Photoshop or Photo Not?

by Deborah Corn
Creative, Design, Marketing, Print & Digital, Publishing, Software, Tips, Tools, Trends
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by Sandy Hubbard, Print Futurist

For years, newsrooms have had rules about digital alternations. Photo journalists who edited items out of shots — with only the most honorable artistic intentions — were shown the door for misrepresenting reality.

Now, it may be that fashion advertising and celebrity entertainment “news” are heading in a similar direction.

Rather than being motivated by journalistic ethics, though, the trend seems to be driven by consumers’ suspicions that an overly-edited image indicates a less than trustworthy advertiser.

Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched

By STEVE LOHR

The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand.

“Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth.

And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”

Continues at: Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched – NYTimes.com.