Photo Editing Has Gone Too Far.
Throughout history photos have been edited for various reasons. Photoshop can be a great and useful tool, but the usage of it just might be getting out of hand.
Although Photoshop hasn’t been around all that long, the editing of pictures has been.
This popular image of Abraham Lincoln printed in the 1860’s wasn’t really of Abe. His head was put on the body of Senator John C. Calhoun.
This photo of Joseph Stalin, the man with his hand in his coat, was taken in Moscow in 1936. The man on the right, Nikolai Yezhov, was airbrushed out of the photo. They did this because Yezhov had fallen out of political favour and was arrested in 1938. An attempt on Stalin’s part to erase Yezhov from history.
Photo editing can be used for good thing. Maybe you want to edit a zit out of your profile picture on facebook. Maybe you want to soften the wrinkles on a picture of your mother. Maybe you want to brighten a photo so it looks nicer with the other photos in an arrangement. These are all acceptable things to do to your photos. Heck, you can edit the life out of any of your photos and nobody will care. It is when extreme photo editing enters the media when things are no longer respectable.
This is most certainly not the real 47 year old Demi Moore. Her waist is smaller, her hips are wider, her boobs are higher, her arms are thinner, her face is younger, even her eyes are lighter! Demi is quite attractive without all the photo editing.
Olay has certainty gone too far in their adds for an eye cream. 60 year old Twiggy is definitely not as wrinkle free as the add suggests. England banned these adds because they gave "negative impact on people’s perceptions of their own body image, " as The Guardian reports. Good job England!
We can be certain that Photoshop has gotten out of hand when movie stars start losing legs. In an add by Burberry Emma Watson, the actress for Hermione Ganger in the Harry Potter movies, loses her leg. It is possible that she posed in such a way that her leg is propped up and is hidden behind her brother Alex. Her odd foot stance could explain why she is hanging on to her brother for dear life. However, the more likely reason is that whomever edited this photo did a bit too much.
Hopefully more people will start to take notice of the false advertising airbrushed adds show. Maybe America will ban the Olay adds like England did. Maybe then things will get better because right now, photo editing is horribly misleading.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
I agree completely, and I wish more people took the time to critique the images that surround them.
January 26th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Wow! This is bad!