My "Perfect" Body Image

 I decided to see how easy it would be to change an ordinary picture of myself into a picture you would see on a magazine cover. This proved to be very easy. I added makeup to the picture of myself and then swapped the edited face of myself with this picture of Selena Gomez. I felt the transformation of the picture was very easy to do. I changed my skin tone, whitened my teeth, added eye shadow, and changed the color of my lips. I feel that the face swapping could have used a little bit more time and concentration. The new picture looks like neither Selena Gomez nor me.

While I was doing this, it made me wonder how real the pictures we see on magazine covers are. I now realize that the pictures I see all the time are, most likely, completely different from the original picture. Whenever I see a magazine cover now, I do not feel jealous of the person I see because it is not what that person really looks like. Through this project I realized that what women and girls see as the perfect body image is skewed. What we see as the perfect body image does not exist. It is a picture that has been edited and changed many, many times.

 I think I did very well making sure my skin was almost the same tone as hers.  My skin tone is very close to Selena’s. I blurred the edges of face to make sure it blended well. Another thing I did well was making sure my facial features were the same size and in the same spot. This helps my face look more normal with the rest of her head. If I could re-do this I would spend more time adding more makeup. This would make the picture look better and more finished. I kept the picture with natural makeup, because that is how I normally wear it.  The picture that I created was not perfect, but it had its good points and bad points.   

Photos and Photoshop

For a project I had to create a collage of photos on Photoshop. The collage was title A Day in The Life of a Mercy Student; we had to take pictures that described our life and the lives of other Mercy Students. Through this project I learned how to use Photoshop and how to use the photography elements in my pictures. At the beginning I found it hard to take pictures using those elements, but as it went on I grew comfortable taking pictures. Some of the elements I used were angle, rule of thirds, and lines. Some of the pictures I took were from above and some I took from the sides, this helped make the picture more interesting and eye catching. Other pictures had multiple elements to them, so I used rule of thirds to organize them.

To make the collage look better, I had to edit the pictures. Some of the techniques I used were cropping pictures, changing the perspective, cutting out part of the image, changing parts of the pictures color, and changing the picture to black and white. I cropped all the pictures to the best picture by using the crop tool. I changed the perspective of one picture by going to edit, then transform, and then perspective. In two pictures there was a sign in the background that I did not want in the photo. I cut it out by using the polygonal-lasso tool and used the magic wand to fill in the color. To change the color of a shirt I used the magic wand tool to change the hues of the color. The shirt was too dark for the picture and needed to be lightened. The last thing I did to edit the pictures, was I changed one picture to black and white.