Welcome back to instagram vs reality, the segment on the channel where we call out bad
photoshop practises and impossible beauty standards with science, or just basic common
sense really.
As always, these videos are intended to be informative and are not aimed to target or
slander anyone’s brand.
This week’s submissions are from r/instagramreality.
Let’s warmup with some easy ones first.
In this photo, If the bright red lamborghini didn’t draw all of the attention away immediately,
you might notice something a little bit off with her proportions.
Zoom in, lo and behold, she’s managed to bend space and time with the liquify tool.
For the 5 of you watching that are still unfamiliar with the tool, here’s a quick recap, because
it’s a common theme in all of the photos today.
In Adobe Photoshop or it’s lesser known half cousin, Facetune, a liquify filter turns
the image into a thick pixel soup, allowing for parts of the image to be moved around
and made larger or smaller in a steady, controlled way with a brush.
The only downside, and the tell tale sign for most people, is that moving something
in the foreground, disrupts the background too as there isn’t additional image data
provided to tell the computer how to fill in the gaps left by the moved pixels.
A better way would be to painstakingly cut out the subject, morph the background and
then paste it back in.
Or in cases of high end photography, take a photo of the background without the subject,
one with the subject and then cut out the subject.
Now you have enough control to morph the foreground without disrupting the background.
The issue with producing composites like that, rather than just editing the photo directly,
is matching lighting.
In our next poorly done example, the balloons look like a dollar store amazon ad, I mean,
there’s bits of it missing for no reason.
Not to mention they all have the same light glare even though they’re in different positions
relative to each other.
I feel as if Im being too critical of what must clearly be an inside joke.
Moving on, I’ve actually seen this ad before on my own facebook feed, although this image
is from the subreddit.
Believe it or not, morphing abs onto a body is actually pretty doable in Photoshop.
If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be multiple one size fits all apps made, but none of them
are good.
There are a couple of caveats to a passable edit.
Firstly, if your face is in the picture, it needs to be relatively lean.
This and this do not match, which is why understanding facial aesthetics is a huge part of Photoshop
and editing.
You’ll notice with virtually every edit on Youtube, they morph only the abs and lower
pecs, leaving the shoulders and arms natural.
Touching those aspects of the body would only complicate the edit if it’s not necessary
and they’re already acceptable.
It goes from being a simple ab photoshop to a face swap onto a muscular body which is
much more complex because the face looks very different as you achieve the magic 10% bodyfat.
With the final product, things still look a bit off where you have defined, blocky abs
but soft arms with no visible bicep, tricep and deltoid separation.
You might even need to add those shadows in manually and make some additional adobe gains,
which are things the apps don’t account for.
My verdict on these body morphing apps, is that if you’re going to use them, just learn
to use Photoshop instead and do it properly.
There are so many fine technical elements that take time to look out for and you’re
limited by your tools.
Plus the downsides of getting caught outweigh the benefits.
You wouldn't expect a handheld app to achieve the same results as a professional in any
other field.
This next image is one of my favourite types of edits.
It’s high res with good lighting so it doesn’t look like it was taken on the cameras they
use for bigfoot sightings.
Also, the edits are more subtle and not so blatantly in your face.
The grass in the outer corners grow straight but near her, contours to her body.
These parts near her leg are actually somewhat believable in that they part outwards in just
one direction and could be due to her leg disturbing it before the shot was taken.
This here, I don’t think grass is meant to grow like a sine wave.
What I like about the grass is that it’s a visual representation of how the liquify
tool is deforming pixels.
In this region, it might be a bit difficult to tell, but the individual grass strands
are much more compressed together, as she likely pulled this part of her body inwards,
compressing the pixels together.
Overall, there’s proof she edited her waist to be smaller, but this region here is a bit
more dubious.
In particular this one large strand of grass curling inwards, whereas the rest go straight
up, suggests she might have also had work done on her thighs, but I’m much less sure
as her dress here looks untouched.
Obviously you wouldn't be able to make the thighs smaller without disrupting the dress
contour.
On the subreddit, the user who submitted this claimed that she used to look up to this girl
for body goals.
Granted that the subject in the photo is already quite skinny, there’s still clear evidence
of retouching.
You can very clearly see the wave ripples rise up unnaturally here and not further back
in the pond.
For future reference waves tend to travel longitudinally along the length of a body
of water, so if for some reason it were to rise up randomly here, it should rise up similarly
along the length of the remaining pond.
Quite honestly, she would've gotten away with it very easily if she just disturbed the surface
tension in the pond like she's done here, to produce much smaller ripples behind her,
maybe by throwing a large rock or making splashes.
If a smaller ripple like this rises up randomly, it’s a lot less noticeable than entire bits
of undisturbed pond contouring to her body.
All I can think about is how miserable the weather is to go for a swim.
She should edit in some sun like the other influencers.
There's been a lot of controversy going around with Madison Beer lately, so obviously I'm
going to clickbait her for views.
In the photo on the right, people are claiming that she’s edited her waist to be narrower,
but I disagree that she has edited anything in this photo.
To show it, I’m going to bring out the big guns, different forensics tools that all look
for the same thing: image artifacts.
I’ve covered these artifacts in detail in multiple videos on this series, but again
a quick recap.
When you disrupt pixels, be it with liquify, warp, wrap or any other deformation tool,
pixel quality reduces at those regions as pixels shear.
This means that they’re getting squashed and stretched rather than all being the same
size.
I have strong reason to suspect that this is just simply a case of good posture, because
it’s more than likely given that she’s still leaner than most people on the right.
Here is an example of an influencer showing us exactly that.
Notice how she arches her ribs forwards and sticks her butt back, just like madison, to
spread the fat over as long of a torso as possible.
Under an error analysis, you can see both the supposedly edited and unedited look similar
with nothing notable at their waists.
I find this to be the most reliable way of looking for evidence of contour retouching
as it shows potential outlines more clearly.
Here is an example of what an edited photo does look like where I clone stamped the poor
guy’s face around a few times.
You can see regions of higher noise at the edges of the edited parts, as one would expect
as the computer is trying to figure out how to piece the edit and the original together.
Going back to Madison’s image, there are very little errors in both the unedited and
supposedly edited shots.
Now, let me be very clear before I get these comments.
I’m not saying that it’s not possible to edit this image to bring her waist inwards.
With a large enough brush you can move everything in proportion so bits of her clothing don’t
seem to unnaturally contour to her body.
It’s definitely possible, but I’m suggesting that given everything I’ve seen, from other
influencers showing how important posture is, the lack of image artifacts and the background
reflection being passable, I’m going to give this one a plausible and say she didn’t.
But maybe I missed something, so let me know in the comments.
This is a really interesting image to analyze.
There’s this ecommerce clothing brand called Shein, some say She-In, but that’s pretentious.
Not too long ago they got caught editing their ecommerce models in post production in the
same way that dollar store instagram photos get caught, the dreaded bending walls.
Surely the people that edited this would have noticed that the lines don’t even match
up.
This is honestly a really poorly done job on their part for a few reasons.
A) they could have used the clone stamp tool, given that this is the simplest background
you could get B)
use the freeze option in liquify to lock anything other than the model’s contour in place
C) Given that they’re an clothing ecommerce brand, it’s not a good look when the clothes
don’t fit right on your own models.
Especially when they’ve been caught in the past.
On a side note, I love her face in this, it’s as if she responded to this kerfuffle in advance.
Using the clone stamp take a few seconds to line up the angle and clean up the edges using
a brush, eraser or another stamp of your liking.
It’s quite easy but hey, Shein if you’re looking for better editors, I might know a
few people.