﻿Welcome back to Instagram vs. Reality, the segment on the channel
where we call out bad photoshop practices 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. For our first pi cture we have an example of bad
editing by improperly balancing light reflections. There are a lot of things wrong with this picture;
her skin is way too perfect without any of the surface imperfections, her nose has no definition
whatsoever as all the shadows have been brightened out of the picture, and on top of all of that,
she has digital makeup plastered on her face which makes it look even less real. Even though there
are plenty of mistakes in the editing, the most obvious one is the light reflecting on he r skin.
It is so harsh that it makes her look like she has horns sticking out of her face. We could've let
this go if it was someone who edited the picture on their phone or didn't know exactly how to do it
but this picture has been taken by someone who at least knows what they’re doing as you can see from
the ring light reflection in her eyes and from her attire, it might have been a wedding photoshoot.
The ring light should have been diffused, or better yet a studio production would
rather use a softbox lighting setup as that provides a more consistent flood of light rather
than the concentrated beam you get from a ring light, which is a much more amateur setup.
To fix this one we're going to use frequency separation, which we have talked about in our
previous videos. Frequency separation is the process of setting the two parts of an image
aside, the color and the texture, to edit each individually. We're gonna be working on the color
layer. First, run the frequency separation action to create a new layer between the high frequency
and the low frequency layer. For those of you unfamiliar with Actions in Photoshop,
these are just saved instructions that do the nitty gritty work for us in one click and you
can download your own online. This allows us to then paint with a color sampled from her skin
to smoothen out the harsh highlights. We're going to also use a selection with about 10
pixels of feathering and blur the colour layer with the selections made from the lasso tool.
You can see that with just that simple adjustment, the picture looks less harsh.
Moving on, we have a fitness model, but as you can clearly see by the bendy lines in the background
that these are not real gains, but actually Adobe gains. It’s likely that she is probably doing
the edit on her phone, because while the amount of distortion is subtle,
a large area is affected each time, almost the size of a finger on a phone screen.
It’s disappointing that as a fitness model preaching healthy gains she felt the need to
risk it all for such a minor improvement and we see this time and time again every week.
To correct this, we're using the trusty liquify tool to bring the lines back to where they belong.
Again, there’s only a minor difference between the before and the after, like a lot of the pictures
we've shown in our previous videos. I'm going to let you in on a big secret here. For this example,
using our corrected version, I can modify her body however it needs to
be and then use the reconstruct tool on the side to correct the bending lines.
This essentially undoes the distortion youve applied, so you get the benefits of using a big
brush and maintaining a smooth , consistent contour, and the benefits of a small brush
selectively undoing the regions you do not want to disturb. If you properly understand
how to use the tools at your disposal, this is a big game changer as now, her butt is 20%
bigger but the lines are straight. Thankfully, most fitness influencers do not watch our videos
so they’ll keep making the same mistakes and we’ll have content for next week.
We have another bad marketing Photoshop and again like our previous example, it is another case of
not understanding how light works. Since the highlights and the shadows have been flattened
on her upper eyelid, it makes it look like she doesn't even have an eyeball. No matter what
brand of eyeshadow you use, it's not gonna change how the light bounces off your eyelids. As you can
see in these examples, they have prominent highlights in the middle and shadows on the
sides and that's what makes our eyes look round when we close our eyes. To fix this, we can use
a lighter shade of her skin color to paint in the highlights, and shadows to blur both the layers.
After lowering the opacity, you can see that it looks like she actually has an eyeball.
The next picture is disappointing on so many levels. We talk about beauty
standards on our channel and how different cultures, geographically have different
beauty standards.This example is from India where having fair skin is a prevalent beauty standard
and it's apparent everywhere from Models to Bollywood actors who endorse skin bleaching
cosmetics that give you fair skin. There’s even light bulbs that can make your skin color lighter.
Yes, sounds bizarre but here it is, in all its glory. This is one of those pictures where you
can spot the mistake from light years away. He has cropped the picture to avoid painting
the details on his hands, which is a very tedious task, and so its easier to only work on the face
since there's already some information there. He bumped up the brightness and the contrast, painted
out the eyes and eyebrows, and used a gray color to paint in the beard. If you zoom in, you can see
that those are not actual hair strands, but rather a blob of greyish black color painted on his face.
Now let's talk about how it should have been edited. Considering it's a very dimly lit picture
and probably taken on a phone, there's not enough information present to do much here
anyway. The only thing we can do is bring up the curves in the mid tones with the midpoint
to bump up the exposure. This obviously is going to be too much but we can mask in the parts we
need and drop the opacity a tad. That is what retouching is all about. It's about removing
the little imperfections, and fixing minor issues like flyaway hairs, blemishes and color grading,
not changing the entire look and personality of the subject.
This is another liquify fail and you can tell by the distorted cupboard in the background
and the bent handles of the cupboard which follows the contours of her body.
We cover examples like this on our channel all the time and the remedy is always the same,
the liquify tool. We can straighten out the lines, push the pixels back to their original position
and you can see that it's not too different from the original so it's just one of those
unnecessary edits. The only good thing about this picture is that they have left the rest
of the picture untouched which is how you're supposed to edit a picture in the first place.
They have kept her knees intact because there's another trend going on where
people get rid of their knee creases. They smooth out the colors, which makes the legs look like
giant hot dogs. Moving on, this is actually one
of the best edits that I've seen so far. She's done two things with this picture
* Changed the background * Reduced her waist size
If it wasn't for the unnaturally sized waist, you couldn't even tell that this picture was edited.
We're gonna use a black and white check layer to spot the editing mistakes.
As you can see, her trousers and her hair are way darker than they’re supposed to be.
The hair above her hand is too light and there's no light source on that side of the picture
since the sun is on the left side. Now, the contrast can easily be fixed by using either a
brightness/contrast layer or a levels adjustment. With these, we can bring the black point down and
use a layer mask to paint in the parts that are required, which in this case
are her trousers and her hair. With only that small adjustment, you can already see
it looks more cohesive as if she actually was present there even though this picture looks
suspicious as her body perspective gives the background away as being edited in. For the
waist we're going to use the liquify tool again to bring her body back to a natural size.
The next picture is of our favorite family, the Kardashians. This time it's a nice family photo,
or maybe not a family photo because some of them are not present in the picture and those who are,
aren’t actually there either (Looking at you Kourtney). This is similar to our previous example
as you can see the contrast differences. She has way less contrast than the rest of this picture,
like the blacks (shadows) on her hair, and her shoes. We can check that by using a black and
white adjustment layer and you can clearly see the blacks on her hair do not match with the rest of
this picture and even her jacket. To make her look like she's actually there, we're using the same
technique used in our previous example but instead of decreasing the contrast, we're increasing it.
Finally, we drop the opacity down to match it with the rest of the picture.
There's one thing that I missed before and it was her shoes. They have no contact shadows which
solidified the fact that she was not present in this picture, but was photoshopped in later on.
I genuinely don’t believe that this photo is entirely real and the Kardashian’s actually
made this big of a blunder, but it popped up on the r/instagramreality subreddit
and I think it’s a good teaching moment. Another thing that we noticed is this weird halo or a rim
light around her head which happens when you do not mask the subject properly. It
shouldn't have been a problem because here she doesn't have frizzy hair and it is the
easiest selection you could ever make, but they missed the rest of the mistakes so it’s probably
an avant garde artpiece at this point. Okay, so this is after the voiceover was recorded,
and turns out Kim actually did post this, finally proving once and for all the Kardashian
clan truly think their audience is downright stupid. E Online quotes a mysterious source
close to the family citing that Kourtney was there, but considering the lack of shadows,
mismatched contrast and the sole fact that they’ve been caught editing their photos for the last
10 episodes we’ve made, I’m going to say she was edited in. That also explains why
scott doesn’t have his arms around her, because none of these 3 are actually here.
When you zoom into Kendall’s arm, the shadow cast is very dark and unnatural, truly bizarre.
To fix the shadows we're going to grab a brush and pick a dark color from the picture,
paint the shadows under her shoes, change the blending mode to darken and blur it. As you can
see when you zoom out, it's not that noticeable, but it does make a subtle difference and in turn
make it a little more believable. The final picture is one of those weird
Kardashian edits that we've covered in a previous video too. Here, they’ve photoshopped the strap
of Kendall Jenner's dress. You can see it goes up from here, fades into her skin,
then comes back again but near her neck. I've known better not to question why the
Kardashians do this, but let's move on to fixing it. We need to select the dresss trap,
which you can do in a number of ways, but we're going to use color range to select it.
Duplicate it onto a new layer and move it to the position where we need and we may need to
distort it to fit the original position. Remove the original strap by using either the clone stamp
tool, healing brush or the patch tool but here we’ve used the patch tool. Finally, the strap is
where it should've been and not where it was weirdly pasted. I’d love some explanation or
backstory of what’s going on in the comments. Alright, that brings another episode to a close.
Hopefully you’ve learnt something about Photoshop techniques. We’ve covered everything here in a
previous video somewhere along in the series so I recommend watching it all to get upto date. I
encourage you to follow us on Instagram where we post quality morphs and before and afters of the
examples used here so you can see for yourself. As always, if you’re enjoying the content, you
can support the channel by subscribing and click the notification bell to catch future episodes.