Photo retouch rating system tells you how much a photo has been ‘shopped

It’s common knowledge that almost all photographs of celebrities you see in magazines have been edited in one way or another. From minor retouches like the removal of wrinkles and blemishes all the way to the emphasis on various body parts – but we’ll never know how much retouching has been done unless we’ve seen the original image or we’re the ones doing it in the first place. Well, a bunch of researchers at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College have proposed a new system to solve the problem.

The system consists of a mathematical model to calculate the differences between digital “before” and “after” photographs of people and then assigns a number from 1-5 to the “after” image; the higher the number, the more drastic the change between the two photographs. The researchers hope to make the system mandatory for media outlets to use, so that they will be forced to label all their edited images with these numbers.

The whole purpose behind this system is to let the world know how unattainable an ideal that was being depicted is – so that people with severely-low self-esteem won’t have issues with themselves. While the intentions behind the system are commendable, can you imagine what magazines will look like? Numbers all over the place are just going to ruin photographs and possibly the aesthetics of magazines. For that reason alone, I doubt it’s going to happen. What do you think of such a system?

George Wong
Categories: Photo-Video
Tags: photographs