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Then people would quit confusing me with Brad Pitt. It gets pretty old after awhile. Fortunately, or not, new technology may be able to define just how much an image has been photoshopped.
Jacob Aron writes in New Scientist that airbrushed images of models and celebrities have already been linked with eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. Now such images could come with a warning, thanks to a system for rating degrees of photograph manipulation. Politicians in countries such as the UK, France and Norway have already called for labels on retouched images, but the publishing industry has so far resisted the change since nearly all photos are tweaked in some way. “It’s a blunt instrument because you don’t distinguish between white balancing or cropping the image and reducing the body by size by 20 per cent or airbrushing every wrinkle to oblivion,” says Hany Farid, a researcher in digital image forensics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. That is why Farid and his colleague Eric Kee have come up with a system that automatically rates retouching on a scale of 1 to 5, from minor changes to a complete digital makeover – you can see see before and after examples on his website.
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