Face swapping – photo trend from the USA

The English verb "to swap" means to exchange, replace, or change. This brings us to a current photographic trend that's sweeping over from America: face-swapping. To participate, all you need is a smartphone app or a small piece of software. Both allow you to swap any faces in photos and replace them with others.

For example, one could cut out the president's wife from a photo of the Obamas and superimpose his face onto her body. Anyone who explores the implications of face-swapping will realize that it can be used for all sorts of mischief, but also promotes historical revisionism.

People who have become unpopular can simply be replaced with others. In the future, the Chinese may no longer need to have Mao Zedong airbrushed out of official photos, but can replace him with a politician who has not fallen out of favor.

Photo effects – implemented using editing programs like Photoshop – are a popular way to enhance, alter, or combine images. Face swapping is technically easy to accomplish. To perform a face swap, you simply cut out the face of the person in question from one photo using a suitable tool and move it to another location – for example, a different photo.

For example, you can take a photo of a father and daughter and create an image where the father suddenly has the daughter's face, and vice versa. The inserted images are automatically resized by the face-swap program, or they can be manually adjusted to look as natural as possible.

Occasionally, compatibility is insufficient because one person was photographed in half-profile, while the other was photographed from the front. However, even this can create strange effects with face swapping. Photos with three noses or pairs of eyes completely distort a person's appearance.

Face Swap is based on facial recognition technology , which makes such photographic effects possible. Numerous applications of this trendy program, which doesn't cost much but promises a lot of fun , can already be found online . With a bit of skill, you can swap the faces of Presidents Bush and Obama while keeping their foreheads and hairstyles the same.

The effect is astonishing: Obama suddenly has gray, side-parted hair, Bush a super-short Afro. You define the desired size of the face swap yourself. Therefore, you can also calculate the resulting effects to a certain extent.

Essentially, you digitally edit an image, subjecting it to a complete or partial change. These photo effects emerged in the 1990s, but only became a trend with the advent of iPhones and tablet computers. A further development or variation of "face swapping" is known as "face bombing.

Here, you don't just swap one face, but all the faces in a group for one and the same face. Time will tell what ingenious photo effects can be achieved with face swapping. But one thing is clear: it won't remain a mere technological gimmick.

The press likely also has a use for such tools and can now superimpose any head onto the body of another to create a marketable cover image. This has been done for a long time using other methods, but the quality often left much to be desired.

For all mobile phone users with Android operating system, I can recommend the following great Face Swap app on Google Play:

• Face Swap for Android

This app makes it so much fun and easy to swap faces that anyone can do it.

If you are the proud owner of the new Photoshop software (CS5 or newer…), you can of course also do it yourself and perform a professional face swap within a few minutes.