Technology to touchup images

Why this is new news is anyone’s guess, but a few stories making the rounds this week center on “automated beautification”, aka the redeye filter has expanded to clear up acne, blur skin blemishes and erase freckles. In other words, someone took all the annoying art tools out of Photoshop and focused purely on the ones that made you look better. And by “made you” we really mean “make females between the ages of 14 and 35” look better.

Enter Pixtr, Facetune and a host of other apps which do what modeling agencies and softcore porn magazines have been doing for decades… applying filters to smooth out nagging physical defects that ultimately will need to be fixed with surgery and an absence of unhealthy fast food. Like with most things, the world ignored these applications up until the point Apple started promoting them on their App Store’s home page. Then, magically they became bad for society, because nobody had ever heard of young women using their computer to present an idealistic version of themselves before now.

From Planet Ivy:

“At the risk of sounding like a middle-aged, technology naysayer, this is one app that the world, and particularly the world of female teenagers, could do without. If there’s one thing worse than someone telling you your nose is too big, it’s your phone telling you it is.”

Well yeah, OK… Except this technology has existed for years and it’s not like these young women are downloading the application, inserting their photo and expecting to be told that they are awesome, beautiful, witty and clever exactly the way they are. The app is called Facetune. If you’re opening the app to take care of the size of your nose, odds are you’ve already come to some kind of realization that your nose is too large. The best you could call these kinds of apps are enablers; but even then it’s a bit of a stretch. If we’re going down that path we need to start way before the phone and take a look at the makeup industry.

Humorously, the founder/maker of Pixtr revealed that it was his wife who gave him the idea of the “face touch up” app. You don’t say.

My real question is when the app ships that will automatically add height, cleavage and various other full body adjustments. Facetune and Pixtr may help make those SFW Facebook profile shots, but given the boom of websites, Twitter streams and Tumblr accounts devoted to self-shots in the mirror, feels like there is a whole other market ready to… er… expand.