Generally speaking, we have two ways to see our appearance: the mirror and the camera.
However, we sometimes feel that the mirror and front camera photos, rear camera photos, the look of the photo is very different, and facial attractiveness is keeping changing.
Occasionally, when I take a picture with cellphone camera, I’m simply going to cry at my own ugliness, especially the skin, with a serious asymmetry between my left and right face, and my eyes are big and small.
In addition, now there are too many beauty cameras, every time you look in the mirror or take a picture with a beauty cam will be confused about how you look, and always feel different.
There are rumors that people will make themselves thirty percent more beautiful when they look in the mirror. So, what do I really look like? What do I really look like to others? Which one is the real self, the selfie, the other one or the mirror?
How do human eyes and cameras see the world?
Is the selfie the ugliest? Other people’s photos? Looking in the mirror is the most beautiful? In the end, which is the higher degree of restoration, but also from the human eye how to see the world.
It is a fact that the self in the mirror does feel much more comfortable than looking at oneself from a photo, but it is a rumor that the internet says that one looks 30% better than the self in the eyes of others.
Because this aspect of perception varies from person to person, there is no way to make digital statistics. Scientists have not done any research on this either. We think we look better in the mirror because we are more accustomed to this view.
The eye changes the focal length of the lens by adjusting the curvature of the lens to obtain an inverted, reduced real image. The farthest point that the eye can see is called the adjusted far point, and the far point that the ortho-optic eye can see is at the extreme distance; the closest point that the eye can see is called the adjusted near point, and the distance between the two points is called the adjustment range.
Just as it is difficult for AI intelligence to distinguish a face nowadays, we humans actually have defects in the human face. Vision is an impression formed after being transmitted from the retina to the brain, and is processed and used for recognition, rather than what things really look like.
Why do many people feel that the skin in the photos does not look like themselves? One of the most important factors is – the camera shooting with lens distortion.
In the camera distortion, the smaller the focal length, about close to the wide angle, the effect is to pull the area close to the lens part, similar to when we use the front camera selfie, the more obvious effect is that the edge of the location away from the lens is reduced, close to the location of the lens (such as the face, nose, skin, and mouth) is enlarged.
The larger the focal length, about close to the telephoto, the effect is that the perspective effect of the five features on the face is reduced, in other words, the sense of three-dimensionality is reduced, and the five features are squashed. [50mm standard lens + appropriate distance away from the lens] This combination produces a photo that is closest to the real you.
Compared to the camera skin , it’s better to look in the mirror
Looking at yourself in the mirror, the top and bottom are the same, the left and right are reversed, while the one in the photo is the same as what we usually see, a positive image. This subtle change makes the self in the photo look familiar and unfamiliar.
When you look in the mirror, you can see another “you” in the mirror, and the “person” in the mirror is your “image”. In mirror imaging, if two people are facing each other, your left side is on the right side of the other person, and your right side is on the left side of the other person. This effect is also called mirroring.
No one’s face in this world is perfectly symmetrical, for example, we always comb our hair to one side, and there are always subtle differences between the two eyes of a person. Even when we smile, the two corners of the mouth are raised at different angles. We usually look at ourselves in the mirror more often than we look at photos, and as a result, we are more familiar with ourselves in front of the mirror than we are with ourselves in the photos. Although the difference is small, it always looks uncomfortable.
This is most deeply felt when taking pictures with others, you will always feel that everyone is quite photogenic, but only you do not look good. This is because the photo of other people and you usually see more or less the same, only yourself, and usually see in the mirror there are differences.
So, in the future, when you feel that you are not as photogenic as others, you need to understand that you are just not familiar with the photo of yourself.
In addition, there is a “frozen face effect” psychological mechanism at work here.
Researchers at the University of California and Harvard University have found that people find it much better to look at a face that keeps moving in a video than to look at a screenshot in a video. This is still the result of the brain’s mechanism for processing visual information.
Since ancient times, humans have been accustomed to dynamic vision, and we don’t pause an image to look at it carefully afterward. The impression of a person is also an abstract model formed by combining facial features and various angles, which we can call the “average face”. In general, we always compare a person’s face with the “average face” in our impression, forming the impression of what we “see”.
Photos and video screenshots or camera skin, however, are counter-intuitive. In this case, we see a clear and objective still image, which is very different from the “average face” in our minds. The more unfamiliar something is, the less acceptable it is to us. This series of psychological effects make the photo of ourselves “ugly”.
In addition, under normal vision, most people’s skin imperfections are not obvious, but under the high-definition lens, the high-definition camera seems to give normal vision on the “hang-up”, the color and pores are unusually clear, so that the neatness of the skin is reduced, the face dirty, no texture of the five senses. Now, many cell phones are trying to improve their camera features, that is, your face’s dark circles, pimple marks, and other defects can not escape. This is like holding a magnifying glass in the face repeatedly scanning, how can look good well?
It can be said that almost every original camera behind the front camera has a broken heart, but when everyone looks in the mirror the situation is much better.
To sum up, the science of the degree of restoration is mirror > camera (phone rear camera) > phone front camera.
