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Are you seriously sick of Photoshop?
Am I the only one who finds those before/after Photoshop images fascinating? (Take this especially interesting one from Buzzfeed as an example) It’s like, I know that Photoshop is used as a tool in almost any image we see anywhere, but I’m still mesmerized by how different Photoshop can make people look. Seriously, am I the only one who finds this really interesting and crazy?
And wouldn’t it be so cool if we had the ability to see what every image looks like before it’s Photoshopped to death? I think it would be. I enjoy seeing what people actually look like rather than what people look like once they’ve been slimmed down, smoothed out and colored differently on a computer.
Well, it looks like I’m not the only one who prefers real-life people over perfect people basically created by Photoshop tools – Dove’s Real Beauty campaign has made a new Photoshop action that allows you to reverse Photoshopped images on your own. I can already tell that this is something that will make me procrastinate every single morning.
In case you haven’t heard of it, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is aimed towards showing that real people and real bodies are just as beautiful as the people and bodies that have been digitally retouched to be made to look “perfect.” And in an effort to show exactly how retouched images are and how these images manipulate how we see people, they’ve created this Photoshop action, called Beautify. Basically, it’s something you can download quickly and then apply to images in Photoshop – it even “un-airbrushes” pictures, so you can see what they looked like before.
The point of creating Beautify wasn’t necessarily to encourage any random person from checking out Photoshop changes – Dove wanted to kind of trick art directors, graphic designers and digital retouchers into using it. They posted Beautify on a few sites, like Reddit, and claimed that it was a Photoshop action that would create a skin glow effect. But once it was downloaded and used, it was obvious that instead of changing skin tone, Beautify manipulated the photo back to it’s original state. As the video below says, this is “Making the point that Real Beauty isn’t retouched.”
Honestly, I think this is pretty cool. Realistically, I know Photoshop is something that people probably aren’t going to stop using, but I hate how much people use it. I think we could all use a little more “before” pictures in our lives.
What do you think about this Photoshop action? How do you feel about Photoshop? Do digitally retouched images bother you? Tell me in the comments.
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Stuff like filters are fine for me, since most filters can make a picture look really cool. It’s the changing of the shape that bugs me. Go ahead and change the colors, just not the person themselves.
I think you’ve misunderstood how the action works. This doesn’t work on any old photo you drag off the internet; it only works to undo any editing you have already done to a photo. Dove is essentially trolling people who photoshop portraits. So say someone is editing a photo of a woman, and they have made her waist smaller and erased wrinkles, and then want to edit the lighting or whatever the Beautify action claims to do–so you apply it, but then all of your editing of the woman’s body goes away, and the message from Dove pops up. But this will not work if you just open any old google images picture on Photoshop.