The talented photographers among us have a great
feel for lighting and composition in creating a mood, but in these days they
will need to be digitally adept if they want to move into the professional
scene. Portraits for publication, maybe for advertising or maybe just to head
up a feature, are frequently being “retouched to remove blemishes.” Blemishes,
like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.
To Photoshop is now a verb in common use and has
raised red flags for some years now in the field of fashion photography.
Rightly or wrongly, heavily photoshopped advertising images are touted as the
cause of the growth of eating disorders among the young. Mutterings are getting
louder about truth in advertising and control of the digital airbrush.
Kee and Farid have rushed to the aid of the
industry with a solution in the digital issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science (1). Their solution comes in the form of a computer
analysis of the before and after pictures to quantify the retouching. It works
on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 means “no change” and 5 is “OMG who’s that?”
They trained their computer on almost 500 images
and then verified the effectiveness with a crowd of 390 sourced through the
internet. The perception of the crowd
was in fairly good agreement with the computer, so now there is a numeric ranking of the distortion of
reality which is available by a disinterested party (your computer has no
personal or financial interest, of course).
Thus the industry can now self-police by labeling
their pictures with a Reality Rating in the form of a number. A nice idea, but
labeling for content is usually only achieved after a long drawn out battle. I
don’t think we should hold our breath.
- doi:10.1073/pnas.1110747108
