Is Photoshop Destroying America's Body Image?

Nowadays Photoshop is used a lot on models, public figures and celebrities. It is used to make the image more 'attractive' to make it look like the ideal photo according to the media. These images effect the public since it gives unreal body image expectations, which may lead to depression for some since they may think they are not 'attractive' according to media.

Social impacts

Photoshop was created to display gray scale images on a monochrome monitor which at the time was called 'Display' but then soon the creator of the software was told to make it into a photo editing software which then lead to changing its name from 'Display' to 'Photoshop'. The stakeholders for this scenario are the models and celebrities whos image is being manipulated through the software, the general public that view the images, the editors of the photo and the company the published the photos. Images being 'photoshopped' affect the models in a positive way since it makes them look more attractive although it affects the public in a bad way due to the fact that they end up having higher expectation on how their body should be as well as some may feel like they are being lied to by the people they might possibly look up to, if someones role model is a celebrity who was photoshopped. A solution to this problem could be to stop using photoshop so photos can be natural and peoples expectations can be lowered for how they want to look.


Ethical issues

The magazine companies are the ones responsible for editing the images of celebrities to make them artificially more attractive. The government could be a accountable since they allow such actions to take place where the public is lied to in a way about how people should look, setting an unrealistic goal to looking attractive. The copyright law can be applied to this scenario since the magazine company edits the photos that they take and have possession over, therefor allowing them to edit them. An alternative ethical decision could be for the magazine company to either slightly edit them for minor things such as red eyes or just don't edit the images at all leave them natural. Although the disadvantage to this could be the fact that it would attract less customers since they will see less attractive images of celebrities in the magazine.



Sources : History of Photoshop and Article