This has to be one of the silliest things I’ve seen for a while. Not the product itself, but how it’s being marketed. Iris claims to offer professional automated headshots in a booth for $20. Your $20 gets you a “photo session” including half a dozen shots, “helpful posing tips”, and one free high res digital file (the other 5 cost an extra $5 each).
When you watch the promo video, don’t worry, your speakers aren’t broken, there’s just no audio to go with it.
https://vimeo.com/222504260
From the outside, it looks like a modern take on your standard photo booth. You just get a semi-opaque glass door instead of the standard curtain.
Once inside, a fancy touchscreen interface guides you through the process. It even offers some “pro” posing tips. That’d be the pro posing tips that cut off your fingers at the edge of the frame, I guess.
Once the shots are taken, you pick your favourite and have access to some “Portrait Pro” style semi-automatic retouching options. Blemish removal, teeth whitening, vignette, focus effects, and so on.
And the photos are then delivered to your phone where you can share them, or choose which of the other images you wish to purchase. To be fair, the photos do actually look a little better than your average passport photo booth, but only a little. The only real difference is that you’re allowed to smile, exposing those radioactive glow-in-the-dark teeth.
According to their website, there are 9 Iris locations at the moment. 6 in Canada and 3 in the USA. Let’s hope this doesn’t spread any further, for the sake of their potential future customers.
If you want real professional headshots that actually look good, you’re always better going to to see a real human who knows what they’re doing.
[via Retouchist]
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