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Photoshop Disaster Draws DMCA Notice For Boing Boing
Pickens writes: "Cory Doctorow writes that Ralph Lauren issued a DMCA takedown notice after Boing Boing republished the Photoshop disaster contained in a Ralph Lauren advertisement in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body with the model's head larger than her pelvis. Doctorow says that one of the things that makes their ISP Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns and proceeded to dare Lauren to sue. 'This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc,' writes Doctorow. 'Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings.' Doctorow adds that every time Lauren threatens to sue he will 'reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it,' 'publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery,' and 'offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.'"
I seriously can't understand how someone could even photoshop that and go 'Well, looks like my work is done here' or the marketing guy who ok'd the final product...sheesh
That's a horrible Photoshop paste job. Does that head even go with that body?
There's a wry New Yorker article about Pascal Dangin, the leading photo retoucher for the New York fashion industry. The print version of that article has before and after pictures. He's much better than whomever did that botched Ralph Lauren ad.
Dangin is much more subtle. Although he's been criticized for slimming down Madonna's arm muscles.
I have an idea, how about making sure that the ORIGINAL unedited version is available upon request, with a link in the advertisement to the source of the original.
Kind of like, Open Source for Photography?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I work in design and have done more Photoshop work than I care to recall. It certainly is an extremely useful tool and can't be banned outright, however, they could impose very clear limits on retouching photos of people.
I personally see two problems. The first is covering up imperfections, freckles, beauty marks, lumps, etc. The second is thinning out individual body parts and in some extreme cases taking the entire person and making them more narrow.
There's a big drawback here, however. This wont address the use of heavy makeup, creative lighting or photography. And movies have always used all sorts of techniques to make actors look amazing. Celebrities are sometimes virtually unrecognizable in person because of how heavily they're done up for movies. And agencies will likely push models to lose even more weight. Photoshop ultimately is one small part of the larger problem of creating very unrealistic expectations of how people should look.
I've had friends who couldn't be with a girl if she didn't have the perfect complexion and body type depicted in the media. I've also known many girls who lament how terrible they supposedly look compared to celebrities. But how the hell do you change these attitudes in a culture so addicted to celebrity culture? And it's not a problem unique to the US either. It's bad enough in Europe, and probably even worse than the US in Asia.