P.S. I love you
Originally published in the Turn The Page Issue 61, July 2017
Get real here for a second, those legs are not standard legs for a 30 year old woman. I even wonder if they ever existed. So often we see things that are unearthly resized to epic standards. Naturally, we react in disbelief, the discussion gets heated and criticism gets thrown around like candy on Christmas. Have you ever realised how it really works, and whether the hard words of your comments are not completely hypocrite as a designer?
Photoshop seems relatively new. The truth is that only the use of edited photos has changed dramatically over the past few years. When the software was written by Thomas and John Knoll (yes, they were brothers) in 1987, it was used to show grayscale images on a monochrome display. In 1988 the distribution license was sold to Adobe Systems Incorporated and in the years after it was completely updated to the killing machine it is now.
It is all around us; stuck to the train window, packed in your bag but foremost deeply imbedded in our heads. Take a good look at the pictures in the editorial. They seem natural, right? What if I told you half of them is made significantly more beautiful? I can do this because your visual perception of people had adapted itself to the things you see the most. And let it be clear, you see a lot of photoshopped faces and bodies in magazines! It might be the first time we edited the writers of the Turn the Page but on a daily bases you see about 300 unnatural photos.
This is not just the case with human beings. Imagine the last picture you have seen of a forest, do the leafs not look more green and lively than those outside your window? Or the hamburger on your menu, does that not trigger a watery mouth whereas the one on your plate is, honestly, a bit disappointing? Even on the house market certain tricks like structure augmentation, warm glows and sunny outsides are used. Now let me explain how, even though everyone knows that Photoshop can fake almost everything you see, you still fall for those sneaky bastards’ lies.
You might not like hearing this, but your brain is crazy lazy. Just like you when you are watching Netflix, it is way easier to just be idle. When you are, you accept the things that seem natural or make you feel comfortable. The film with the happy ending leaves you way more satisfied than the one where the main character dies for no reason. This is a twitch that your unconsciousness developed out of sheer laziness. The same goes for photoshop; it is not challenging for your brain to process beauty. It addresses positive feelings, leaving your brain not to have to digest anything. Just like green forests, yummy food and sunny houses, pretty faces give you a good vibe which makes things easier to accept. That is why we unknowingly rather accept weirdly beautiful bodies than ugly or even normal ones. Really, when we unconsciously start accepting photoshopped foods, places and people, it is only a matter of time before we perceive that to be the standard to which our visual anticipation of the world is aimed at.
I just told you that it is out of your control. You are doomed to pay more for a good photoshopped hamburger on a menu than a good taste on your plate. But now what do we do? We can not change the fact that your brain would rather be lazy than overused, but what we can do is think twice before we make an important decision based on visual perception. Although the first impression will be positively adjusted to the hoax you saw in the picture, thinking deeper and using more than one sense will help you in deciding more accordingly.
On the other hand, designers should make use of this unique advantage, because we now know that good marketing is not just making everything as juicy or boney with photoshop as possible. On the other hand, when giving people a positive feeling that is easy to process, you are making it easier for them to accept. This is extremely useful when you try to place an innovation in this chaotic world. If you surround the product with positivity and things that are not hard the accept at all, the product itself will be embedded in people’s unconsciousness as positive and normal.
What I am not trying to do is justify the over-photoshopped marketing world, but what is important is for you is to understand how it works and not to neglect it. Remember this article the next time you wished you had Taylor Swift’s legs but also remember it when you struggle to implement your genius idea into the normal world. Oh and one more thing: do not abuse this information because although you are now ten times as smart as before you read this article, a lot of people do not realise the complication of fake visual perception.
