Beauty in the Modern Media

February 19 marked the quiet 31st anniversary of the ever famous Adobe Photoshop primarily programmed and processed by two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll. It has been 31 years of revolutionary photo editing or digital alteration that contributed a lot to different media and people.

Adobe Photoshop is a program that is extensively used for image editing, graphic design and digital art. This program became a backbone for graphic designing and image retouching. Over the years, this software also served as a partner for marketing and perfecting photos.
Because of this success, a lot of photo editing programs aside from Adobe Photoshop were released in the market like Affinity photo, GIMP, Sketch, Pixelmator, Pixlr, and Acorn.

Because of these programs, photo editing became easier, more accessible and convenient. Little did everybody know that photo editing became the twin of make-up. It also served as the backbone of social media and printing industries like magazines, newspapers and even marketing materials. Anything and everything can be edited nowadays that seemingly tend to redefine beauty and alter our minds.

Photo editing is usually done when the original photo is dark or badly taken but editing became more complicated and “perfecting” photos became a trend. Whether a person is aware or not of photo editing softwares, not everyone completely realizes and understands how much perfected photos crash and change the view of the society for aesthetically acceptable. Manipulations are everywhere, as images are digitally perfected or altered so are our perception of what is beautiful and racked up.

A frequent scenario in photo editing is altering the fat to thin and the thin to fat. Also, removing blemishes, breasts enhancements, curve shaping and skin toning are mostly done on Photoshop. Oftentimes, these are done for magazine photos of actors or actresses to set the ideal of the society.

Though photo manipulation controversies fired up the media, producers and executives still tend to use it to a far-fetched bound because perfect photos are the industrial setting of earning bucks through the print entertainment. This is the modern media.

We like beautiful things so these photo editing softwares and the media gave it to us. Because of this, we liked media and depended on it for information and entertainment. We never realized that because we depended on it a lot, we have vested a very important power on them ? manipulation and influencing. Let us be guided because what seems to be beautiful and racked up may be the opposite of it. Photo editing and make-up are truly twins but because of the overuse of digital alteration, they become triplets; photo editing, make-up and a lie.

VOCABULARY:
Match the words with the definitions.

1. Revolutionary
2. Digital
3. Alteration
4. Perception
5. Racked up
6. Far-fetched
7. Bucks
8. Industrialized

a. a thought, belief, or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances
b. amount of money
c. to increase something such as a rent or price, especially by an amount that is considered to be too much
d. relating to a complete change in a system of government, or bringing or causing great change
e. to increase the amount of industry in a place or region
f. a change, usually a slight change, in the appearance, character, or structure of somethingg. difficult to believe and unlikely to be trueh.
h. recording or showing information in the form of numbers