The Truth About How We Really Look

Today, I spoke with a friend and offered to take photos of her. And her first thought was exactly like mine would be (especially some time ago) and pretty much every other women’s: “I don’t know if I’m beautiful enough.“ I need to explain why this is a completely unjustified way of thinking (which we all learnt, unfortunately). Time to debunk a big myth about how we look!

When I was growing up, having a photo of myself taken was not very frequent (without smartphones). There was no Instagram and no social media. But there was already a TV and magazines (yep, I’m not 100 years old yet :D) so my brain quickly understood that I looked different in photos from the people shown there. Nicely said “not photogenic” and what I really thought was “pretty ugly”.

I looked in the mirror sometimes and I looked OK, but then someone took a photo of me and I was thinking: “Oh. So that’s what I look like in reality. Oh no.“ Weird skin colours, all the blemishes stealing attention from a nice shape of my face… I was convinced that I looked like in the photos. And even today, many people believe that they actually look like in a photo. The camera simply captures the moment. Wrong! I’ll explain in a second.

I remember that I had to visit a local photography studio couple of times in a short period of time to get photos for my ID and passport and some other ID… And I visited studio '“A” and I looked quite terrible in the photos. I was not excited, but not shocked either - I already knew that I looked terrible. The next time, studio “A” was closed for the holidays and I had to go to studio “B”. And to my surprise, I looked much better in the photos. I was excited this time! A couple of weeks later, I needed more ID photos. I went straight to studio ”B” this time and guess what. The photos were terrible again. “OK, I just look ugly”, I accepted again, losing all hope.

It is very clear to me now, it however didn’t convince me by that time - the problem was not me. It was a combination of the photographer’s (lack of) skills, equipment, knowledge and effort. Plus the legal requirements for the photo and my own lack of knowledge (about skin reflectance for example).

Later, I started to understand that those magazines’ photos were “retouched”. Aha, OK, the people are not so perfect in reality, but still, they look pretty good and definitely real.

A bit later (2005), there was this article in a newspaper about the wife of our former prime minister. We all knew her from TV what she looked like. And then we were presented the photos of how she got nice makeup and retouching. That was an AHA moment for me - how much it’s possible to change just by makeup and retouching.

That moved me to another stage of thinking: Some people look naturally great, some people look ugly (like me) and some people fake it (retouching). I always really disliked the third group. I guess I felt like it was not fair.

And now let’s get to the truth. Retouched photos are not reality. But un-retouched photos are not reality either! Let me explain.

Photos are never a reality. Why? There are so many reasons. For example:

There is something called a dynamic range. That’s a range of lightness (or darkness) where details are visible. Imagine that you’re outside on a sunny with a friend. You look at him/her and you can see them and you can see what’s behind them too. But when you take a photo of her/him, they are either a silhouette because the sunshine behind them is too strong, or they are visible, but everything behind them is just white and washed out. Or you have the latest smartphone that makes a photo where everything is visible, but that’s not the original photo - it’s an automatic composition of light and dark photos creating a single picture that is unreal from the camera’s perspective, but made in a way that it looks real to us.

My point is that the human eye is very good at adjusting - we see more details in lightness and darkness and we adjust quickly and our brain composes everything together smoothly. So we simply just “see”.

BTW if you are thinking that what I’m saying means that even what we see with our own eyes is not necessarily “reality”, you’re right and we all know this I think (that’s why illusionists are able to work).

The camera, however, is struggling - it doesn’t have such a big range where it “sees”. That’s why it often makes dark things too dark and bright things washed out, white. The dynamic range of my Nikon is 9.7 stops. The dynamic range of our eyes is around 15 to 24 stops! As a result, simply said, photos from a camera make bright things brighter and dark things darker. Practically it means that all the shadows and darker areas in our faces (wrinkles, dark circles under our eyes, pimples…) are much more pronounced than in reality!

Also, remember a situation where a child was waving something in front of you and shouting: “Look! Look!“ And you had no other option than to say: “Keep it still sweetheart, I can’t see anything when you move it so fast.“ ?

When we interact with others, we move. And people focus on the “whole us”, they focus on our eyes, the message that we’re trying to get over - they don’t have a chance to even notice a tiny wrinkle here and there for example because it’s not really much visible and it’s moving around.

That’s why I claim that how people perceive us differs greatly from how we look at photos! The photos are not reality. They are simply dots of different colours with different brightness and saturation inevitably altered from reality by the camera.

Therefore, now we have this “original photo”, “fake retouched photo” and there is also a third option: a retouched photo that is retouched in a way that looks more like a human would perceive the subject of the photo. Retouched, but not fake. Shadows and distractions are reduced, and colours are fixed, showing the person how we truly see her/him. That’s the one that is closest to the reality.

When I finally understood this, I started to feel comfortable about retouching. It’s bringing the picture closer to reality.