Above are those old, leaked photos of Kim Kardashian before and after photoshop…
Perhaps I was very naive, but until the last year or so, I had no clue how much photoshopping is actually done in magazines… and yet, for most of my life, I was one of those women who constantly had at least three fashion or “health” magazines chock full of pics of women photoshopped to give some impression of how a perfect female looks. I wondered why I didn’t have a perfect complection or have perfectly hairless legs even just after shaving and all that. I felt so amazingly “less than.” It probably didn’t help that I started buying these kinds of magazines as a pre-teen and into my mid-twenties. It was too many years of believing everything I saw in magazines. Am I the only one who has been there?
The Brits have an interesting idea of banning photo “enhancements” (including photoshop, according to the story I heard on NPR this morning, but cannot find a link to on their website…) in magazines aimed at girls age 16 and under. Or, maybe they won’t ban it all together, but require advertisers and magazines to disclose the level of photoshopping done in their pics. I would love to see an influx of real bodies in magazines, but somehow I doubt that it would be that easy or simple. Magazines do seem so very attached to their photoshopped bodies of women (oh yeah… and men too!). I don’t doubt that they would fight tooth and nail to subvert any such law. Sigh…
What do ya’all think? Do you think this could be a good thing or no? Pros? Cons?
For those of you who are still learning how much ridiculous photoshop is out there, here is a great blog that helped me learn how to spot photoshop (and OMG… it IS everywhere!! sheesh…!) and how not to believe everything I see in glossy pages: PhotoshopDisasters. I cannot believe that I didn’t notice this stuff before. Heh. Also, learning how photoshopped images are in those magazines I loved helped me put them down and realize that they were selling unrealistic images. Good riddance! 😀
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
I never really realized just how much photoshopping was going on until very recently. I don’t even read magazines (except for Mental Floss *g*), and still internalized a lot of ‘not good enough’s from how much of our media and culture has been saturated with these types of images.
I’d really love to see a push for real bodies in all sizes making more appearances in advertising (a girl can dream!), yet at the same time, there’s still something that just feels wrong about outright banning excessive airbrushing. Honest disclosure of how much images have been altered however… kind of a surgeon general’s warning for the mind? That I wouldn’t mind seeing at all.
I read gofugyourself sometimes (well, I look at the pictures) and I saw a bunch of magazine covers recently they’d put up for Fab or Fug. Once you see Photoshopped images, you start noticing how weird people look when you mess with the proportions of their faces and bodies. In this instance, it ruined Fab or Fug because you really couldn’t tell if it was the outfit that wasn’t working, or the lopsided digital hackery.
I have nothing against Photoshopping for enhancing some colors and changing really weird things that happen with wardrobe and poses. Even obvious zit removal is fine, hell, I do that to my own pictures. But when they start thinning limbs, enhancing busts, widening eyes, and shaping faces, I have real issues with it. If you wanted Kiera Knightly on your cover, then you wanted her bust line too, or you’d have gotten someone else. Leave the freckles and the moles, the “expression lines” and the scars too, I find them so much more visually pleasing than the digital mask effect.
Banning Photoshopping won’t do a whole hell of a lot. I’d like to see a required disclosure page with all the before and afters, perhaps as an online feature for each issue. I like those flash deals you can mouse over to see the changes.
Actually… to clarify… digitally enhancing a picture to get rid of a pimple would still be okay most likely… at least that is what I heard on NPR…
Thanks for bringing that up… once I’m properly awake, I will edit the post to have something about that in there…
I stopped getting Seventeen and Cosmo, both after only a one year subscription. I just couldn’t take it anymore. It’s all one of three things:
1. How to lose weight
2. Makeup tips
3. How to attract a boy/man
oh, and for those with money, which I wasn’t, a fourth:
4. Fashion/ How to look cool so you can be popular
Reading them got tedious, and I started using the magazines only for the value of the pictures – I liked doing collages.
I call them rag mags. If it is on a supermarket checkout shelf, it is an impulse buy…i.e. something I do not need and have no use for.
Magazines are designed for the must-have-it-nows. They gloss over important information, make a few useless points, and the article says….nothing. It makes no impact on the world. They state supposed facts, but don’t tell us where they got ’em. But it is reading, instant-gratification style.
I suppose someone reads that crap.
There was a Dutch documentary a little while ago about body image, photoshop and cosmetic surgery that was a real eye-opener to me. Some of it is in English, because the part about cosmetic surgery was filmed at a Californian clinic, but I suppose most of it is incomprehensible to you. http://www.beperkthoudbaar.info/docu/
These days it’s safe to think that every picture in a magazine and on billboards has been photoshopped. The example above is a classic, all they do is change some colours, rub out some wrinkles, make the whole thing look more smooth. But some pictures do much more…
The beginning of the documentary shows how the woman who made the documentary gets her picture taken for a magazine. In the end, the picture doesn’t look much like the woman anymore.
The documentary also talks about a teenage girl from california who wants to go to the cosmetic clinic to have her labia “fixed” because they look all crinkly and flabby and nothing like the crotches of the women in Playboy magazine. A shocking example of a teenage girl who knows nothing but what the magazines tell her, and who thinks she is strange because of that.
Banning photoshop is not possible I think; it’s new technology and because it can be used for so many good things (adjusting lighting and colours) it will be used by professional photographers.
I think we need to teach our children that none of the things we see on TV, in magazines and in other forms of media, is real. I think we need to teach our children to see the difference between real pictures and photoshopped ones, to read a story from the news or from internet carefully before believing it, to be critical about what we hear every day and weigh all the information before accepting it.
I think all images that are digitally enhanced should come with a warning on them saying they have been manipulated.
It is a huge bug-bear of mine in the wedding photography industry to see perfect skin, teeth, busts, bums, waists etc on the front page of websites. It just doesn’t reflect reality.
Andrew Miller
http://www.andrew-miller.co.uk