Comment by Shinkei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shinkei | Hacker News Reader

I have always been personally bothered by the way images are photoshopped to the extreme. For me, it feels fraudulent to have an advertisement of a product and use an image that has been doctored. I mean, we can think of a whole spectrum of this phenomenon that an increasing number of people would be uncomfortable with:

A photo of a mountain scenery published only for art's sake.

A magazine cover of a woman with a few scrapes from a car accident photoshopped out.

A makeup ad with a woman's wrinkles and blemishes photoshopped out, instead of adequetly concealed by their product.

A diet product with before and after photos doctored to show the customers thinner.

A hotel ad with an ocean view, which is actually photoshopped. The actual view is 50% obscurred by a building.

Read these examples and consider your feeling of discomfort with each. I think there is a sliding scale of 'wrongness' when using Photoshop and IMHO if a photo is used for an ad, it should have a disclaimer if any digital manipulation was used.

I started using Photoshop when I was maybe 12 years old. I learned to be skeptical of every image, every advertisement, and there is so much more psychology, philosophy and art theory I could go into. I am 'female' and I grew up thinking the Photoshopped pictures of myself on social sites were the 'right' pictures, the 'right' self. To put a long story short, an eating disorder very mildly describes the kind of maladaptive clash I experienced between my physical form and my intellectual one.

I imagine the same thing happened when journalism was revealed to be yellow journalism, and other technologies slowly reveal their effect through generational adaptation.

In one sense, it's the same thing that happens because of the cycles of birth and death; technologies and cultures are born, and they are subject to death too. It's not surprising, but it is surprising, because the stuff that changes is not always the stuff you expect to change. In another sense, it's screwed up, and the only thing I can really hope for is that some kind of overarching balance can be intelligently directed towards and balance can be achieved. The idea that this is actually progress, and not just yet another side of the same coin that will eventually flip again.

I agree with the dissonance between physical and psychological self you mentioned and it's great that you have achieved that insight. Unfortunately, it seems like most people do not understand this dichotomy and there are also many (maybe the majority?) who do not understand how commonly images are photoshopped to be almost unrecognizable from their original.

There's little point to understanding it unless it affects you. Most people think things don't affect them, and sometimes it can seem like just thinking about it can make it affect you when it didn't affect you before. Even I suggest I have a higher level of skepticism than the norm. But I can't really measure that without affecting my level of skepticism. So my psychological understanding might be high right now, but my logical correctness and scientific methodology are probably reduced.

This might have made me upset when I still had my eating disorder, but otherwise I chalk it up to a habit of complaining. The other insight I guess is that people can have correct, rapid switching thoughts and ideas that continuously contradict one another until they achieve a kind of abstract balance.

To me it's one form of maturation. Other people could experience the same thing without the capacity to verbally express it. They may have the insight without the words.

I agree. Your comment made me think about how images are perceived by our brains, we humans see very very tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and its fascinating to see us create tools that can tweak what we can see by manipulating features on photos. Maybe unrelated, but definitely worth taking a step back and realize how little we are, how little we know, how little we see, and how much we mess with whatever little we know and see.

Doesn't have to be Photoshop taking out the wrinkles or taking off the inches. Note the serious difference in lighting between the before and after photos for cosmetics, or the way that in the after photos for weight loss the subjects pose with their torsos at an angle to the camera to look thinner.

In england there were cosmetic companies who would digitally enhance eyelashes in ads for mascara.

Their competitor companies complained to the advertising regulator and now digitally enhanced eyelashes have to be declared in the ad.

It'd be great to see similar declarations for any digitally created content in adverts.

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