Even though Photoshop fails are ubiquitous, many of us still don't realize quite how much our ads and magazine spreads are manipulated.
One young women not only found this reality depressing, but also inspiring.
Anna Hill, a 24-year-old student at East Carolina University, created four images for her final project in an advanced digital photography class showing mock ads for Photoshop itself.
"I thought it would be fun to poke fun at how much beauty ads are overly manipulated," she told the Huffington Post in an email. "They really are altered so much, they may as well be advertising Photoshop rather than the products they actually sell."
Given that a worrying number of female consumers believe that advertisements depict models and celebrities as they seem in real life, these images are a refreshing reminder of just how far digital editing can go.
Hill first shared her images on Reddit, where she revealed how easy it was to see the altered images as more "real" than the originals.
"One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross," Hill said. "It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while."
Hill is not alone in her critique of overly-altered marketing images. This year, women's magazine Verily pledged not to Photoshop any of the models featured in their publication. The magazine's founders told HuffPost: "The unique features of women, whether crows feet, freckles, or a less-than-rock-hard body, are aspects that contribute to women's beauty and should be celebrated -- not shamed, changed or removed."
We couldn't agree more.
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