagery." How does that make you feel? It would sketch me the fuck out. In all fairness, would I react differently if it was a cute asian dude with a big dick? No, honestly, I would still be sketched out by it, and I like cute asian dudes with b…

> How does that make you feel? It would sketch me the fuck out.

I would also not like it right away, but I would be willing to listen to their reasons for it.

I don't like pornography (whether it is a "naked picture of a hot white chick" or a "cute asian dude with a big dick"), and also don't intend to indulge sexual interests in the workplace, but what is need in this case is to know which collections of pictures are more helpful for testing digital image processing. And, anyways the picture is cropped.

(However, I think that for test images, it is better to have a variety of pictures to use for testing instead of only one. They should not all be photographs of people, either, although it is helpful if some of them are.)

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#197

Post by jtriangle »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #90

This is good fun, however we really need multiracial Lenas with varied skin tones.

We have this already actually. Not quite up-to-date on the current hotness, but, we've used a set of images called "the roman 16" which accomplishes exactly that and more.

They're not really used for compression testing inasmuch as they're used to evaluate output quality of various imaging devices/workflows/etc

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#198

Post by throw009 »

teachrdan wrote: post #158
googlryas wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how mostly liberal(and good) viewpoints about the badness of body shaming go out the window when it comes to their enemies. Whether it was about his weight, or penis or hand size. Heck, there was even a popular statue made of a nude trump with a micropenis which people were lining up to have their picture taken with.

This is a false equivalence. The reason people make fun of Trump for being ugly is because he himself mocks others based on their appearance -- particularly women. This is akin to queer activists in the 80s outing closeted gay Republicans who were advocating for anti-gay laws. Turnabout is fair play. If Trump doesn't want people to make fun of him for his physical qualities, he shouldn't do the same for others. https…

If you think that decency is a human right and not a privilege to be given out only the the worthy then you're a hypocrite for treating people the way they treat others.

If on the other hand you think that special grounds deserve special rights then go ahead. I have an apartheid to sell you though.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#199

Post by zzo38computer »

I think that, when working with digital image processing, it is helpful to have a variety of pictures (photographs of different things (some of which are pictures of people, and some of which aren't), both landscape and portrait orientation (some algorithms might work better one way or other), art, line drawings, pictures drawn by computer, colours, monochrome, etc) to test with.

Wikipedia says about the Lena picture: "David C. Munson, editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, stated that it was a good test image because of its detail, flat regions, shading, and texture." Wikipedia also mentions: "In today’s age of high-resolution digital image technology, it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard." So, there are valid arguments both ways, relating to the use of the picture.

Re: Ethically Sourced Lena Picture

#200

Post by [deleted] »

mock-possum wrote: post #179
thepasswordis wrote: post #87

Can we please just have some things with some soul? This is a cute photo, the model in the photo has said she thinks is cool and kindof funny that it has been used for image research, the story is kindof cute and funny, and it's just...all around wholesome. The people who want to get rid of this stuff are sad. The world does not need to be a soulless, beige, featureless, boring slurry of boring featureless HR spoken…

yeah but think it through - what kind of 'soul' is there in this story, when you really dig down to the bottom of it, eh? Cropped nude pinups aren't really what I'd call 'wholesome' - and the prospect of being in a room full of people working off that reference image doesn't really sound too comfortable to me. Additionally: we all know there's a reason it's a naked white cis girl's butt. Change any of those attribute…

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