Touch-ups

[lillibet]

officialgaiman pointed out this photo touch-up software site. It reminds me of the Dove ad and has some of the same sense of sick fascination for me. I found I was more bothered by some than by others. This made me curious--if someone you met online were using this software, at what point would you feel they had crossed the line from putting their best self forward to engaging in deception?

Comments

[dpolicar]

I have difficulty imagining caring. Much like yellow embroidery floss, people don't look the same moment to moment, either.

Every once in a while I realize that someone's LJ icon is a picture of some celebrity rather than a self-portrait and I'm slightly taken aback.

There are exceptions. The guy whose skin was artificially cleared up bugged me. OTOH, the roundfaced bearded guy I actually thought looked better in the original.

[thatwesguy.livejournal.com]

I would say that using the software is deception if it is not announced.

Interestingly, there were some photos I found (markedly) more attractive without the "enhancement."

It occurs to me that the software doesn't make one more attractive. It makes one more like a particular sort of ideal that the populace probably prefers on average, but which I feel has some positive and some negative aspects.

Therefore, I feel pretty comfortable asserting that it's deception. After all, I'd feel pretty cheated if I turned someone down based on an image that wasn't actually of their real face. :-)

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I would say that using the software is deception if it is not announced.

For an alternate point of view, you might want to see my comments on this. The executive summary is that a photograph is not a particularly "accurate" way to represent a person, and that fact that this sort of altering can be surprising just underlines for me how the particularly strange ways in which a camera (as opposed to, say, the human eye) captures an image is so pervasive in our culture now, that we take "image out of the camera" as "reality."

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Some of these really give me the creeps. Those are the ones where they haven't just smoothed out the skin or evened the light/shadow balance, but where they've actually changed facial features. When they change the shape of the face, nose, eyes, mouth...that's what I call deception.

Plus, most of those pics where they enlarged the eyes of the women, especially? They removed all the human warmth and made those people more plastic. Ick.

[mangosteen]

I draw the line between "correction" and "re-touching" the same place I draw it when doing wedding photography. Anything that you could do in a darkroom without altering the negative or physically transforming the picture in any way ( i.e. knifes and airbrushes aren't allowed, Mr. Stalin) is fair game.

If one is just removing highlights, or doing the equivalent of altering the lighting and color balance, that's not a big deal. As soon as one starts altering skin tone or facial structure, it's just deception.

Besides, a few of those people looked cuter with the freckles.

[gilana]

I'll freely admit I often Photoshop pictures of myself (and sometimes my friends) -- I remove blemishes, maybe lighten the circles under my eyes, and once or twice I've made myself a little skinnier, although that's rare. They're things that probably no one but me would notice, but they make the difference between a photo I love and one I can't stand to look at. But I would never change my facial structure -- that seems just weird to me.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I think my background colors my opinion on this issue a fair amount. Personally, I see photography as just another form of representation, and just as I make choices about what lines to use and not use when drawing, I expect anyone who is so inclined and able to make photoshop choices, too.

In fact, I think it takes a fair amount of processing to make a photo "look like" a person as you see them. When I look at a person I almost always notice their eye-color. So in that earlier (camera-phone) picture for my website, I added color back to my eyes, that the camera can't capture. I would always color-alter an image to give a person a little more life in their face: in fact this process is so common, that most consumer-grade film is color-biased toward (caucasian) skin (in daylighting), and most digital cameras automatically enhance certain color ranges before you even see the image.

Even beyond that... I have no problem with pushing eyes to be a little larger, if that makes a person happy-- maybe in real life they have a lot of enegry and expressiveness in their eyes. Most people will draw eyes and mouths far "too large" because we actually "see" them as larger than they "are."

For that matter, it's said that the camera puts on 20 pounds. Traditionally Hollywood has dealt with this by keeping their actors and models at near starvation weight so that on screen they look as desired. I'm all for shifting that to post-processing, if they feel the need to do it anywhere, instead of altering the body from the beginning. Sure I'd rather they accept the body as it is, but if we don't have that, why make the model starve when 2 minutes in photoshop can acheive the same result?

So really, for me, I think an image, be it a drawing, a painting, a photograph, a collage, is a representation of the person, not the actual person, and all that I would take out of heavily processed images would be "Ah, so this is these people see (or want to see) themselves. Interesting." Now if I perceive a huge self-image-dysphoria that would most likely make me extremly uninterested in the person, but mostly because I prefer people who can live in their own skin, not because I prefer people who happen to be captured well by photography as a contemporary camera functions.

As I said, I know all of this is colored by my background. I've spent most of my life making images that I think better represent what I see and perceive than an image I can take with a camera.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I tend to "clean up" photos of myself, but I usually see it as correcting the photo to look more like the real me (at least, on a good day). For instance, I'll work on the colors, particularly making my hair redder if the picture was taken at the most-faded point of my dye cycle (but that isn't necessary if it was taken not too long after a dye job). That kind of thing. Sometimes, though, I'm just lucky -- the icon I'm using wasn't touched up at all, beyond normal color/contrast/light balancing.

The face shape changing reminds me of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies -- excellent book.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I lied, I just remembered I made my lips pinker when I adjusted this photo. But that's just because I'd forgotten to put lip gloss on.

[skreeky]

The guy who pretty much changed his race from hispanic to caucasian, DEFINITELY bothered me most. Changing one's weight bothered me, and significantly changing one's age bothered me. Changing things more specific to the individual person than a demographic group, bothered me either very little or not at all.

To the question of whether it's deception... A few of the people who radically changed their faces to where I wouldn't recognize them from a picture, really depends what the picture is for. Dating site? Deception. Acting job? Deception. It also depends what exactly they changed and by how much. Reducing a little under-eye puff seems different than entirely removing 15 years worth of wrinkles. Changing your entire face shape to what you wish you looked like, unless you are presenting it to people who otherwise don't know what you look like, and in a context where it MATTERS what you look like, this is probably more of a personal choice. And in a context of where it MATTERS what you look like, I think the line is "could you look like that in person given a day's notice?" (Meaning, without plastic surgery.)

Minor changes bother me not at all in either context. If it's something that could be covered with conventional makeup (acne, skin redness, minor brow shaping, lip color) go for it. If it's something that would otherwise have been done with traditional photography (soft frontal light for wrinkles, soft filter for skin blemishes, directional lighting for eye sparkle, bad shine on skin, etc.), go for it. I especially have no problem with removing spinach caught in teeth or flyaway hair, as this is no different than looking in a mirror and doing a quick brush-up before the picture is taken. I regularly smooth out sweat on dancers, glare in eyeglasses, and unpowdered noses.

Of course, I don't think there's anything wrong with pop singers lip synching their stage shows, either, unless they have directly lied about it. And I have always thought anyone who believes reality TV isn't completely manipulated into something only vaguely related to reality, is pitifully unthinking. It's fundamentally about the *purpose* of the image.