It’s been a while, but today we’re covering Instagram Vs Reality to brush up on your Photoshop
skills and expose badly done frauds.
Today’s set of photos come from the r/instagramreality subreddit and as always, these videos are
meant to be informative and fun and are not targeted at harming or injuring anyone’s
brand.
First up is this very easy to spot example of body morphing.
The back story being that girls on Instagram are using it as body motivation.
Perhaps they haven’t spotted the very clearly bent lines that come about as a result of
using the liquify tool on Photoshop or a similar distortion tool in facetune.
The real red flag for me in this video is wondering how her jeans stay up with no belt.
There’s one method of cinching the belt loops together at the back which I’ve seen
in modelling shoots where they send a one size fits all piece of clothing and have it
match the model’s frame but that’s obviously not the case here as they hang loose.
Moving on, Massimo seems to have forgotten he was standing in front of a busy background.
What I love about this image is that the tiles act as a very close representation of the
transformation map formed when using the liquify tool.
Transformation maps like these are used to tell the computer how to distort pixels when
a liquify brush is applied.
At these regions the lines concave inwards, indicating he’s sucked his waist in, but
you don’t even need visual proof like this to tell if a body is edited, you need to understand
the limits of human proportion.
I’ve used this example in a previous episode, but former IFBB body builder Brian Buchannen
was known for having some of the narrowest hips in the league.
Unless you’re a one in a million case with exceptionally gifted genetics such as him,
chances are there’s something strange going on in the picture.
Also, notice how in Brian’s proportions his waist and hips are nearly the same size.
This is the bone structure for most men, and I’ll use Ronaldo’s extremely lean physique
as another example of the upper limits of what’s possible, his waist to hip ratio
is 1:1.
If anything the waist on most men is wider than their hips as belly fat pushes it out,
however in this photo it’s the opposite making him look like he has child-bearing
hips.
There are rare cases where men have wider hips than waists due to unfortunate genetics,
but for someone to photoshop their physique into the unideal shape is just odd.
Lastly, no one ever stops at just one edit, so by looking around you’ll see distortions
at his deltoids and biceps too.
This photo is a perfect visual representation of all the things i’d look for, or all the
things i’d avoid as a Photoshop Editor.
Here we have a budget Kardashian.
From the video taken of her by someone else, her waist isn't as thin as she makes it out
to be in her photos.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you profit off of selling impossible goals
to impressionable teens, it’s a bit problematic.
So lets break this image down.
Her shadow is clearly visible behind her suggesting that the light source, in this case the sun,
is in our direction, the viewer.
Unless she’s in a football stadium with multiple spotlights on her, there shouldn’t
be a second shadow as we can see here, especially one that contours to her waist.
This second shadow is from the window sill and it’s very easy to see how each gradient
of shadow contours in exactly the same way towards her waist, pointing to the obvious
culprit of a liquify or facetune brush.
The fact that her edit disturbed every gradient of the shadow rather than just the main one
indicates that she used a brush too big for the job and overall it’s a sloppy job.
A professional edit would involve cutting out her outline and implanting the original
wall back in so that it looks undisturbed.
As for the rest of the face it’s difficult to tell what’s makeup and what’s photoshop
as she hasn’t changed a whole lot, so we’ll leave it at that.
In this next photo, we have Kylie and believe it or not, Caitlyn Jenner.
It’s really hard to find accurate photos of what Caitlyn actually looks like at 70
because the large majority are edited like this.
From this interview shot her skin shows heavy nasolabial and nasojugal lines, finer undereye
lines and considerable skin sag at her eyebrows and cheeks.
Also, in this shot her skin is very pale and pasty whereas in the edit with Kylie their
skin tones match and shes gained an instant tan.
I have to give credit to her editor for leaving some creases and fine details for realism,
but the biggest giveaway is the colour disparity between the face and neck where Kylie’s
natural neck is the same tone as her face and Caitlyn’s is a few shades darker.
It’s strange to me that she or whoever her editor is would overedit the face past what
the general media is used to seeing.
Here’s a similar example of turning back 40 or so odd years.
It’s quite clear to see how the wrinkles were edited when looking at the sharp change
in skin tone at the forehead.
This is caused by using a patch tool or something similar that samples a desirable portion of
the skin to replace an undesirable one.
Unless you’re constantly changing where you’re sampling the skin from, simply dragging
the tool across and being lazy will result in only one skin tone being copied over rather
than a range which is what you’re seeing here; only two.
Leaving in uneven complexion may be seen as a flaw but it’s also what makes us human
and realistic.
Here’s a better example from a dodgy skincare ad on Instagram.
Not only does their miracle cream make your nose straighter but it also blurs your face
and makes it all one skin tone.
This is one just ridiculous.
It’s so ridiculous, I’m still going to talk about it.
You can see her obliques and then the separation as we move into her rectus abdominis which
is this region here.
So where is her other set of oblique muscles?
This image seems odd because she only edited one side, and even then she overdid it.
Another sign is that the shadow behind her contours to her waist when the light source
is in front of her.
Lastly, if you zoom into the shadow and the waist, they both have pixel shear as the skin
coloured pixels from her body blend with the pitch black shadow.
This is seen when you stretch them too far with the liquify tool.
If Sylvester Stallone wasn’t 73, i’d be convinced this is him.
His Adobe gains have managed to bend the spacetime continuum and it’s clear to see he’s worked
on his delts, with one being larger than the other.
His left arm has quite a busy background, so if he did change anything there, it would
be really noticeable.
Not to mention right his delt has a random bump in it’s contour, which you wouldn’t
expect from cannonball sized muscles.
Edits like this always confuse me.
There’s something definitely unique with being 70% legs and 7’2” with the proportions
of a 5’8” girl but I genuinely don’t know how these edits are done.
A lot of users have sent me footage of chinese editing apps that make the legs long and slender
but the fact that it can do it in real time without disrupting the background is miles
ahead of any technology the public has on the western market.
Update: so after recording this video I did some more research and found a great video
by a Youtuber called Asian Woes who basically stretches the bottom half of the image with
the legs to elongate them.
The effect is very subtle and I’m honestly surprised how easy it is.
That being said, I don’t think that’s what’s happened here.
If you look at the sky it’s very clearly an artistic edit because of how defined the
line between the background and foreground are.
Whoever edited this photo be it her or someone else would likely go to the more painstaking
trouble of cutting her out and stretching the photo manually but that’s a lot of work.
We’ll end it there for this episode as the remaining honorable mentions are just more
of the same thing.
Follow our instagram page @qovesstudio to see more celebrity facial morphs and edits.
If you would like for us to edit your own photos in a more responsible and accurate
way you can go over to our site at qoves.com and contact us.