Abstract

With the inventional of digital editing, photographs now have the capability to be altered to extremes creating an entirely new image, unrepresentative of the real world. The ways in which a photograph can be edited is based upon the perception of beauty that the editor possesses. This article aims to find a correlation between the public’s perception of beauty that has been influenced by the media and digital editing that can enhance or transform a photograph. Several of my own edited and raw photographs were evaluated, looking for results of my own specific views of beauty that impacted the editing process. Along with my own photography, I developed a questionnaire that was completed by seventeen participants at Indiana University of Pennsylvania evaluating their own beliefs of beauty and edited images. The results from the research gave substantial evidence that supports a correlation between digtial editing and media influence on perception of beauty considering a large percentage of participants, and myself, edit our photographs and believe that our perception of beauty has been influenced by the media.