We have all heard those stories, where someone has used PhotoShop to make themselves look younger, more handsome or thinner – right?
Well, what I am about to share with you here is what I call photo-shock!
It’s the shock someone experiences when they meet someone for the first time, who they have previously only seen very heavily PhotoShopped pictures of.
A twitter connection
I spoke with a friend last week, who told me about her shock at meeting a man for the first time; whom she had only previously communicated with via twitter.
They agreed to meet in person; as this guy is a designer and my friend had some design work, which he wanted the chance to quote for. So, they decided it was best to meet in a public place and chose Starbucks. My friend arrived a little early, grabbed a coffee and waited.
Noticing her twitter friend was about 20 minutes late, she decided to give him a quick call, just to make sure he was OK. The weather was extremely bad and she was concerned he may have had an accident.
Imagine her surprise, when he answered the phone and told her he was already there; sitting upstairs enjoying a coffee! Now, my friend had sat downstairs, close to the door and she watched each person come in. She told me:
“At this point Jim, I just assumed he must have arrived before I did; because I watched the door like a hawk, so that I could welcome him and ‘break the ice’.”
Even after being told where he was sitting, she STILL couldn’t spot him – until he called over to her! Suddenly she figured out what had happened!
The picture used by her twitter friend had been so heavily PhotoShopped that it was basically a different person! As a professional designer and an expert with PhotoShop, he was able to create an amazing set of pictures of himself for his website and twitter profile; which look great – but are nothing whatsoever like he really looks. She was genuinely shocked!
Most noticeably, the man she met seemed to be around her age (she’s 52), yet the pictures he uses online look to be closer to someone in their late twenties. He had doctored the images to change his age by around 25 years. As she told me;
it’s one thing to pick pictures of yourself that show you in your best light or to remove the odd zit / spot; but this guy looked like the father of the guy I was expecting to meet. It instantly destroyed any trust I previously had in him.
Although this might sound like a funny story, there’s an important issue here.
What about trust?
Before someone will do business with us, they have to trust us. They need to believe we will deliver on the service we promise or that the product we supply really will do whatever we claim it will. If someone starts off a business relationship, behind a heavily doctored picture of them self, is it REALLY going to impress a prospective client when they learn it’s a fake?
Over to you!
If you met someone for the first time and saw that they had been using heavily doctored images of themselves online – would it create a ‘trust issue’ for you?
Do you believe, as my friend does, that this is a form of dishonesty or is it OK to use software to make yourself look as good as possible? Is there a limit, beyond which it’s unacceptable, if so, where’s that limit in your opinion?
Let us know what you think!
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I believe in the principle, “Who you are is more important than who you appear to be.” I personally would have been scared and ended the meeting right away.
For me, it’s not even a trust issue. The main point of having a picture up on twitter or my blog is so that people can see exactly what I look like. I’d much rather use a mugshot that allows me to be easily identified in person than an image that’s been so heavily photoshopped I look better than Denzel Washington.
Jeremy
People are shocked to find that I really am a Yahoo! Avatar in real life too. They can’t miss me at the Starbucks.
Is it strange that my avatar wears sunglasses to remain incognito?
That explains alot. I should have used a photoshopped picture instead of my real face!!
LOL!
I wonder why your friend didn’t find out how old the person was or anything else about him physically before agreeing to meet. It’s one thing to broadcast a certain false image of yourself on-line, it’s totally another to outright lie to someone you’d like to get to know. I’m not condoning his PhotoShopping tendencies, but it seems to me that an important issue is that your friend didn’t really get to know her twitter friend very well before setting up this meeting. I am assuming that her friend didn’t deliberately mislead her by giving her false information; she just *assumed* his age and looks based upon his pictures on twitter.
Say, what do we do when we can no longer photoshop? You now, when “age” old reality sets in?
))
Great, thought-provoking topic IF you plan to meet someone in person. All of my avatars are either baby photos, illustrations, or slightly Photoshopped (a few wrinkles removed here and there). My profiles are honest about my age, so if we expect to meet and you think a 1-year-old is coming, maybe you’d better not take my avatars too seriously! LOL
Authors have been doing this for years, I’ve seen book jacket photos in use for 20 years or more. It never made me think less of an author when I saw the more wrinkled and aged visage at a reading It just seems a touch of vanity, nothing more. It’s one thing to misrepresent yourself in a dating profile in your resume photo or something similar but avatars seem to me to be playful by nature and subject to different rules.
Photo doctoring has been going on for some time even before the great photoshop. It is just become easier now with this software.
Personally, I think cleaning up blemishes, brightening, and such are perfectly fine. However, I have not done that personally. I can understand why some would.
Of course, I think that it is out of the question for one to heavily doctor into another person entirely or take off 25 years. It certainly hurts your credibility if discovered like in this case.
Unfortunately, this goes on very frequently online. Many are never discovered because they don’t ever put themselves in a place to meet any of their “customers” offline.
Personally, I think that it is great to get an opportunity to meet any of your customers or followers in an offline setting. It really takes the connection to the next level creating more trust and loyalty.
To Success,
Joseph Parton
Such a thought provoking post! It does beg the question of whether or not people who choose to portray themselves through excessively photoshopped photos should be trusted.
I agree with what many others have said that small alterations (blemishes, flyaways, etc) are acceptable. However, I would think twice about someone who had no problem using massive changes to portray themselves. It strikes me as deceptive. If the individual has no problem being deceptive with their avatar, where else will they have no problem using deception?
I guess this is just another example of where we need to be cautious online. How you choose to portray yourself may have consequences you didn’t anticipate.
Come ON people! This is not DATING. I don’t think it is deceitful for someone to PhotoShop the heck out of their avatar, use a cartoon instead of a photo, or use a pic of a side of beef.
If you are meeting someone from Twitter on a professional basis, it is common practice to ask “what do you look like?” or “what will you be wearing?” Or even “Can I find you based on your Twitter avatar?”
Forming a business opinion about a Twitterfriend based solely on their avatar “looks,” airbrushed or not, is superficial and I feel quite inappropriate.
I totally am for trust and there are many slippery slopes building trusted online business relationships. But “trusting” someone or not because of the avatar they are using is simply not smart business.
Personally, I think a 50-something guy touching up his avatar to look 25-something is akin to the 50-something who pulls up to the Starbucks in a flashy Corvette. I’ll recognize the mid-life crisis moment but certainly won’t hold it against him in business.
I think it would be a complete deal breaker for me. It is a bit like the Trades Descriptions Act, if we started touching up product photos so they looked more than they are then we would start getting law suites.
Yes a little bit of touching up is ok, I admit I have done it with mine. But digital cosmetic surgery is just a bit to far and would completely break any trust built up if it happened to me.
Interesting. I have never liked any photos of me – professional or otherwise. They are definitely not glamorous or flattering. I do find it helpful to haver reasonably up to date photos on my web and to find my contacts’ up to date photos so we can meet. So the totally out of date photo does not help, but beyond that I build my trust levels on someone’s actions – whatever the packaging or the words, it is what someone does that indicates to me what they are like!
I know this may be a little off topic … while reading this blog I caught jim mentioning “They need to believe we will deliver on the service we promise or that the product we supply really will do whatever we claim it will.”
While I am not self-employed, my mind-set isn’t any different than if I were self-employed. That I give my all to the job so that hopefully by the time it reaches the client, their expectations have been exceeded and this encourages returning clientele. Now that is my mind-set, but throughout the years I have observed at work that most fellow workers work grudgingly, always critical, nagging that this isn’t right, that isn’t right and how can they possibly do their job when the customer hasn’t done this or that. Like the customer is a real obstacle/problem to them!
Why is it that when we purchase something, we “expect” value for our money, but when the roles are reversed, and now here we are the ones offering a service, the mentality becomes the opposite? This is the one draw back to being employed by others I think anyways. We tend to turn off something in our brains when it is our turn to return the favour we expect others to do for us when we part with our money in return for a service or product.
Go figure.
Maybe I am just trolling, but it really irks me when people break up the word ‘Photoshop’ as ‘Photo Shop,’ ‘PhotoShop,’ et al. The application name on my dock is ‘Adobe Photoshop CS4.’ One word.