When one looks at a face, one cannot help but ‘read’ it: in the blink of an eye, people form reliable impressions of both transient psychological states (e.g., happiness) and stable character traits (e.g., trustworthiness). Such impressions are irresistible, formed with high levels of consensus, and important for social decisions. Disclosed herein is a large-scale data-driven methodology that allows for the easy manipulation of social trait information in hyper-realistic face images. For example, a given face image could be made to look more or less trustworthy by moving a simple slider. Further, this method can not only generate faces, but can ‘read’ faces as well, providing confidence estimates of different social traits for any arbitrary image. The disclosed approach is both fast and accurate, and represents a paradigm shift in facial photo manipulation.