New software scrubs Photoshop off edited photos
Source: Greg Otto
Adobe's Photoshop is the modern day paintbrush for magazine editors, allowing for the perfect amount of polish to be added to advertisements and high-gloss photos that go to print.
While some photos see minor touch-ups, others often see a dramatic edit from their original state. Skin tones are altered, wrinkles disappear and every limb or curve seems symmetrically pleasing to readers' eyes.
The practice, which has caused controversy in the United Kingdom and been condemned by the American Medical Association may now have a metric for measuring how much a photo has been altered.
Two computer scientists from Dartmouth have developed a tool that measures the amount a photo has been smoothed, sharpened and retouched. The algorithm, developed by Dr. Eric Kee and Hany Farid, uses widely circulated photos to show how much professionally shot photos are changed.
Kee and Farid believe the metric will not only help magazine readers gain a realistic perception of magazine photos, but will protect the integrity of advertisers and publishers.
The doctors explain their reasoning for the software in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
In recent years, advertisers and magazine editors have been widely criticized for taking digital photo retouching to an extreme. Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers. The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children...This metric correlates well with perceptual judgments of photo retouching and can be used to objectively judge by how much a retouched photo has strayed from reality.
To see how retouched some magazine photos can be, you can visit the study online.
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