Thursday, January 14, 2010

photo-shopping the truth

I can no longer remember how I found this article (probably reddit) about a ridiculously bad Photoshop job in a Victoria's Secret picture. If you don't see the problem, look at her right hand. The article goes on to dissect the image using various tools and analysis to identify what other parts of the image have been modified (hint: all of them).

The article reminded of the now semi-recent uproar in the UK about a skin cream ad with Twiggy that had also been Photoshopped. People were upset that Twiggy's skin was not made better by the cream, but by computer enhancement. Perhaps I'm already jaded from the 34 gigabytes of information I consumer daily, but photoshopping seems to be the order of the day for advertisements.

And that made me think about food advertising. Ok, so Twiggy's face in the ad isn't really her face, not even her face done up with favorable lighting an d make-up. But food in print and television ads is almost never real food. Where's the uproar? Was there an uproar a long time ago when the wax-for-food substitution began? Give it time and people won't really care about the photoshopping either. It's almost automatic that no one really looks the way they are shown in advertisements. Just look past it all and we're all pretty goofy looking, especially the so-called celebrities.

1 comment:

C(A)CC or just triple-C said...

The biggest problem with the Photoshopped Victoria Secret ad is that they lightened her skin. The "missing" bag is just incidental.