Ever wonder whether or not a magazine cover you are eyeing is actually photoshopped? Chances are it is, but how can you train your own eye to spot the manipulations so that you don’t bemoan why you don’t look like the image on the cover? Well, here’s one trick.
Recently, this catalog landed in my mailbox. Not my average mail but some company I order from must have sold my address. Anyway, while the cover model’s Gumby-like proportions made it seem highly likely to me that she’d been photoshopped, the place my eyes went to immediately for more possible proof was the hands.
Hands are a tricky thing to photoshop. Just check out what happened to Kate Moss’s daughter’s fingers when her mama was photoshopped.
What makes photoshopping hands so hard? Those pesky little fingers. It seems photoshopping hands will distort or disappear individual fingers and so one way to tell if a photo has been photoshopped is to compare the hands (if they remain) to the rest of the person. As you can see in the catalog cover, if the extraordinarily long legs weren’t a head’s up that the image might be photoshopped for length, well those disproportionally long hands could be a give away.
Want to give the hand test a bit more of a try? Well, here are some more images for you to consider…
There are lots of things of note in this particular cover but, for today’s sake, let’s just stick to the hands. Compare the arms to the hands in the lefthand image. What strikes you?
What’s missing? Yep, that’s one way to avoid the whole photoshopping a hand issue.
And I understand that it might be hard to check out the hands in this one when the waist is actually smaller than the model’s head (defying all sorts of logic), but avert your eyes from that discrepancy for a moment and take a look at the hands vs. arms ratio. Yeah.
So, there’s a little trick for you to use the next time you are thinking, “I wonder.” Chances are the answer is in the hands.
Whoa! It’s all in the hands, huh? Never would have thought to look at hands when the legs and arms are being stretched until the subject is literally all limbs, but you’re right.
I’ve seen many a photoshop disaster photo where they end up cutting off an arm (kind of like Kristen Stewart, above). Makes me wish more celebs would appear on magazine covers with the condition that their image NOT be photoshopped. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
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