Beauty Filter: A photo-technique 'blur' effect that looks beautiful!

- Sign-in-Harsh Meswania

- Here's what to know about the technique and its effects after beautifying a myriad of selfie filters on vacation with family, with friends or on a trip!

How many photos are posted on social media platforms every day?

Let's start with the biggest platform Facebook. Facebook has 2.91 billion monthly active users. 30 crore photographs are posted on Facebook every day. On an average, 300,000 statuses are updated in a minute, of which 70% share photos. 46 to 47 thousand photos are shared every minute in Instagram, owned by Facebook itself. In Twitter, there are four and a half to five lakh tweets in a minute, and half of them include a photo in the post. Snapchat users share five and a half million photos a minute. Last year, people around the world took 1.2 trillion photographs and shared them on social media, of which 4.7 trillion photos are stored in the servers of social media companies.

These facts mean that people like to share the happenings around them with others. Loves to present himself to others. what did you eat what did you drink How did it work? What fun? - People like to put the event in social media through photos or videos. How and to what extent social media companies will misuse our data in the long run is a different topic of discussion, but if we talk only about photoposts here, the researchers' findings point to many things.

In social media, people present more good things. The craze of showcasing beauty has also increased along with flaunting a lavish life-style to impress others. A by-product of the craze that spawned a multi-billion rupee beauty industry out of the quest to look good is the beauty filter.

After mobile phones became 'smartphones', the bet was on to provide a better camera. Various camera tricks emerged as a key feature in smartphones. Instead of one, there are two cameras. Added front camera feature, increased pixel capacity.

After all that, Snapchat, popular among the youth, provided beauty filters for the first time in 2015. Till now the features were coming in mobile, but for the first time the social media platform has given the facility to make the photo look better with the help of official intelligence. Mobile may be of any company, but if the photo is taken with the help of Snapchat's feature, the result would look better. This feature got very good feedback. It had such a technique that the lights could be set to be more or less low while taking pictures, and the photographs of the photographer looked much neater.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom introduced the beauty feature for the first time in 2016, soon after this feature came to Snapchat. That filter was even more powerful than Snapchat. It had more options. If there are pimples on the mouth, any other small blemishes or dark circles around the eyes, it will be filtered and the photo will look like a movie hero-heroine was the main feature of this feature. If the photo that was shared in the Insta story for 24 hours was taken from the Insta itself, then the person looked more beautiful in it. This feature works like online makeup! Once upon a time, modeling photos were taken in professional studios. That photo looked better and more attractive than our ordinary photos taken in events like engagement-wedding - the picture taken from the beauty filter of M Insta became more attractive.

This Insta beauty filter has revolutionized smartphone photography. After 2017, half of the smartphones that came in the market started getting the option of beauty fielder. In a year or two, that feature was added to most of the smartphones. Not only this, other social media platforms also got the same facility.

Now the situation has come to such a state that we don't even like to share photographs without beauty filters on social media, let alone keep them in our mobile phones! How much has the mindset of the new generation changed due to the feature which initially seemed revolutionary? There has been a lot of research on this and it is shocking.

Apart from comparing ourselves with others, social media has created a situation where we constantly compare ourselves with ourselves. Appearance based assessment has been there for centuries. Social media added more fuel to it. At one time face value was important for an actor or a product. Today it has become important for everyone. It has made people health conscious. If we consider it a plus point that people have become more aware about appearance, then we have to consider the minus point that people are living in a new virtual world.

British cosmetic company Uvance conducted an interesting survey. Its findings are startling. 2069 people were asked questions about face filters. 38 percent accepted that it is impossible for them to post photos without beauty filters. 59 percent said they hate looking at themselves in the mirror after seeing a social media photo!

23 percent of people said that they get shocked after seeing the unfiltered photo. 30 percent admitted that using filters negatively affects their self-esteem and makes them feel self-loathing, but still use beauty filters to look prettier and younger in a changing world.

37 percent had no problem with the filter feature. They said that they enjoy showing a filtered face more than their real face. His argument was that 90 percent of social media friends are never likely to meet face to face.

What role do filters play in the changing beauty standards of the new generation? The psychology department of Erden University in Germany conducted a research on this topic. There were also many interesting findings. Of those surveyed, 78 percent admitted that they no longer had the confidence to look like they did after overusing beauty filters. 29 percent avoided going to social functions for fear of looking less beautiful after being photographed with a beauty filter.

New York's famous plastic surgeon Dr. Selfie filters are a form of online plastic surgery, says Daniel Maman, but in reality, they're cheating ourselves. We use such features to deceive others because we cannot appear as we are, but at the same time we deceive ourselves.

American Newport Academy professor Heather Moonroe, who has done a detailed study of the new generation and beauty standards, says that face filters reduce self-confidence in the new generation. Not only this, a terrible mental illness is being born of not being able to accept the natural process of growing from child to young, from young to mature, from mature to old. The new generation does not want to grow old and such features give it scope for more comfort.

Well, this study does not mean that we should not use this photo-technique. A face filter helps in taking good photos in low light or high light conditions. Makes the face look more radiant. Our confidence increases. If there is an advantage in photography with the help of technology, it should definitely be used.

But what the researchers point to is nothing to ignore. Technology is welcome as long as it is for our convenience, for our interest, for the increase in our confidence. If the same technology becomes inevitable or creates a permanent state of non-acceptance of reality, it can have serious consequences. It doesn't matter as long as the image is clear with the beauty filter, if the blur effect occurs, it's worth noting.

Selfie is the most popular hashtag in the world

- Girls using smartphones spend 54 hours a year taking selfies. Young people aged 16 to 32 spend an average of four and a half minutes on selfies every day.

- The average age of smartphone users who take selfies is 24 years. In 60 percent of selfies, people keep smiling faces!

- iPhone 4 was the first smartphone with a selfie camera. The trend of selfie started from 2010. After the popularity of Instagram, sharing of selfies has increased by 75 percent.

- After 2016, there was a 13 percent increase in plastic surgery worldwide to make selfies look better. Experts say that most people, especially girls, undergo plastic surgery not to look like a celebrity, but to look like a filtered photo of themselves.

- Know what is the most popular background for selfies? The Eiffel Tower.

- The researchers found that users who try to hide the background while taking selfies are privacy conscious and introverted.

- On January 16, 2011, a woman named Jennifer Lee posted a hashtag selfie for the first time. After that, there have been countless posts in the world with the hashtag selfie. Selfie is the most popular hashtag in the world today.