﻿*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. The first picture we’re gonna start with is of the
legendary filmmaker Neil Breen. As you can confirm from his critically acclaimed movies that this is
not what he looks like. Here his skin is way too uniform in tone and too soft to be believable,
as always is the case with these textureless edits. Comparing this picture with this artistic
poster of his movie Fateful Findings and another picture, it’s VERY clear that that’s not what he
looks like. It looks like a movie head shot for an acting portfolio that he got taken
and he told them to give this picture the same treatment he gives his movies, which is to get
rid of any good/natural characteristics and just leave this washed out, flat looking end product.
So to fix that, we're just going to use his own face. We're going to sample an area from this
picture, put it on top of this one and remove the eyes, the nose and the mouth and change the
blend mode to soft light or overlay. We are also gonna desaturate the picture and adjust the light
levels, so it matches better with this picture and even though it's a subtle change, it makes a lot
of difference and makes it look more Neil. The next example we have is of hot dog fingers.
It is consistent throughout a lot of online jewelry stores that they get rid of all of the
texture on the skin. That’s why we had to mention these too because, this is one of those examples
where “retouching” makes no sense. There are only a few stores who do not edit the textures as you
can see in this picture. Even in this one, though the picture is really blurred out, you can still
see the creases, the wrinkles and the overall texture so it doesn't really matter if the picture
is blurred or not, you should still be able to see some of it. In our example though, you can
see the texture on the rings, but the hands are just way too pale and soft which indicates that
they got rid of the texture and also brightened the skin colour. Brightening or darkening skin
colour is very common practise, you should watch this business insider interview with a hand model,
where lightish brown skin is actually preferred for models because that skintone can be easily
darkened or lightened in post production, giving you two models for the price of one.
Now, to fix this one, we're going to grab texture from a different picture as we did in our previous
example. The steps are the same, desaturate the picture, change the blending mode to soft light
or overlay and mask out the parts that we don't need. even though the textures on the joints
do not line up exactly. You can still see that this is a huge difference from the original.
This one looks more natural and not too soft and this is why it's better to leave any kind of
texture or a characteristic feature alone because it's hard to create something digitally to make it
look better than the natural, original thing. We can make a close enough replica but not
an exact copy because our brains are wired to recognize patterns faster than we can process
them. That’s why we see faces in pictures where there are none. This phenomenon is
called face pareidolia. So when we look at this hand, our brain is quick to point out the absence
of a pattern (pores stretching/texture) and we are quick to notice that something is wrong
with the picture which, as a result, incites the uncanny valley effect.
Another similar example to this one is this picture of a hand and if I was a palm reader,
I would guess that this person is going to die in the next five minutes because
they have no life line and no heart line either. So, either this picture was taken just before a
disaster or the photo editor just blurred the hell out of the lines from the hand.
So to fix this one, we're again going to use the same technique of getting a (real) texture from a
different picture and apply it on top of this one by following the same steps of matching the
light with a levels adjustment layer and lowering the opacity a little bit to make it a little more
believable and as you can see the final result is much more better than the original.
The next example we have is of lady Jack Sparrow because this is what it reminded me of
as soon as I “put my eyes on it”; the painted eyes on top of the eyelids. What’s concerning is that
it probably wasn’t even posted as a joke either. This goes to show how detached people really are
when they're editing their pictures, trying to look like something that's not even “real”.
There’s actually no way to fix this one.You can salvage some of it but it's a lot harder and the
end result is not even going to look convincing. So the easiest thing to do to show you how bad
it originally was to take eyes from a different picture, match up the eye lines and composite
is well as can be done. This is a desecration of picture because as they say that “eyes are
windows to the soul” which has merit in science too as researched by Matthias Keil, the publisher
of the paper “I look in your eyes, honey”. He found that the brain's facial identification
mechanisms are specialised in eyes. Which means the brain is able to identify a
person's face from the eyes alone, without having to look at the nose or mouth.
Moving on to the next examples of beauty products claiming to make your skin
lighter and soft. These pictures are usually posted by these skincare companies
showing the before and after the application of their products, but the thing is that it’s the
same picture, just badly retouched to make it look like their products work. In this example,
they have smoothened out the spots on her skin, thickened her eyebrows and also given her eyes a
more oval shape. As these pictures match up perfectly and as we bring the opacity down,
you can see that they've just tweaked the same picture to show that their product works.
The next example is exactly the same. It's just the same picture edited to indicate the before
and after results of using their products. This one’s worse because it's sponsored by Instagram,
which is kind of the point of this series; Instagram Vs Reality. This is why you should NEVER
believe anything you see on social media because, all of social media is sponsoring these types
of ads where they clearly have just retouched a picture and claimed that this is a result of using
this product, which isn't just false advertising, it's also fraud. If we match up this picture you
can again see that they've made some adjustments to this picture by making her eyes bigger,
her skin lighter and way too blurry. \
The next example is one of those badly composited images that we've covered in a few of our previous
episodes. Here in this picture, you can see that there's something wrong with the subject. It
looks like this person does not belong there. That's because the light levels don't match.
This is the most common mistake made by people when making a composite like this.
Here, she's not lit by the lights that are on the bridge i.e. the lights around her are not
bouncing off of her. There should be a hue of the lights on her if she was actually
present there. It seems like she was taken from a picture taken in the sun with no harsh
shadows and low contrast. That’s why she looks way too bright in this picture. Also, half of her
foot has been cut off due to a bad selection. So to make this look a little more believable,
we're just going to leave the shoe as is, and instead make a shadow to make
it look like she’s actually standing there instead of floating in the air.
It’s also good practice to crop feet out while making a composite (at least for beginners)
because ambient shadows are difficult to recreate. To create the shadow, we’ll use the select subject
feature found in any of the selection tools to make a rough selection of our subject,
copy her to a new layer and paint a shadow under her foot using a shadow colour picked from the
image itself. Then we’ll use a levels adjustment layer to fix the light levels and then use a layer
set to soft light or colour to paint colors on her from the environment. Finally we’ll
blurr the colors out and adjust the opacity to fade the colours if they’re too strong.
Now the next example is bad in terms of proportions (as always) but
good in terms of how they decided to hide the bad edit by blurring everything out. You can see
the stretched pixels on the chain of her bag and the white flowers behind her so there’s no doubt
that this picture has been heavily edited. For this one, we're finally going to use
the trusty liquify tool again and bring her waist out to about a realistic size
because we can’t really see how far she went with the morphing because of the extreme blur
and again, just by making that small adjustment you can see how much better it looks.
Another way of hiding a bad edit is to make everything wobbly, apparently. Since nothing in
this picture is at a right angle. So I guess the lesson here is if you’re not good at something,
make everything so bad that the thing that you were clearly bad at doesn't show.
The next example is another one of those gratuitous uses of liquify where using it makes
0 sense. We saw something similar with a photo posted by Britney Spears in one of our previous
episodes. Here, again, you don’t need to look hard enough to figure out if the picture has been
edited or not because it is very apparent from the stretched sea waves. Unless she's a waterbender,
that should not be happening. There’s not much to fix
here because the pixels already have been stretched out to their very extreme but we
can show you how subtle of a difference it was between the before and after.
Alright, that brings another episode to a close. Hopefully you learnt something about Photoshop
techniques. We’ve covered everything here in a previous video somewhere along in the series.
As always, if you’re enjoying the content, then you can really support
the channel by subscribing and click the notification bell to catch future episodes.