Great work from Anna Hill showcasing how deceptive ads are when it comes to beauty (well and probably just about anything other ad).

I think a lot of people now realize that *every* magazine type image is photoshopped, but I don’t think many people realize just how much things are photoshopped. Or, more importantly, just how easy it is.

There are countless YouTube videos and NAPP tutorials that you can watch — all that walk you through quick and easy steps to make (usually) women look more “inline” with magazine models. Some common ones that I can think of off the top of my head (ones that would take me no more than 10 minutes to do on a slow day):

– Disproportionately scale the image size so that you shrink the width of the image by 1-2%. This gives a thinner/trimmer look to the face/body and is hard to perceive even if you know the model well in real life.
– Add a Gaussian blur over the skin to make it porcelain smooth. (For men you do the opposite, looking to add contrast and sharpness to make more pronounced “manly” stubble.)
– Obvious: remove any blemishes, moles, and stray hairs.
– Whiten teeth to match white of the eye, which the white of the eye has had most veins removed from it.
– Isolate the iris on the eye and boost the vibrancy to get more colors/contrast/pop.
– Isolate the eyes and make each one bigger.
– Isolate the lips and make each on bigger.
– Grab the liquify tool and shape to Barbie like perfection.

And on, and on…