Anna Hill’s Photoshop Project Pokes Fun at Overly Manipulated Beauty Advertisements
Photoshop takes a lot of flack in this day and age, especially when it comes to the beauty and fashion industries that consistently publish overly manipulated imagery. Often that ‘flack’ doesn’t give us much to laugh at, but a recent project by East Carolina University student Anna Hill does.
She put together four mock Photoshop ads that poke fun at just how far the beauty industry often takes photo manipulation.
24-year-old Hill made the ads for a final project in an advanced digital photography class, using herself as the model. Once finished, she decided to share the images on Reddit where they collected a massive number of upvotes and caught the attention of many a blog and news outlet.
Commenting on her Reddit post, Hill explained how the project made her aware of the biases that years of flipping through magazine ads have created:
One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross. It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while.
Here’s a look at all of the ads she put together (click here to go to her full-res Imgur album):
The purpose of the project — one the editors of Photoshop-free Verily magazine would probably agree with — is, as Hill puts it, “to point out that we shouldn’t take things like magazine ads too seriously, because sometimes they ARE altered that much even though we don’t notice.”
To see more of Hill’s work — which includes everything from street photography to some very impressive digital art — head over to her website or follow her on Facebook by clicking on the corresponding links.
Image credits: Images by Anna Hill and used with permission
