My first thought on reading this article from xojane about digitally retouching magazine photos was, “No wonder I’m so bad at spotting celebrities out and about!”

But if you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, talk to a digital retoucher at a fashion and celebrity glossy, which is what I did. The retoucher I spoke with — who preferred to remain anonymous — is a 20 year veteran of the trade. He came up when digital retouching was in its infancy, when edits were still being painted on with an actual airbrush (like, with real paint). His mentor was the exclusive retoucher for one of the most famous supermodels of the 1990s.

I think in some ways we’re holding magazine photo shoots to an unreasonable standard of “reality.”

I agree that things like giving models of color lighter skin or taking out people’s collarbones or erasing pounds are ridiculous symptoms of a nasty cultural climate of body image pressure. But…these aren’t your sibling’s vacation photos or candid shots from a dinner party with friends; they’re already highly staged and highly produced before the photograph reaches the digital editing stage. Models are routinely captured in poses that no one, including themselves, could hold for more than a few seconds because that’s all the time needed to get the shot. Everyone is wearing much more makeup than they would normally because of the bright lighting; it’s like the theater, where close-up photos look weird because the actors’ makeup is exaggerated to make their facial expressions visible from the back of the audience. Context does matter.

One of my favorites (via Retronaut).

Photographs seem to be a more “accurate” view of ourselves because they are produced by an observer outside ourselves, which we have learned to think of as objective and authoritative—yet they can be unsettling because we are used to seeing ourselves in mirror-reflection. People in Victorian and earlier photographs seem so solemn and stiff because they had to hold still for the long exposure times required with early photography techniques so the end result wouldn’t turn out blurry and superimposed; it’s a bit of a shock to see examples of them smiling and being playful.

If you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a beautiful sunset and are disappointed that the result doesn’t look like what you witnessed, you should know that there’s more to processing photographs than drastically altering someone’s appearance. Our eyes can do things automatically that even really good cameras aren’t great at—or take a lot of time and effort to set up and then the sun goes behind a cloud or the temperature drops half a degree and you have to do it all again, or wait—and that’s where the computer comes in (and/or the darkroom, if you’re working with physical film). Washed-out colors, overexposure, poor contrast: these are all things that Photoshop is designed to be excellent at fixing. Photographers do a lot of work before taking the photo and a lot of work afterwards; the idea that the perfect photograph just “happens” is mostly a myth. It’s disingenuous to disavow Photoshop like owning and using it at all is some kind of a moral failing when it’s a standard digital photographer’s tool.

Digital plastic surgery aside, magazine covers reflect reality the way “reality TV” reflects reality: they are both constructed images designed to sell more of themselves. And beyond that purposeful construction, fundamentally the very act of recording a thing can change it; the presence of a camera or any other observer alters the way we perceive an event and the way we act in it, and the resulting images are no longer the thing itself. It’s off base to expect these products to be completely raw and unedited, or to assume that they would be more “real” if they were.