Digital Home Thoughts: Software Digitally Morphs Faces Closer to Perfection

"While digital enhancement has been around for years, subtly airbrushing celebrities and models to make them a bit thinner, less spotty or better endowed, the mere mortal has been resigned to, well, looking like a mere mortal. But new advances in digital enhancement software may mean dodgy snaps could soon be relegated to the photo album of the past. Last week, New Scientist magazine reported on new technology that had been developed by scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Presented at this year's Siggraph conference on computer graphics in Boston, the system transforms photographs of faces into more attractive versions of themselves."



This is either an affront to the natural beauty of women, and perhaps the most obvious example of how painfully shallow Western society has become - or it's one of the most useful digital photography breakthroughs every developed. Myself, I lean toward the first one: while we all have different standards of beauty, something seems inherently wrong with morphing a human face into something it is not. We've seen examples of this before, of course, where professional retouching technicians alter models for magazine covers. This is quite different though - it's taking your own pictures and altering the female subjects in them to look "better". It seems like a denial of reality to me. I can see it being popular among the Internet dating crowd, at least until the first date bombs because the person didn't look like their morphed image.