It’s a well known fact that beauty and fashion ads as well as magazine photo spreads are retouched. Photoshop turns already beautiful people into unbelievably perfect human beings. The problem is that we do believe it. This has resulted in a society with an unrealistic standard of beauty. The idea that models and celebrities are flawless is absurd, yet we buy it.
Now researchers at Dartmouth have developed a technology that is able to detect the amount of retouching that went into creating an image.
Forensic Specialist Hany Farid and doctoral student Eric Kee reportedly began researching the computational model after the United Kingdom took a stand against overly Photoshopped images in advertisements. According to Farid, “It’s an interesting scientific problem. How much is too much? That got us thinking about whether we could quantify this.”
Farid and Kee developed the computational model by analyzing 468 sets of original and retouched photos. They then distilled a mathematical description of alterations made to the models’ shapes and features. Then, each altered photograph scored on a scale of 1-5, with 5 indicating the heaviest amount of retouching.
To answer the question “How much retouching is too much”, would be impossible. There is no clear, definitive answer since the perspective changes from person to person. Farid and Kee have, at least, created a tool that could help individuals decide for themselves. The key is knowledge, and with this tool, we no longer have to be deceived. Which could go a long way into helping change the impossibly high beauty standards of our country.