The Importance Of Photoshopping In The Media

“The average American is exposed to over three-thousand ads every single day, and will spend two years of his or her life watching television commercials” (Kilbourne). Everyday people are exposed to billboards, television commercials, influential mall kiosks, and magazine images that portray beautiful, flawless, perfect women selling a product. The women in these advertisements have had their hair, makeup, and even their body profile altered in order to look a certain way. That altered image is what Americans think beauty should be. Advertisement companies are continuously photoshopping women in their advertisements, giving a false idea of what women should look like; this is wrong and it needs to be banned in the United States.

The media needs to stop being the judge of what beauty is because everyone is pressured to look like the photoshopped version of the people the media portrays. Bad body imaging can lead to mental and eating disorders, and “fear of becoming fat” has become a common phenomenon.

Photoshop is known to fix even the slightest imperfections. This sets impossibly high standards for what women expect for themselves. Photoshopped images are destroying America’s body image. The media sets up high beauty and body standards for women. The media takes beautiful women and tells them they are not beautiful enough. Being beautiful nowadays is having a face covered in make-up, being “skinny” is having a thigh gap, and to be perfect is to have no flaws. Women need to start realizing they are beautiful with their flaws, but it’s a hard process to love your flaws and imperfections. Dove made a commercial about loving something as simple as your curls. A handful of young women (ages 5 to 11) were asked about how they feel about their

In recent discussions of modern photography, a controversial issue has been whether photo manipulation is ethical. On one hand some argue that photoshop has “enhanced and expanded photography exponentially as an art form” making the possibilities

For example, Jennifer Lawrence was recently featured on the cover of Flare magazine, but it wasn’t entirely her. An already beautiful woman was altered and refined so that she could fit the qualifications of the magazine editors. They photoshopped her to look thinner, have more appealing features, and even changed the shape and color of her hands. If a famous actress that is already looked to as gorgeous had to be modified to look better, how can common women ever feel good about themselves? Only 5% of women in the U.S. are said to naturally have the picture-perfect body that is portrayed in media. 40-70% of girls that are in grade school either want to lose weight because of magazine pictures or think that the perfect body is depicted by magazines. 42% of girls in 1st through 3rd grade want to lose weight. 81% of 10 year olds are scared of getting fat. The media’s interpretation of the ideal body is even affecting kids. We can prevent that by stressing that being “average” isn’t what you see on magazines, being “average” is any way someone can be

“To men a man is but a mind. Who cares what face he carries or what he wears? But woman’s body is the woman.” (Ambrose Bierce 1958) Humans have defined beauty not just as health, youth, and symmetry, which people are biologically programmed to admire, but also tall slender figures, femininity, and pale skin. People are skeptical about this statement and believe that what women accuse the media of influencing is actually the influence of our own mind and other people. While this accusation may be true that people are the enemies of their own mind, I believe no one deserves to feel shame over the way they look. It is important to keep repeating the continuing stream of propaganda targeting women and girls. Women face pressure from society to

Daily, we are bombarded by the appearance of “flawless” celebrities in television, advertisements and commercials. This false perception of a perfect body has led to the creation of numerous campaigns that are fighting the use of Photoshop.Photoshop has been used since 1988, when Thomas and John Knoll came up with the idea to edit images. Ever since then it has taken over the media and graphics industry by a storm and now, after two decades of its invention, there have been debates over whether or not Photoshop has a lasting impact on society’s beauty standards.Photoshop was originally innovated to show grayscale images on a monochrome display, and later on developed into a full-fledged editing program. And while the purpose of Photoshop back then was to alter images by cropping them or changing their color effect, now it has progressed into some companies using it to completely alter facial and

Tools that can get rid of your pimples, it can remove your red eyes, it can make you look taller or shorter. On July 10th of 2011 Associated Press sent out a “Photo Kill, Advisory” to a series of images that were shot by their freelancer Miguel Tovar, who was based in Argentina. Tovar had removed his shadow, which was showing in his original image. “The AP has severed its relationship with the photographer and is eliminating more than 3,000 of his images from the apimages.com archive,” in a memo sent to Associated Press’ staff and contributors. Altering an image cannot only ruin the reputation of the photographer but it can also change the way readers look at things, the start to question the authenticity of the work that all photojournalists are putting out. With new technologies photographers are expected to make images that are better than what they made the day before, so they will do what ever they can to give their work an extra boost. This can cross a dangerous line between what is ethical and what isn’t. In Associated Press’ code of ethics it says, “Minor adjustment in Photoshop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale [black and white], and normal toning and color adjustment that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the

For instance, Amanda Fortini of The Cut describes a new way to think of how we should look at photoshopping advertisements and social media posts: “Looking at them, one can’t help wonder why we resist accepting, or even celebrating, a retouched photo for what it is: an open fiction, a candid fantasy. If we could ditch the idea that these images bear any resemblance to reality viewers might not feel conned of played for fools” (Fortini). Fortini believes that we should start viewing photoshopped pictures as the works of art that they are and not as an ideal to strive for. By being able to sperate the two trains of thought, thinking of altered photos as works of art and thinking of them as the ideal way to look, it would make social media a safer place to explore while also taking the pressure off women to look how advertising and media want them to look. However, that mindset is not as easy to achieve as it seems as advertising celebrates perfectionism causing an enormous pressure on girls to conform. For instance, author Samantha Yee Yee Foo conducted a study for her college thesis at the Auckland University of Technology where she concluded

One of most international well-known photographers, Steve McCurry Photoshop’s scandal has sparked widespread controversy in worldwide. People argue about whether Steve McCurry’s use of Photoshop in his work is ethical or not. In my point of view, McCurry’s action is ethical, because he is not a photojournalist. Also, photography is a kind of visual art, editing is a part of it. Moreover, editing photos is a tradition that people already accepted.

Body image has become a huge issue in society today, with magazines such as Shape, Covergirl, Vogue, Seventeen, or celebrities such as Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, or Kylie Jenner. Women, especially teenagers, find themselves thinking that they have to look like the model they saw in a magazine, or on social media. The media is greatly responsible for the growing of the “ideal” thin women. Statistics show that diet and weight control advertisement appear ten times more in women’s magazines than men. Showing thin models next to them which leads girls to eating disorders, harming their bodies so they have an “ideal” image of what they think they should look like.

Everyday, magazines produce and print pictures of models that were re-touched or edited, people post pictures on social media with multiple filters applied, and professional photographers use special tools to make the model “more appealing”. All of the editing never makes the picture different. The picture is still taken of the same person, doing the same thing. Photoshop isn’t meant to change the purpose of the picture, which is why everyone is victimized of using photoshop themselves. Everyday people use photoshop to edit their pictures, so why is it bad if magazines use photoshop as well. For these reasons and many more, magazines and newspapers should be allowed to use photoshop to edit their pictures.

The clothing store Modcloth recently signed off saying that they would no longer use any retouching on their photos (Forbes). American Eagle’s “Aerie” store has begun its own anti-retouching campaign in an attempt to create more realistic expectations of what girls should look like. In addition, the campaign “Brave Girls Want” has arisen. It is a movement that asks that overly edited photos not be shown and provides a pledge that may be signed with rules that go along with

I think that people should just stop using photo manipulation to give people in the media such unrealistic bodies and just use the real version and stop setting a standard for everyone. I also feel that when they manipulate photos, they are having a negative effect on people and that they mess up people’s perception of beauty. Knowing that society manipulates how women look in the media can say a lot about society. It can say that society believes that you have to look one way to be accepted: flawless. It also says society doesn’t accept how females look unless they have the “perfect” body, so they turn to the use of photo manipulation, and that society doesn’t believe in true beauty on the inside but only externally. This says that society

When presented with the question of “who is to blame for today’s beauty standards?” the simple yet obvious answer comes to mind, the media. What an abundant amount of people for reasons unknown to me, fail to realize, though, is that the media is not an all-powerful being that has a mind of its own. The media is ran by humans and watched by humans. Both having an equal share in what is publicized, one cannot survive without the other. Numerous individuals have argued that if we were all too just boycott anyone who uses photoshopped images of anyone for marketing strategies that they would just cease to exist anymore.