My longtime boss Kevin Connor left Adobe earlier this year to launch a startup, Fourandsix, aimed at “revealing the truth behind every photograph.” Now his co-founder (and Adobe collaborator) Hany Farid has published some interesting research:
Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Check out the interactive presentation of before & after images. Details are on the NY Times.
I can’t believe such learned people (or anyone for that matter) really care about stuff like this. It’s so naive. Photos have been manipulated since the dawn of photography. Nothing new or shocking about it.
For fashion and beauty photography, it’s not of overwhelming importance, but for journalistic work it is of vital importance.
Actually for fashion it can be important. Many (most?) of the young women in the world try to style their bodies as they see in fashions. Sometimes anorexia etc follows. Finally in some countries, Europe I think, this is actually illegal, or are they just talking about it so far?
One big European name in fashion apologized to the women of the world for “malfeasance” in advertising over the past decades.
It’s made at least one UK paper
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/im-ready-for-my-touchup-the-secrets-of-photoshop-unmasked-6269275.html?origin=internalSearch