Kim Kardashian has practically made a living from her
curvaceous figure.
But the E! network celeb was looking a little less shapely in
Complex magazine in April.
Her body was reduced about a dress size, and her legs were
smoothed to near-perfection.
How did readers know? Complex accidentally posted a
pre-Photoshopped image of Kardashian on its website - before
her thighs, arms and waist had been digitally sculpted.
In a matter of hours the photo was gone.
But in that brief time span, those who spotted it got a
little reminder that we should think twice about taking
photographs at face value.
"My belief," says Scott Kelby, president of the United States
Association of Photoshop Professionals, "is that every single
major magazine cover is retouched.
"I don't know how they couldn't be."
But don't stop there.
Aside from newspapers, most of which do not permit photos to
be manipulated, is quite possible that the vast majority of
images seen in the public arena have been altered.
Photoshop, the go-to graphics editing program that got a
foothold in the 1990s, has become so ubiquitous that most of
us gaze at faces, bodies and landscapes without registering
that wrinkles have been diminished, legs lengthened and the
sky honed to a dream-like shade of blue.
While some laud Photoshop for its ability to allow people -
and things - to look their best in a photograph, others see
it as a vehicle for feeding society's desire for
uber-perfection.
"I think the perfect bodies we're seeing in magazines that
are Photoshopped have a terrible effect on how women feel
about their own bodies," says Prof Montana Miller, assistant
professor in the department of popular culture at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio.
One theory about retouching in advertisements is that it's
done to create an aspirational concept of beauty that
inspires women to buy more products.
Prof Miller has heard another: that the goal of showing
perfect images is to make women feel bad about themselves -
also making them buy more beauty products.
Mr Kelby, who writes a blog about Photoshop, doesn't believe
it's a malevolent force.
He sees it as practical, and cites the example of singer
Faith Hill.
In 2007, the fashion website Jezebel posted unaltered images
of Hill that were shot for a Redbook magazine cover.
