Photoshopped Images

Kendall Roemer
Digital Scholarship Lab @MarquetteRaynor
2 min readNov 29, 2017

Photoshop is an amazing tool. It allows artists to create sophisticated online pieces and photographers to tweak their images to perfection. However, this can be a problem when the public views the highly edited image as “real.”

Magazines are probably the most notorious for over-editing their already beautiful models to unrealistic standards. As people read and take in photos of gorgeous models filling the magazine, they start to wonder why they don’t look the same.

Questions such as “Why don’t I have that body?” or “Why doesn’t my face look as perfect as hers?” may formulate in particularly young women, leading to feelings of inadequacy, depression, or even eating disorders.

Generally, the models used are celebrities famed for their talents, as well as their looks. Most of these women are already deemed highly attractive to society, so what difference does it make if they’re photoshopped?

Credit: The Sun: Celebrities before and after Photoshop

The model above is Candice Huffine. She is beautiful in both pictures, however, her image is clearly edited to showcase a thinner woman. While there are plenty of healthy women who look like Huffine’s edited picture, she does not appear to be an unhealthy weight to begin with.

Although I can guarantee this edit was not meant to cause harm, and rather was likely meant to be a more aesthetically pleasing choice, changing Huffine’s bodytype to be thinner sends a message that her normal body is not good enough. Girls with Huffine’s genuine body type are left to wonder why their body was changed to be thinner, and may become dissatisfied with themselves.

This is where Photoshop gets dangerous. Photo editors and magazines need to understand despite them trying to make their images look as pleasing as possible, when the image is edited and showcased as real, it can cause genuine harm to readers. Hell, when someone can edit an image of a pizza slice to look like a sexy model, something is wrong.

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Kendall Roemer
Digital Scholarship Lab @MarquetteRaynor

Digital Media major at Marquette University | Tutor | Student Production Assistant |