Playing with facetune and uncanny valley

After discussing retouching and ‘How far is too far’, we got into small groups and played with the facetune app. I took a simple, face on picture of Tara. We then all looked at it and tried to change as many things as possible without it looking completely fake. Tara felt really uncomfortable being the model and we all felt really uncomfortable adjusting her facial features.

I honestly think she looked much better in the original image- she didn’t look human in the final edited picture. We began by smoothing out her skin, then went in on top with the smoother, raised her cheekbones, whitened her teeth and thinned out her nose- that last one was her request! We made these changes because these are the areas that are edited most frequently. 

Her face looked relatively normal at this point, but then we got a bit excited and sharpened all of her features and changed the colour of her hair. She now looked like an animation- a completely different person, actually quite scary. If I was to do this again, I would direct my model and ask her to pose in a certain position with the intention of focusing on enhancing this area when using facetune. This way, I wouldn’t be going in and randomly changing bits of her face and ending up with something that didn’t look human. And I definitley would not change the hair colour!!

This leads on to the  ‘uncanny valley’ concept. This is the idea that you can edit an image to make it ‘beautiful’, but you actually end up with an image that does not look human and is actually quite creepy. Apparently, beauty is all about being symmetrical, but it actually looks so weird when you take a normal face and make it completely symmetrical. But this made me think, if everyone is freaked out by these ‘perfect’ symmetrical images, does this mean that our idea of beauty is individuality, quirkiness and imperfection? 

 The image on the left is the original. Bridget Bardot was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time and yet the machine still corrected her face to make her 'beautiful'. I feel like all character was completely lost from her face, the sparkle has gone from her eyes. She just doesn't look human at all,she doesn't look alive.