So many advertising photos these days are beyond belief fake it's not even funny. How is it that a 60 year old person has the face of a 20 year old, with not a wrinkle to be found? The entire practice is no more fair than it is realistic. Touching up photos is one thing, but creating impossible perfection is another. Thanks to come cool new software, the lies are about to be exposed.
...Computer image specialists Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, have come up with a technique that measures how much a digital picture has been manipulated. It ignores trivial tweaks that improve the picture quality and focuses on changes that most alter a person's appearance.Click through here for a few before/after examples.
The list of changes that are commonly made to photos in magazines and adverts is long. Picture editors airbrush out the darkness under people's eyes, the crow's feet, the wrinkles on the forehead, sagging skin on the neck, freckles, blemishes, and unsightly hairs. They remove folds of skin and body fat, elongate the neck and enlarge the eyes, or even move them slightly.
"Retouching is becoming more extreme," says Farid. "They are no longer making perfect skin, they are making impossible human beings. They are moving us, slowly and surely, in the direction of an over-idealised notion of beauty."
