Google Image filters for comicbook art

Google Image search is the visual equivalent to the usual Google web search. Originally it used the keywords and text around an image to estimate what it showed, but their engineers are beginning to add analysis of the image itself. Read Write Web pointed out that they’ve now added clip art and line art setting. On the surface these aren’t too interesting if you’re looking for photographs, but for comicbook fans looking for scanned art they’re really useful.

Take the example search of “batman”. The default response (first 4 images) looks like this:

So that’s a set of The Batman cartoon, the World’s Finest fan film, what looks like a computer game promo art, and the death of Jason Todd from the cover of A Lonely Place of Dying.

This is how it changes as you apply the various drop down filters:

Line Art: – tuned for black and white art (pencils or inked comic art prior to the colouring).

Clip Art: - Clip art is normally taken as art free from copyright, but that obviously isn’t true for images of Batman. What it does seem to be tuned for is the equivalent of traditional comicbook colouring – line art coloured with flat blocks of colour – as opposed to the more modern form of shaded, almost painted colouring.

Photo Content: - the title is fairly obvious, but the result is actually rather broader than just photographs. It seems to be tuned for images with a full range of colours, as opposed to the limited number of colours in line and clip art. So that includes modern photoshop coloured comicbook art and Alex Ross’s paintings.

These Batman results have been heavily influenced by the presence of various cartoons and live action movies, but in general the three filters of “line art”, “clip art”, and “photo content” will respectively find uncoloured pencilled/inked images, traditional flat coloured images, and modern painted or computer coloured art. These three look to be the best ones when searching for comic book art, but there are also two additional filters,

Faces: - tuned for the human face (generally finds photographs or photographic like paintings)

News: – finds images associated with news stores. In this case it’s picked up the rumour that Eddie Murphy will play the Riddler in the next Batman movie.

These searches were done with moderate safe search on and while I was logged on to my Google account. I have heard of users being served different results depending on how Google has has tried to tune its results to their past activities so your milage may vary.