When photoshopping hits home

To me, photoshopping is an integral part of the media today. I've always known and accepted that what I see in magazines and on billboards isn't always what is seems.

Sure, I passively agree with the majority over the issue of digitally altering images in the media. Photoshopping is wrong and should be stopped, but until a short while ago none of this had really hit home. I hadn't truly realised how much this technique of altering an image in retrospect has infiltrated into our society...

A few weeks ago I was sitting beside a friend in Science, at school we have laptops that come with the usual software as well as some slightly more unusual things, included in this package is Adobe Photoshop.

My friend was looking through photos and stopped on one of her and a friend, which was primarily of their faces. She sighed and looked at it for a second before opening Photoshop and promptly tanning her own skin a few tones, smoothing out an imperfection on her friend's forehead and reducing the shine on both their smiling faces.

I stopped, and stared. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This is ridiculous, maybe she's just experiment, fiddling, right she probably doesn't do this that often...

Me: "Hmm, do you touch up many of your photos?"

Her: "Yeah", *shrug*

I sat there in utter disbelief. This beautiful, outgoing, bubbly, gorgeous girl is really that self-conscious that she has to fix her and her friend's almost perfect skin in a photo from someone's party on the weekend?

But why? That I didn't ask, and I'm glad I didn't. I think it was wrong that she felt she needed to change such a minor aspect of herself, to make herself "perfect".

But I think it would be far worse, making her to examine her behaviour and change her ways in efforts to become a better person. A "perfect" person.