December 8th, 2011

A New Scale to Measure Photoshop Manipulation

We all know brands and fashion magazines often use Photoshop to ‘retouch’ photographs of their models. But often these tweaks can be so drastic that the final image doesn’t reflect reality at all. Thankfully, Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid has announced a new tool in the battle for transparency. Farid developed an algorithm that uses a 1-to-5 scale to measure just how much a photo has been retouched. This may allow brands and models to set contractual limits for how much their images are manipulated (nothing above a 2, for example).