Do you dislike the current photoshopping of magazine photos?

In My Humble Opinion
1

A model has exposed the photoshopping of her photos. The model is quite attractive and obviously not over weight. Here are thebefore and after.

The thing that strikes me is only the critical eye of a graphics artist would even notice the natural width of her thigh and tummy. I’m pretty sure this photo wouldn’t have been altered 25 years ago with the retouching methods that were available. Simply because of the cost and time. The original photo was fine just the way it is. The average magazine (digital or print) reader won’t even look at that photo for more than a couple seconds. A few people will focus on it longer because of the setting (underwater) or because its a bit sexy. But how many people will notice and critique the model’s thighs? She’s very fit and completely normal.

Do you think its silly and maybe even harmful to make such unneeded photoshop changes to model’s photos?

By harmful I mean it promotes an unhealthy and impossible body image.

2

I was tempted to include age in the poll. I grew up in the 70’s when photo retouching was expensive. They only did it for scars, large moles, or wrinkles. Going through puberty I studied images of females quite closely. :stuck_out_tongue: I never found the natural bodies a distraction. I think todays photos look strange. The bodies are too thin and there’s no natural curves anymore.

Here’s Kathy Ireland’s famous swimsuit photo. Her thighs and waist are bigger than the model in my OP. She’s a very fit and attractive woman. She’s supposed to have those curves. I hate to think what some anal retentive photoshopper would do to this photo. They’d make the same unnecessary changes as the photo in my op. **And **remove the bikini. :smiley: :smiley:
http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kathy-Ireland-Sports-Illustrated-.jpg

3

I’m not sure there is an ethical difference between altering the appearance of the model with lighting before the shoot, or photoshopping after the shoot.

4

I just wish they’d show people being their real shape instead of changing them into something else because they have this idea that it will look better. The original looked great. No alteration was necessary. It didn’t improve her shape; it make it represent something unreal. I guess it’s okay for art, but it’s not the art of photography, it’s the art of digital manipulation.

5

I mean it doesn’t matter because regardless of my personal opinion, in the aggregate, we have chosen to purchase the magazines and the products advertised therein that engage in this sort of manipulation over the magazines and products that do not.

6

Frankly, I don’t understand all the ruckus about retouching photos. Pretty much all the media we consume is retouched in some way, often in very significant ways. When we see a film, chances are there’s significant digital effects. When we listen to music, chances are there’s some tuning adjustments and multiple retakes, etc. I don’t see why photography should be any different.

That said, I do think we need to be aware of the context and take that into account when evaluating the media or art. It would be ridiculous to watch a film with significant CGI under the impression that they were actually practical effects. But when I go and see a film, I don’t have that expectation unless it’s been explicitly given to me; for instance, though I haven’t seen the film, I have heard that the fairly recent film Need for Speed was all real stunt drivers and none of the stunts were done digitally. But if I’m watching a lower budget film, or one where the effects are less important, I wouldn’t expect that they’d do a lot of digital retouching on it.

So when it comes to photography, I’d look at it much the same way. For a lot of modeling, the goal isn’t to be realistic, it’s to sell a product. If that means retouching the model significantly to make the advertisement more appealing, fine. When I had some professional photos taken of my then girlfriend, the only retouching I wanted done was to remove the redness from her eyes because she had a minor reaction to the makeup. The difference there is, I wanted the photos to look like us, and I’d feel more or less the same about pretty much any portrait work, and I would very much dislike it if I found out someone had their portraits or wedding photos or whatever significantly retouched.

Besides, digital retouching is only part of the equation. It’s not like the models look like that every day even if they aren’t retouched. They have professionals doing their hair, makeup, nails, skin. They have professionals precisely choosing the colors, fabrics, and fitting of all the clothes they’re wearing. They have professionals choosing/designing the location, lighting, equipment, and settings. And, of course, the person taking the photo is a professional. How is it that all of this, possibly even if a little bit of retouching, is okay but going the extra step with the digital retouching is so much worse? It’s all a distortion of the truth, the only difference is now we have somewhat greater exaggerations of already ridiculously beautiful women than we did before.

We’re fed huge exaggerations of products in advertising all the time. That burger from the fast food joint, I guarantee it won’t look half as good when you buy it as it does in the commercial. But at the same time, I’m not going in there expecting it to look like that. I know that it’s advertising, and I have tempered expectations as a result. When we see beautiful people on a magazine cover or advertisement, we should similarly realize that it’s essentially the same thing, and just think little more of it.

7

But can you be that jaded at 14?

8

I realize that it IS that way, but I would prefer that it wasn’t. That was the question, was it not?

9

Other than the obvious cropping, I can’t tell the difference.

I start to draw the line at news photos. If a crowd of protesters is altered – maybe making a few white faces black, or maybe adding a few guns to the crows – then I’m vigorously opposed to it, and I’ll be so is damn near everyone else here.

Fashion photos? Go wild! As jtur88 says, what’s the difference between alteration afterward, and fancy lighting, make-up, giclee projection, and other visual effects? The model might be wearing body paint to look like a dinosaur…or might be shopped later to look like a dinosaur. What’s the damn difference?

Just don’t fake us out in a context pretending to be reality.

10

I don’t see why we can’t learn these lessons by a young age. We experience plenty of violence in the media we consume at young ages, but most of us realize or are taught that it’s not realistic. We experience a lot of glorification of sex and romance that isn’t realistic either, and yet we are learning those real life lessons at 14 as well.

I realize that this does have a very real impact on self-esteem and body image issues for a lot of young women and men, but it’s hardly the only form of exaggeration and glorification of unachieveable ideals that we are bombarded with constantly. Just like I don’t think we need to scrub violence and sex from media, I don’t think we need to just stop digital manipulation of photography either. We’d be better served to have a more active role of parents and society as a whole to drive these points home.

11

Before I get into the distorting of women’s perception of their bodies, I’ll remind you that it happened before Photoshop, even before photography. Go look at ancient Egyptian tomb paintings; people didn’t really look like that.

Now, fashion, women, and girls. Fashion designers want to show their wares on good-looking people, of course. In the case of women, though, the ideal of the pretty woman changed, at some point of the timeline, to an image only available to a few women born to be unusually tall and very thin.

It’s an ideal that most women can never attain, because they were born to be normal. However, many girls and women beat themselves up over not looking like that. It is the source of most eating disorders.

We men are not subject to that, to the same degree. Male fashion models are more fit than the rest of us, but being more fit is attainable, unlike the skeletal look women are taught to strive for.

12

bolding mine

You don’t think there’s even a glimmer of contradiction in “we don’t need to stop digital manipulation of photography” and “society needs to be more active in counteracting negative self-images caused by digital manipulation of photography”?

13

I don’t mind it at all in ads. If the company feels their message is best put forward with an enhanced version of a photo so be it, they’re paying for it.

I object to it completely in news. IMHO any photo that accompanies a story that purports to be news should never be altered in any way with the possible exception of blurring extremely graphic portions when intended for general release (but I’d prefer the original be available through a link or something).

14

No. That we as a society have an obligation to work on the various issues that face youth, that doesn’t put the onus on the artist. I think the analogy to violence in various media is apt here. Sure, there are some people who rail against Hollywood, musicians, and videogames for having violence in them, but in general, it seems we as a society have put the onus on parents to teach kids about it, put certain restrictions in place to prevent younger people from consuming, etc. We haven’t just, nor will we in the foreseeable future, outright ban violence in media.

Why can’t we approach body image issues similarly? I think a lot of the onus falls on the parents to identify and help correct body image issues, and maybe there should be some social awareness on the part of advertisers about where and how they use digitally manipulated photos that could be viewed by impressionable youth. For instance, assuming Cosmo is mostly read by adult women and Seventeen is mostly read by teenagers, I see very little issue with the former using photos unrealistically modified, and perhaps some moral issues with the latter.

But still, I think my larger point remains that, even without digital manipulation, photos of models still give unrealistic images for young women. Besides all the professionals involved in making them look gorgeous, all being far beyond the means of a typical teenager, they’re also generally women that are already gorgeous in their own right, and probably go to ridiculous lengths to maintain their physique and appearance anyway.

Body image issues aren’t something that just showed up since digital manipulation became common, they’ve been around for centuries, millenia. I remember times when Barbie set unrealistic ideals and people wanted those banned. So, even if we banned or severely reduced digital manipulation, the problem won’t just go away. So, yes, we as a society need to find another way to deal with these issues.

15

What’s a “magazine”?

I think I’ve heard of them but it seems like it was a long time ago.

16

For a magazine cover, it’s artistic choice. As long as they don’t do something silly like forget to remove an orphaned hand or have the lines of the torso not matching up with other parts, I’m OK with it.

I do studio portraiture, and I prefer to show people as they would look on a good day. Once you photoshop away too many bags/wrinkles, the image ceases to be the same person.

Sometimes I run someone’s photo through a tool called Portrait Pro Studio that is pretty much designed to automate all of the stuff you would normally do in Photoshop (e.g. darken pupils, brighten iris, sharpen eyes, smooth skin, darken lips, …). There are all kinds of sliders you can play around with, and they run the gamut from “plastic Barbie doll look” to “totally natural”.
I find that if I dial things way back (i.e. more subtle adjustment) the pictures are much better. But then I’m not doing magazine covers either.

By the way, these days when you get your kids’ school photos back, they were probably run through a tool like that. No photographer has time to individually retouch hundreds of kids’ photos in Photoshop; I’m certain they batch-run them through a portraiture tool (and often with heavy-handed settings).

17

A glossy book of advertisements with some words in between. Think of it like a Kindle Fire with each page on a new screen.

18

Is that actually a fact? Has anyone ever tested photoshopped versus non-photoshopped images and found that the former sell better, or move product better? I very much doubt it. The photoshopping is done because some designer, under the influence of the milieu in which he works, has the gut feeling that it looks better, not because it has been scientifically proven to sell.

19

I don’t mind if they make their hair look perfect, their teeth look a bit whiter maybe, and remove a couple of blemishes. I don’t mind that they are wearing a lot of professionally applied make up* and expensive tailored clothing, or that the lighting makes them look flawless. I love makeovers of the general public, not as a recommendation but just as an interesting experiment and maybe a self esteem boost.

I very much do mind when their body shape is being manipulated, making them thinner or elongated or even completely inhumanly distorted (as has been done in a few extreme cases).

Here’s a picture of Chris Pratt, from Guardians of the Galaxy. He has been manipulated so much he is unrecognisable.

*I prefer minimal make up in real-life cases, but models can be completely slathered as it seems appropriate somehow

20

I dislike it because it gets to the point where they take away the small, detailed features that make the individual model look like an individual. I understand that if you put an un-photoshopped magazine next to a photoshopped one, the small, tiny flaws in the natural model will suddenly become more pronounced in direct comparison to the glossy photoshopped one. However, I myself will check out the magazine where the models look natural and like someone you could possibly run into in real life, and not some super shiny CGI effect.