Call for crackdown on Photoshopped images in ads, magazines

Legislators in multiple countries want digitally altered photos used in ads and magazines to be labeled, according to a New York Times report today.

Calls are coming from everybody from the American Medical Association, which is worried about "unrealistic expectations of body image" to feminists.

Said lawmakers and lobbyests are apparently anaware of the celebrity magazine mania for true-life photos, which makes it hard to escape grungy, non-airbrushed pictures of stars, however much you may want to idealise them.

Anyhow, Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at US univesity Dartmouth, says labeling is too blunt an approach.

Instead, he's come up with a software tool that could automatically access the degree to which a photo has been altered, then assign it a number on a 1 to 5 scale.

Details of the academic's research will be published later this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For now, Farid has placed some before-and-after examples on Dartmouth's website.

Personally, I think laws about labeling photo-retouching of celebrities (widely-assumed by all readers these days) would be a big waste of law makers' time (the Photoshopping of news photos is a different story; New Zealand media, in my experience, is meticulous to note any digital alteration of a photo; for example, to display two figures in a news story side-by-side. Enhancement of columnist photos tends to be a different story. But perish the thought Parliament should focus on that one).

Still, it's fascinating to check-out Farid's celebrity examples: