Lifestyle | When Does Editing Go Too Far?

Hello Lovelies! 

For most of us bloggers, if we learn anything about photography, it will be that editing is our best friend. It can take a photo from looking meh to amazing with only a few tiny adjustments. Editing is just a part of the magic that goes into conjuring up a beautiful, eye pleasing shot. 

My editing besties are Photoshop, VSCO and Afterlight. I use these to brighten, saturate, colour correct and straighten my photos until they're just right. And honestly I see no problem with that at all. But when we start to manipulate photos further, that's when things start to get really murky. 

Now I'll be honest with you, there was one time when I did manipulate a photo of myself. It was a photo I posted of myself around last Halloween, where I was wearing red lipstick and had a spot above my lip that looked not so much spot like, but more like I'd smudged my lipstick. I didn't really care too much about the spot, because we all get little face foes, but it looked weird so I decided to edit it out. A couple of seconds later the spot was gone from the photo, and I uploaded it to Instagram that night. It was so easy.

Every other time I've posted a selfie or a picture of myself, I've always made a point to leave any so called imperfections there. But realistically I know for a lot of girls the idea of being seen with a spot, or dry skin, or little lumps is super daunting. Even for me the idea of posting a picture of myself without any makeup on, for all my followers to see is super scary. 

(I could go on a rant about how girls are never accepted as they naturally are but I shall leave that for another day...)

But thinking about all this editing, I got really curious about how easy it is to actually manipulate your photos to the point where they no longer represent reality. So I downloaded Facetune 2, and this is how I got on with it...

I'll start off by saying that Facetune can be used for a wide range of things. It's great for little corrections on photos as you can choose select areas and adjust them as you like, so imperfections on a flatlay for example can be easily fixed or you can even use their whitening feature to brighten up shots.

But then you can also easily change your face and body, and this is what makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. 

Now, I'll start off by saying that my editing skills are pretty amateur so the touch ups I did on these photos are a little amateurish. Notice how I accidentally whitened the top of my mouth? And no I wasn't going for the milk above my top lip look, that's just my total pro skills right here. 

Let's get down to basics. Facetune 2 is free to download, and super user friendly but it also comes with a lot of premium features for their VIP customers. These features include things like changing the background of your photos, removing spots and getting rid of shadows. 

But the app also has a lot of free features. They have a face setting which naively I was shocked by. It immediately grabs your face, and by simply sliding you can adjust your smile, face width and chin. You can also use the whitening feature to lighten your teeth, and then the various resizing features to slim parts of your body down or enhance it. 

Basically it's super easy to adjust your face and body even as a beginner to the app, and perfectly possible without even spending any money. And perhaps that's the point, in this day and age you can so easily change your appearance or misleadingly enhance your photos. 

Most successful bloggers and influencers are no longer really the girl next door that takes blurry shots in her bedroom mirror, or candid photos. The standards these days are so much higher, and the expectations of beauty much more unrealistic. These days it takes so much more to stand out, and its understandable that because of that things are beginning to become a lot more fake, staged and distanced from reality. 

But who's to say when editing does go too far? We live in a society that tells us we're too fat, our acne is ugly or that we shouldn't have cellulite so is it surprising that so many girls touch up their photos? If anything isn't it a sign that we're unhappy with ourselves not that we want to mislead girls to an unrealistic idea of beauty. 

As the lines between glossy mag and blogging begin to blur it begs the question of where blogging is really going. Maybe we'll start to see a shift back to true candids, photos that aren't perfectly put together and blogs that aren't stunningly beautiful. Or maybe this is just the direction of blogging, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. 

I love beautifully crafted Instagram shots, and lovely staged candids but I do think with blogging comes a responsibility to not mislead your audience. If you wouldn't be happy telling your followers how you've touched up your photos, that's I think when you know you've crossed a line. 

But I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, so do let me know what you think in the comment section!

Have a great weekend lovelies! Love Vicky x