In recent years, advertisers and magazine editors have been widely criticized for taking digital photo retouching to an extreme. Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers. The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children. In response, several countries have considered legislating the labeling of retouched photos. We describe a quantitative and perceptually meaningful metric of photo retouching. Photographs are rated on the degree to which they have been digitally altered by explicitly modeling and estimating geometric and photometric changes. This metric correlates well with perceptual judgments of photo retouching and can be used to objectively judge by how much a retouched photo has strayed from reality.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:seorefath@gmail.com
- Author contributions: E.K. and H.F. designed research; E.K. and H.F. performed research; E.K. and H.F. analyzed data; and E.K. and H.F. wrote the paper.
- The authors declare no conflict of interest.
- This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
- This article contains supporting information on-line at www.clippingpathsolutionsindia.com
- *“July Redbook Wins Website’s ’Most Photoshopped’ Contest,” Huffington Post, Jul. 2007. “Twiggy’s Olay Ad Banned Over Airbrushing,” The Guardian, Dec. 2009. “Model in Altered Ralph Lauren Ad Speaks Out”, Boston Globe, Oct. 2009.
- †“AMA Adopts New Policies at Annual Meeting”, AMA Press Release, Jun. 21, 2011.
- ‡“Airbrush Alert: UK wants to keep fashion ads real,” AP, Sep. 2010.
- §The intraclass reliability (10) is computed as
, where the between-image variance is
, the within-image variance is
, and n is the number of ratings per image.
- ¶While the judicious use of make-up and lighting can significantly alter the appearance of a model, subsequent digital retouching can create highly idealized and unobtainable body images that no amount of make-up or lighting can produce. We focus on this latter charade because we consider it to be more significant.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
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