When a “Before and After” photo takes honesty to a new level
I’ve always had a beef with “Before and After” photos — they are almost always taken with the subject frowning and wearing boring clothing in the Before photo, and smiling with a much nicer outfit and maybe even better lighting in the After photo.
It’s dishonest and manipulative. I think most people will realize what is going on, I don’t think this is a major problem in society, but it’s something I like to laugh at.
I was at the dentist and came across this Before and After photo, which takes honesty to a whole new level:
The two photos aren’t just taken under similar conditions — they are actually the same photo, with the new white, straight teeth photoshopped onto the second one. Hilarious.
I guess these are the Before and After photos that are appropriate for contemporary society — consumers are very familiar with sophisticated visual effects in all forms of media, and are even literate with sophisticated visualizations demonstrating complicated information. The only thing the dentist will change is your teeth, so it’s only appropriate for the example photos to show the teeth as the only thing being changed.
This tool – a controlled experiment/demonstration – is the sort of thing that scientists have been familiar with for decades or centuries. 20 or 30 years ago, such a set of photos might have been considered surreal, ridiculous, or perhaps even horrific to a typical consumer. But now it is not only something with which consumers are familiar and comfortable, but also something that they expect.
All solutions create new problems. The problem now becomes: just how much of either photo was photoshopped? Has the color or position of the teeth been modified in either of the photos? Right now there is no way for this information to be communicated to the consumer, short of issuing something like a “statement of honesty” paragraph next to the photos. Perhaps in a decade or two, the authenticity of such things will be communicated to consumers, maybe with some sort of still-image metadata standard similar to MPEG-7, allowing for a checksum/signature to be carried all the way from the photo capturing device (camera) to the presentation device (printout / computer screen).
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