If Only I Could Get My Real Life Self Photoshopped

SF Gate: That is not really Cameron Diaz / Of course every magazine spread has been Photoshopped. But do you know to what degree? How deep is the lie? Great article by SF Gate columnist Mark Momford about the incredible depth of photoshopping that goes into the pictures of a magazine and the lack of depth in our souls that make us hunger for such things. A short segment: "It is no longer about zapping pimples and wrinkles with the Healing Brush tool, no longer about eliminating red eye and evening out the skin tone. And we are light years from the quaint, old-school darkroom tricks of dodging and burning and torquing exposures." That's the stuff I know how to do. Amateur stuff. I can mess with color and exposure correcting, fixing one's skin, teeth, eyes, etc. to look pristine. But the pro's these days are way beyond that. "These days, it is far more about creating entire worlds. It is about manipulating every single pixel. Simply put, there is nothing Photoshop can't do, no scenery recreation, no age redefinition, no body part that can't be rebuilt from scratch, nothing. The fantasy has been distilled and purified to a degree where, if you are the slightest bit attuned to it, it becomes truly fantastical. And also, well, a bit of a joke." The article mentions the numerous YouTube videos, even links a couple, that demonstrate the prowess of Photoshop to change the average person, even ugly, to be a supermodel. "Observe, for example, this recent spread of Cameron Diaz on the cover of British GQ, so hilariously retouched and glossified and hyper-perfected she might as well be a mannequin dipped in olive oil and draped over a smoky sunset. Does anyone actually believe Diaz looks anything like that? Just how low does the average male (or female) IQ have to be to believe this silly lie? Who, really, finds this sexy?" Friends, we must, we absolutely must teach our daughters that those magazines are liars and the women in them are not the standards for beauty to live up to. They don't even exist. They are no different than an oil painting or drawing. It used to be that a photo was considered an accurate re-presentation of the original. No longer.