Dove Canada uses Photoshop Trojan horse to shame potential body-shamers
In the latest round of Dove’s long-running “Real Beauty” campaign, the company leaves a Photoshop Action where photography creatives might find it, in order to sabotage the unrealistic beauty standards they may be supporting.Battles can’t always be fought like a football game, with the offense and defense meeting each other head-on. Sometimes it’s most advantageous to infiltrate the enemy for a sneak attack—which is exactly what Dove is doing in its ongoing war against unrealistically svelte depictions of women in advertising.
The decade-running “Real Beauty” campaign, which won a Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007, continues its assault on Photoshop by fighting fire with fire. Created by Ogilvy Toronto, Dove Canada’s latest endeavor is a sneaky way to hit the perpetrators of such ads right at the source—their computers.
The team at Ogilvy created the Photoshop action “Beautify”, a downloadable file that makes a change with a single click, in this case aimed at photography creatives who might be shaving the curves off of a not-even-curvy model right this very second. The company hopes to spread “Beautify” by leaving it on sites like Reddit which art directors and the like are known to frequent—presenting it as an aid for retouching.
At first blush, it appears that “Beautify” adds a healthy-looking skin glow effect to the photo. What it actually does, however, is revert photoshopped images back to their original state. Although it occurs to me that some innocent Photoshoppers (though, are any of them truly innocent?) might get caught in the crosshairs of this sneak attack, a Photoshop action can be easily undone, and so any casualties will only be mildly inconvenienced—and probably not ashamed of their bodies.
Joe Berkowitz is a staff writer for Co.Create. He has also written for The Awl, Rolling Stone, Salon, and McSweeney’s, among others. CONTINUED
Below are from the collection of rare colour photos of Nazi Germany taken in 1930’s Berlin by Thomas Neumann.
If you find yourself photographing where the lighting is composed of several light sources, you may get acceptable to great results if you set the correct Kelvin temperature of the lighting in your camera.
This chart may help, as it gives the starting settings based on the dominant light source in your environment, and you’d have to experiment from there (with digital photography, it only costs time).
Colour Temperature Chart
Colour temperature is a description of the warmth or coolness of a light source. When a piece of metal is heated, the colour of light it emits will change. This colour begins as red in appearance and graduates to orange, yellow, white, and then blue-white to deeper colours of blue. The temperature of this metal is a physical measure in degrees Kelvin or absolute temperature. While lamps other than incandescent do not exactly mimic the output of this piece of metal, we utilize the correlated colour temperature (or Kelvins) to describe the appearance of that light source as it relates to the appearance of the piece of metal (specifically a black body radiator).
By convention, yellow-red colours (like the flames of a fire) are considered warm, and blue-green colours (like light from an overcast sky) are considered cool. Confusingly, higher Kelvin temperatures (3600–5500 K) are what we consider cool and lower colour temperatures (2700–3000 K) are considered warm. Cool light is preferred for visual tasks because it produces higher contrast than warm light. Warm light is preferred for living spaces because it is more flattering to skin tones and clothing. A colour temperature of 2700–3600 K is generally recommended for most indoor general and task lighting applications. Colour Temperature is not an indicator of lamp heat.
“How to Fake an Anti-Israel News Photo”
Always good to be reassured that reporting the news these days is more about getting the story out sooner than getting the facts straight.
Demonstration in Tel Aviv: equal share of burden 2012.07.07 הפגנה בת”א: חלוקה שווה בנטל
Ron Barak 2012
