We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more ›
In this socially networked age it can be tough to manage your personal brand, what with all those hastily snapped pics from last night ending up on Facebook (and Twitter, and Last Night’s Party, any number of Tumblr feeds). What if your hair wasn’t right? What if, heaven forbid, someone captured a pic that wasn’t of your “good side.” The new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 has the answer: a “beauty re-touch” function that tweaks your skin tone, whitens your teeth, adjusts your makeup, and otherwise replaces images of you with a more attractive person that looks like you.
“According to data we’ve acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,”Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera, told Reuters. The other half, presumably, are already stunningly beautiful, and the FX77 aims to level the photographic playing field.
The Cosmetic Mode allows users to manipulate their images in a variety of ways, removing dark circles from eyes, smoothing wrinkles, increasing translucency and tone of the skin (Summer Look!), and even shrinking the size of faces and enlarging eyes. It even lets users apply or adjust makeup, adding rogue, eye shadow, and lipstick to an image.
A testament to human vanity? Absolutely, but the Art Retouch function also lets photogs tinker with the saturation of color and brightness of images right on the camera, features that many might find useful beyond doctoring their own visages.
There’s certainly something very uncandid about snapping that candid shot only to manipulate the faces into something that they’re not. Then again, if you’re really particular about putting your best foot forward in each and every Facebook photo your friends never see, you now have an option. Until we all have beautifully sculpted, personalized robotic doubles to pose in all of our photos for us, this will have to do.