Painter

Photoshopped or Not? Software to Rate How Drastically Photos Are Retouched

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times, November 28, 2011

The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight — colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic — shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe’s Photoshop software, the photo retoucher’s magic wand.

“Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth.

And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to “discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image.”

Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said.

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.

The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered. He and his wife, Eva Matlins, the founders of a women’s online magazine, Off Our Chests, are trying to gain support for legislation in America. Their proposal, the Self-Esteem Act, would require photos that have been “meaningfully changed” to be labeled.

“We’re just after truth in advertising and transparency,” Mr. Matlins said. “We’re not trying to demonize Photoshop or prevent creative people from using it. But if a person’s image is drastically altered, there should be a reminder that what you’re seeing is about as true as what you saw in ‘Avatar,’ ” the science-fiction movie with computer-generated actors and visual effects.

The algorithm developed by Dr. Farid and Mr. Kee statistically measures how much the image of a person’s face and body has been altered. Many of the before-and-after photos for their research were plucked from the Web sites of professional photo retouchers, promoting their skills.

The algorithm is meant to mimic human perceptions. To do that, hundreds of people were recruited online to compare sets of before-and-after images and to determine the 1-to-5 scale, from minimally altered to starkly changed. The human rankings were used to train the software.

His tool, Dr. Farid said, would ideally be a vehicle for self-regulation. Information and disclosure, he said, should create incentives that reduce retouching. “Models, for example, might well say, ‘I don’t want to be a 5. I want to be a 1,’ ” he said.

Yet even without the prod of a new software tool, there is a trend toward Photoshop restraint, said Lesley Jane Seymour, editor in chief of More, a magazine for women over 40.

Women’s magazine surveys, said Ms. Seymour, a former editor of Marie Claire and Redbook, show that their readers want celebrities to “look great but real.”

“What’s terrific is that we’re having this discussion,” she said. But readers, she added, have become increasingly sophisticated in understanding that photo retouching is widespread, and the overzealous digital transformations become notorious, with the before-and-after images posted online and ridiculed.

“Readers aren’t fooled if you really sculpt the images,” Ms. Seymour said. “If you’re a good editor, you don’t go too far these days. If you give someone a face-lift,” she said, adding, “you’re a fool.”

World’s First ‘Blue’ Rose Soon Available in U.S.

Long a symbol of the unattainable, blue roses will be for sale this fall in the United States and Canada.

Named “Applause,” the rose is genetically modified to synthesize delphinidin, a pigment found in most blue flowers. The rose was first released in in Tokyo in 2009, after 20 years of research by Suntory, a Japanese company that also distills whisky, and its Australian subsidiary, Florigene (now Suntory Flowers). Today Suntory announced the rose will be for sale at select florists in North America, beginning early November. While the flower might appear more silver-purple than sky-blue, Applause is the nearest to a true blue rose yet.

Arguably the world’s best loved flowers, humans have cultivated roses for more than 5,000 years. Roses can signify love, beauty, politics and war.

Blue roses have a mythic quality because they, until recently, were impossible to grow. Roses appear naturally in many shades of red, pink, yellow and white, but lack the natural ability to produce blue pigments. For centuries, blue roses have conjured unrequited love or the quest for the impossible.

Blue roses traditionally available through florists have been white roses dyed blue. Suntory and Florigene achieved the blue color inserting a delphinidin-producing gene from a pansy into an Old Garden ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’ rose. When debuting in Japan, Applause was sold for 10 times the price of normal roses.

Are We All Relying Just a Little Too Much on Facebook?

By Oren Katzeff, September 6, 2011

My wife was featured on The Food Network a few weeks ago.

I say this not to boast or to call out how wonderful she is; rather, I do so to point out what a complete failure I was in telling our friends and family to tune in. My strategy for promotion was very simple: two posts on my Facebook wall on consecutive days announcing the day and time of the airing of the show. Surely all of my friends and family would see the post. And if not, those who did would definitely share it with those who didn’t, right?

Wrong.

To my surprise, a lot of friends did not see my post (or just claimed that they didn’t to rid themselves of the obligation of watching a show that they otherwise wouldn’t care about). Over the next few days, I started getting emails and voice mails saying things to the effect of “You never tell me anything, son” (“son” was meant literally and not as a figure of speech -– the message was from my Dad) and “Why didn’t you tell me that your wife was on TV?!” So that got me asking two questions: Has Facebook become the default way for us to update each other on everything from the trivial (“I just ate an apple!”) to the important (“I just gave birth!”)? And if so, is it out of laziness or is there another reason behind it?

Let’s tackle the second question first. Surely there were other alternatives to getting the word out about my wife’s TV appearance. I could have called people. The drawback: having to endure the unavoidable small talk. Too time-consuming. I could have sent out a mass e-mail. The drawback: having to figure out which friends/family to send the email to, and then making sure that I have each correct e-mail address. Too much hassle. Facebook provided me with the only solution that was easy and didn’t require me to have any communication at all with other people. So yes, laziness definitely played in to the equation, as did my desire to avoid any sort of human interaction. What that says about me as a person is a topic for another time (preferably with my therapist or Larry David).

As for whether Facebook is now the default way that everything gets communicated, looking at my News Feed it is hard to argue otherwise. In just the last five minutes, I discovered that one friend just bought a new car, another is newly single, and a third is just “really high on life right now.” Just a few years ago, I would probably have gotten phone calls from each one of these friends – or at the very least personal text messages –- sharing the news with me (except for the “high on life” friend who is probably too busy marveling at the double rainbow outside his window to put a coherent thought together). The point is, as with my post about my wife on TV, Facebook makes it so darn easy to announce anything and it creates the illusion that every one of your friends will not only see it, but actually care about it too. And as with the post about my wife on TV, I learned that everyone getting that message is in fact an illusion.

Having learned that lesson, what will I do the next time I have something important to announce? I’m not sure yet, I’m hoping that the Facebook poll I just created about this topic will help shed some light.

Downloadable. Unsustainable, Too.

By Chris Osborn, The New York Times, August 11, 2011

I FINALLY met Amy at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport a couple of Mays ago. I recall walking through the Atlanta airport’s terminal among pictures of nebulae and galaxies, floating along corridors with only a backpack. I called my friend Devin, hyperventilating, feeling downright Neil Armstrong, needing to broadcast this moment to someone.

Amy and I had already known each other for five years by then. We had connected online when we were high school students on opposite coasts; I was in Oregon, and she was in Georgia. I liked her because she listened to Bobby Darin, knew who Italo Calvino was, and posted cute pictures of herself digitally multiplied to play the banjo, guitar, trombone and tambourine at the same time, a full band of Amys.

I was 15 and had just started dating. My first kiss was at a school dance, regrettably to Usher’s “Burn.” I was terrified to find my date’s tongue in my mouth, not knowing what it was. This was before Facebook had opened its doors to everyone, and before Twitter condensed everything, so all we had were long-winded blogs, which typically fell into two categories: daily observations or teenage angst. Mine was famous for the latter.

Something about the format was enticing: being able to say whatever you wished without ever having to face your audience. Not only did I write about girls and my social anxieties, I wrote on subjects I rarely spoke about: existentialism, family, religion and the wars. I broadcast everything that scared and exhilarated me.

If my blog was a miserablist exercise in self-discovery, Amy’s was the opposite, filled with sweet stories of riding her bike in McDonough, Ga., singing to her dog and dancing in fields with her friends. Her photos were amber-tinted and pastoral.

She was a folk singer, and I tried to sing folk songs, so we had that in common. When we first started talking, Amy was unable to record her songs, but as time and technology changed it became easier than ever, until she was able to e-mail me her songs.

After years of “chatting,” I actually heard her voice: a weathered, pretty thing, seemingly encased in a bygone era, unmarred by modernity. It was Southern, lilting, traumatizing, and this was just an MP3.

It’s strange how the phone is the next step in social connection these days, as if that is somehow more serious, more personal, more dangerous than, say, letting someone into your daily thoughts and photos.

But Amy and I started to call each other. A blizzard had just swept through Portland, so during a bout of cabin fever I began writing songs for her. In these songs I could travel south for the winter, run away from home and feel something tangible. I distracted myself with these notions of what might be if I were there, or if she were here.

At the same time, our calls grew longer. We started to tell each other secrets. She spoke with inflections that couldn’t hide behind text, sweet memories that translated only by hearing her voice, however distorted and fractured a poor signal might cause it to be.

In the spring we graduated to Skype. Finally, face to face. She would sit in the computer lab at her university and we’d talk into the early morning. We brought guitars and played our songs to each other. I sang louder than I had ever sung. I hit my highs and didn’t crack at the lows. I wonder how much she actually heard and how much was garbled by my weak Wi-Fi, her beautiful face often contorted into a mess of pixels.

Then it was her turn. Somehow, I heard every word. One verse in particular stood out:

Sparrow, won’t you fly down south by me?

Sparrow, build your home in the belly of the beast.

Lay me in the sand, in the sand by the sea,

There’s a devil in the land and a devil that’s in me.

When she was done, we just looked at each other. We didn’t have to say anything. If we were to be together, it would be at the expense of many things in our real worlds. Still, was she singing that to me because she couldn’t say it? Or was it like that Carly Simon song, and I just thought it was about me?

Vain or not, we started planning my escape.

“What if she’s different in person?” my friend Matt posited one morning over breakfast in the dorms. “What if you don’t like her?” I had already assured him that she wasn’t a 400-pound man who wanted to murder me.

I responded with a laugh, never actually thinking of the risks. I was giving myself a four-day weekend on the other side of the country right before finals. What could go wrong?

All of my friends half-supported and half-laughed at what I was about to do. Jeremy rightfully smiled at my naïveté but gave me his blessing. When I cautiously told Beth, prefacing it with disclaimers, she reassured me: “Hey, that’s the world we live in now: no borders.” Samiat drove me to the airport, and on the way she kept gushing at how “cute” I looked.

I was on air. The mere act of leaving felt almost as good as seeing Amy. This act would be my pièce de résistance, the existential proof that love was the answer, the convergence of art, romance and technology that would make everything beautiful.

On the airplane, though, I was really sweaty. Just roasting. My hair was a mess, and I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. I had decided not to shave, thinking Amy might like my “beard.” But feeling my face, I realized it was a terrible idea.

As the plane approached the runway, I pictured myself in a lunar module, anticipating the impact. I was a space kid, always traveling in my imagination, and old habits die hard. I exited the plane and walked down that corridor. I felt weightless; my heart was pounding and some insects entangled with my insides.

Every girl looked like Amy. My heart skipped with every imitation Amy. I walked past the automatic doors. Each of them opened with another possible Amy. I half expected to find one with a trombone, and one with a banjo, like those charming pictures she used to post.

It was a comedy; how many cute girls with asymmetrical bangs and perfect bone structure could exist in Georgia? I paced back and forth, walking around the baggage claim, frantically checking my cellphone.

And then, there she was. Just like that, I could feel her in my arms. This was her body. This was her face. She was here. I was here. I felt enveloped; feeling her close to me was like outer space, with all its questions: Is it infinite or contained? Linear or cyclical?

Now, here is where there are gaps. I know we held hands through Piedmont Park in Atlanta as a busker played “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and I know we drove to McDonough and kissed for the first time on the floor of her turquoise childhood bedroom, and I know we went to a Wal-Mart and danced for the security cameras, and I know I took a nap in her lap at a cemetery in Macon.

And I know that we decided not to continue our relationship. We both knew we couldn’t move close. But we also knew, after this, that we couldn’t just go back behind our computer screens. All of these things are knowable and definable and yet obscured and opaque.

The truth is, Amy feels like a ghost in static now. I have kept all the evidence: old e-mails and chats, text messages, her songs. My memory of her feels contained within servers and hard drives, locked away and inaccessible. In my mind’s eye, I keep parsing through the same remnants of my time with her, the same jpegs, the same docs, the same pieces to construct a patchwork past of those four days.

WHEN I went to Georgia, we took photographs with a black-and-white disposable camera, and this is what I can remember: only the threads between these pictures. We thought we were documenting it for posterity, but there they are, haunting me with an exactness that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Then, sometimes, there will be a moment, like catching a breeze from a window, where a wisp of memory will trigger and flood: the goldenrod color of her blouse, her freckles and cheeks stretching into a smile, holding her crying face.

And, of course, Amy’s voice, finally clear and finally close, a song whispered in French, a foreign tongue I never learned.

When we have spoken since our last meeting, Amy has always reached out through the distortion. On one such occasion, when I was feeling quite low, she simply told me that love is a moment in time.

Even in this time — because of this time — our moment was possible. Sometimes, I have to remind myself.

Chris Osborn is a filmmaker living in Portland, Ore.