Photoshopped or Not? Tools to Find Out

From left to right, photographs show the five levels of retouching in a system by Hany Farid of Dartmouth. The effect, from slight to drastic, may discourage retouching. “Models, for example, might well say, 'I don't want to be a 5. I want to be a 1,' ” he said.


NYT - The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand. Feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.” Dr. Hany Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Darmouth are proposing a software tool that would measure how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/technology/software-to-rate-how-drastically-photos-are-retouched.html


SEE related story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fashion/28RETOUCH.html