I'll describe PhotoSketch, but you really have to watch the demo video to believe it. If you make a living putting together composite images in Photoshop, you may want to stop reading right now, and start looking for a new line of work. Photosketch takes rough, even stick-figure-like drawings you do in Photoshop, finds real images to match, and puts together a montage that looks a lot like what you were imagining when you drew those sticks. You do need to add some text labels to the elements of your picture to help with search, but PhotoSketch does the rest. And, surprisingly, it looks pretty darn good.

You might expect something as advanced as PhotoSketch to come from a huge company like Google, but it was actually developed by a group of 5 computer science students in China. Their bandwidth isn't enough to stand up to all the hype, though, so PhotoSketch is down right now. The very impressive demo video shows a bit of how it works, though.

PhotoSketch uses a combination of your text labels and the rough shape of what you drew to find appropriate elements for your image. The results, at least the ones in the video, are incredible. The video also reveals that PhotoSketch isn't perfect - you don't want a baseball player for your Frisbee throwing scene, for example - but it generates several decent options for you to choose from, so one of them should be what you're looking for.

[via Mashable]