A new photograph-analyzing tool quantifies changes made by digital airbrushers in the fashion and lifestyle industry. Psychologists have become vocally critical of such images: By employing an arsenal of retouching techniques retouchers create unattainable standards of both beauty and normalcy, ultimately leading to self-destructive body image disorders.
In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, image forensics specialist Hany Farid of Dartmouth University and doctoral student Eric Kee debut a computational model developed by analyzing 468 sets of original and retouched photographs. From these, Farid and Kee distilled a formal mathematical description of alterations made to models' shapes and features.The Presurfer
