Joseph Carson was abducted by his non-custodial dad as a toddler and was missing for about five years when a customer at an auto parts store saw that a PSA showing his age progressed image was strikingly similar to a kid who just happened to be in the store at that exact time.
With all of the “photo manipulation for marketing evil” stories that have been in the news lately, it is nice to see a story about Photoshop used for something good. Boing Boing has an interesting post today titled How forensics use Photoshop to find missing children about how the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children uses Photoshop to create age-progression photos of missing children. An excerpt from the article…
We use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to manipulate the photos. We stretch the face to approximate growth, blend it with parental photos, and put a hairstyle on each child. The clothes are transformed to be more appropriate for that age. We use powerful Macs with lots of memory and speed, and drawing tablets instead of mouses. With this technology, we can complete one age progression in about three hours.
When we look at the child’s face and family photos, we pretty much know what we’re going to do with it right away. We try to do an age progression every two years until age 18, and then every five years after that. We continue to age progress children unless we’re specifically told not to or until the child is located. Last quarter, we produced 131 age progressions. I enjoy seeing the transformation as I manipulate the photos.
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