Magazine editors, Who can improve on Nature?

This article debates whether it should be acceptable in society to alter picture for magazines, it seems nowadays everyone has adopted a necessity to change reality as it is no longer 'good enough'. The other side is that people buying these magazines are often manipulated by thinking those photographs are real and believe that in order to be 'beautiful' they have to look in such way, giving them the aim of looking like someone who never looked like that to begin with. People accountable are the creators of Photoshop and the magazine editors, those responsible are more often than not those buying the magazines and the magazine owners who allow Photoshoped images to be published.

Social Impacts

Adobe Photoshop was create in 1988 and since then the 'art' of editing pictures has become easier and easier, it is now at the point where people cannot distinguish between what has been edited and what has not, this is why it is controversial, the fact that one can be influenced by a picture believing it is real while in fact it is fake can have monstrous consequences that can affect all of us, this applies to advertisement, war photography and many more. Nevertheless an advantage of such advances in Photoshop is that picture correction was also improve, simple details such as red eye can be easily eliminated and make photos look better. Overall the social impact is that those who understand Photoshop will lose trust on what magazines publish as they soon will believe everything has been edited, on the other hand the others who are unaware of such editing skills nowadays can be negatively affect by the fact that they start believing the perfection they see on pictures is real and try to achieve it.

Ethical Issues

There is no law against photoshoping an image that will be published by a magazine, but maybe there should be, with such abuse of edited images in society no one can believe what they see anymore. The ethical decision would be to stop editing images and show the real picture instead but that would mean destroying an image of celebrities and models have created for themselves while using Photoshop and they would never let that happen, the next best thing was the presence of a stamp on a picture that would allow the reader to understand what percentage of that photo was real and how much of it was fake.



Here's the link from the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/arts/magazine-editors-and-photographers-on-retouching-photos.html?_r=0