Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel, where skincare is all about
progression over perfection. Because perfection doesn't exist... unless you use
one of many Apps that I'm going to show you today. It exists
but it's, it's all fake. It's all fake, we know this. Welcome back to another
Instagram versus reality, Facetune fails style video. You may know me as a
skincare reviewer but I'm actually a photography graduate. I studied editorial
and advertising photography and really took a keen interest in digital
retouching, and photo manipulation. And today, I want to share some of the photo
editing Apps and software that is widely used, by not just influencers but
everyone, companies, etc. I believe that knowledge is power, and if you know
exactly how these photos are being manipulated then you know what to look
out for in the future. First of all, we're going to take a look at a few videos
that I've been tagged in, and that I actually found myself this week. So, one of the main
profiles I found was Chinese_ edits, and this profile seems to use a
very particular App which I really, really tred to find but I think it's
Android only, and in China that you can download this. But
it uses a particular App to make these insane edits to these pictures. Let's
have a look at some of them.
I mean, looking at that it doesn't look massively edited. Now we
know it is, it does look edited. But for example, we have the usual bendy
background even when there's natural patterns in the background like whatever,
there's a wallpaper behind her or, I don't know if that's a concrete print.
You can see it wrapping around her face so that's something to always look out
for. We've got a dodgy hairline going on as well, and of course just the no
texture with the texture on the skin. So here's the thing, a lot of people confuse
poorly pixelated pictures for edited or filters. I posted a picture recently that
everyone was like hmm... something's wrong with this, it looks like a filter. It was
just a sh*t quality picture. But what the difference is on this final picture here,
there is so much detail still by her eyebrow and then it's just completely
blurred everywhere else. Even the skin right next to that detail. There's no
reason other than Photoshopping or retouching, that you get that different
in texture, that difference in texture sorry, right next to each other. So what
they've even done is they've gone back on the hair that's going over the face,
and taken away any dodgy bends, because that's usually a telltale sign that the,
the picture's been edited. But they've actually gone in
and straightened, well recurved that hair back out.
In fact, we can actually see the original pictures retouched. Again that's where
the difference in quality originally comes from, is the initial edit. Let's
look at this one.
These Apps are good. So the eyes could in fact just be circle lenses, they could be,
you know, blue contact colored contacts. The makeup in the first place is really,
really nice anyway. I mean, so much has been done,
like they've even added extra hair in there for like what reason? I'm trying to
look at the signs. But again, like, again it's that sweeping hair under the chin,
the hair that kind of like, instead of falling like this and waving a little
bit or just falling down, it for some reason sweeps where there's like no...
there shouldn't be a real, any kind of like pull, like gravitational pull under
the neck for some reason. Oh, guys.
I mean some of these are so subtle
that you would think, oh yeah that's them. Do you know what I mean? Like if that was your friend
you'd be like, oh that's a really good picture of you. So that's kind of thing
we're dealing with here but there are so many Apps that will do this for you. The
most obvious is Snow. Snow is an App that I use all the time because they have
amazing, amazing filters on there. They have a really good library of filters.
But I also use it for mine and my brother's joint channel Instagram page, to make these
like really alien looks, and kind of take the piss. And we always say like no filter
and stuff. And this is a very, very popular App. There's also an App called
Soda which is pretty much the same thing. And these are so easy to use, so easy to
use. You can use them live, a lot of these have the video option so you can edit
your face and record a video. And it looks pretty convincing as long as
you're not standing in front of a fence, or anything with straight lines. And now
we have Apps... well they've actually been around for a long time. We have Apps that
will actually slim you down and will do your body live, live video. And again, they
look pretty convincing. Let's look at this video from
the Reddit forum, Instagram vs reality. I mean, at first glance this looks
incredibly real. To look at you'd be like, oh she's, she's
long in all the wrong places. Like her body anatomy doesn't quite make
sense. But as we zoom in very, just even not massively, you do start to see
everything kind of like gravitating towards the body, bends as people walk
past. And it really is amazing now what these
Apps can do. And I've mentioned before in a previous episode of this series that
there are Apps out there, currently being made, programs currently being created,
that will slim you down, change all different types of your bodies without a
single glitch in the background. So you're never gonna know, you're never
gonna know. These kind of things are very popular in China, a lot of gamers use
them, a lot of streamers use them. I'm going to be taking a deeper dive into
that for a future episode. Photoshop is a software that you can use on any
platform basically, that is a professional tool but now has become
affordable because you pay for it on a monthly basis. And the basics are very,
very easy to use. What I want to do is show you what's often done to people's
faces, how subtle it could be, how obvious it can be, and how this is so
easily done as well, that anyone can do it. And I'm not going to show you in a
professional way how to retouch skin all that kind of stuff, because there are
certain ways of doing it. I'm going to show you in the simplest way how to use
these tools and how to use Photoshop. But I also want to show you what to look out
for, if you see an image that you're a bit like, hmm... there's something
not quite right about this. I want to show you the telltale signs that this
has been retouched. So here we have it, here's an angry looking picture of me
from when I used that, the poor vacuum thingy. It's made my
pores bigger, it's made my skin red, it's giving me like a tiny spot. So we're
going to get rid of all those. First thing we're going to do though is create
a new layer, and we're just going to call this 'liquify'. I'm going to go, filter,
liquify... I've cut that off, I'm sorry. Liquify tool use to be something that you
could spend hours doing to reshape the face, however recently Photoshop have this
face tool in liquify that recognizes areas of your face. So the outside of
your face, just kind of like the sides, whatever that is, I don't know what that
is. It's just the outskirts, I don't know. Nose, eyes, forehead and lips. It always
gets my lips wrong because it thinks my beard is a lip. But, I want to slim
myself down, it's really easy to do. You just grab that and do that. I'm going
to make my chin a bit pointier. We are going to bring my forehead
down a bit. We'll have to kind of like, re-do that. My nose down, we wanr my nose
skinnier. And then we could use... make my eyes a bit bigger.
Tilt them a little bit as well, because I feel like my eyes droop in the
wrong direction. But, we could also move them completely
as well, the same with the nose. And then with the liquify tool you could
use this 'forward warp tool'.
Again, which is just like the manual kind of ex...
exfoliation? Manual liquify tool, where you can make
little changes. So I want my nose to be a little bit straighter, so let's just
straighten that out a bit. Again, very, very simple
way of doing this. Make my jawline a bit squarer shall we, for no real reason.
Let's pull that back up so it doesn't look obviously Photoshopped. Okay, so I
don't like how that looks, obviously, but that's just to show you what's going on.
So, doing the skin is as simple as
selecting a tool. We'll go up here to the main tools
really. You've got your spot healing brush tool, healing brush tool, patch tool, and I
don't really use the content aware move tool, or the red eye. So spot healing
brush, super easy to use.
Here, we've got this bit of redness here and we're just going to circle it, and
it's gone. Red bit here, gone. Here, gone.
Burst capillaries, gone. And you could just go around your skin
forever getting rid of all these blemishes.
It's also good for flyaway hairs. And this basically just copies the skin
around it. And this can work on acne, it can work on stretch marks,
dark spots, wrinkles, fine lines, like this one here. We also
have the healing brush tool, where you have to be very selective about the
area you get. Because instead of kind of like cloning the area, it literally copies. So
if I want to get rid of this fine line, I'll select an area near it, and we'll
just go over. What this does though, is it kind of repeats the pattern of your skin
and that's one thing you need to look out for, if you're looking at retouched
work, is repeated skin. Another thing is the clone stamp, it does what it says really
on the tin. It clones areas of skin from around your face. So again, if I want
to get rid of these moles, just do that.
This is also good for lightening dark areas of skin, like dark under eyes. Turn
the opacity down a bit, select a lighter layer of skin
and start painting away. Make your eyes look a
little less darkened by selecting the skin near, get rid of those dark circles.
Again, you'd be a little bit more careful with this but I'm just showing you how
easy it is to literally make things disappear off your skin. But one thing we
can do with the texture is something called frequency separation. It's a little bit
more technical, and it is where you separate the texture
from the tones of your skin. So the tones would be the blur, and the texture
being the texture. One thing we do have to consider when we look at retouched
pictures, is that real skin isn't always real skin. I think the skincare industry
in particular has this idea that real skin means skin with breakouts, acne,
dark spots, anything then clear skin basically. When that's not always the
case. In fact, the idea that a before and after picture, for example, needs to be
bad, "bad" textured skin. It means that a lot of people are actually faking the
before pictures rather than the after picture. Again, I found this picture on
Instagram versus reality Reddit forum. This is a great example of a before and
after picture, where there's been editing going on in both the before and after.
But what you can see on the side before, is that the image has been sharpened,
meaning that every single bit of texture is going to show up. You can also do
something called a high pass, which again, is going to make every crevice, every
crack show up on the skin. So whilst, from the looks of it, from what we know, it
does look like she has some natural texture, some post-inflammatory
hyperpigmentation, and redness. It's been greatly, greatly exaggerated. On the after
side, it's been filtered, edited, smoothed, and acne has been removed. Again, as you
saw from a demonstration, something super, super simple to do with a click of a button.
So there we go, that is it for this
week's episode of Instagram vs reality. I'll be back next week because I enjoy
doing these, and I know you enjoy them as well. And I feel like this merges my
photography background with my skincare and new industry knowledge, so do
keep tagging me in these. Again, just tag me, don't say anything else, we all know
what we mean when we see these. There are a lot of brands that I have saved
that we're going to be naming and shaming in a couple weeks' time. And
remember, let's not go around shaming people for using filters, unless they are
really trying to sell us something. But let's just be aware that they're being
used, I think that's a good first step. But you can watch the rest of the
Instagram versus reality series here, and also some general light entertainment
here, and I'll see you over there.