Beware photo editing!

Learn how to spot the signs of editing so you can tell a genuine photo from an enhanced one.


Learn hot spot the signs of heavily edited photos

These days sites like Instagram, facebook and pinterest are filled with incredible photographs of beautiful cats and kittens. We scroll through our social media feeds admiring all of these incredible cats and kittens and wondering how on earth a cat can have quite such vivid orange eyes, or how a cat can have the deepest sapphire blue eyes - the likes of which we have never seen before. 

Well...here is the secret...the images are heavily edited! And some are really heavily edited.  Almost all of the famous social media cat accounts are consistently heavily edited to ‘improve’ the appearance of their cat. If you met these cats in real life, you would likely be very disappointed by the vast majority of them.

Here we will teach you how to spot a heavily edited photo. 

There are some ways of editing photos that are so clever that you would struggle to spot any signs of editing. However, as a general rule, where you see something so incredible that you have never seen anything even remotely like it before, be suspicious! These images are probably heavily edited.

Most people, however, are not talented enough or blessed with enough time to be editing their images that cleverly. So here are the tell-tale signs of photo editing: 

  1. Eye colour is just too deep. Some cats do have fabulously deep eyes, but not many. If eye colour looks incredible, then investigate the picture further. 

  2. Nose colour is too pink. Where cats have pink noses, it is easy to see editing: as they edit the photo to make eye colour look deeper, the nose starts to look deeper as well. When the nose is pink it can end up looking fluorescent pink! 

  3. The fur colour starts to look warmer and darker: blue starts to look more amber, chocolate looks much richer and white cats start to look more yellow or pink

  4. Look at the background. If there are items in it that you are familiar with, pay attention to see if they look brighter than you would expect. For example wood will look more orange.

Here is an example of quick photo editing for you:

This is the first photo. This is totally unedited, and not even a particularly good photo. In fact, the light was very bad and has actually made her eyes look paler than they are. Be aware that our colourpoints have naturally exceptionally blue eyes! So even though this is a normal, not very good photo, the eye colour is still exceptional.

Photo editing: genuine photo

This photo has not been edited in any way. Remember that our colourpoints are exceptional and already have incredibly blue eyes. 

british shorthair blue eyes for sale

This is the second photo. This has been edited using a social media editor to 50% capacity. See hoe the eyes appear more vividly blue, the nose is pinker, and the fur more yellow?

Photo editing: half enhanced

british shorthair colourpoint blue eyes photo editing

 

Photo editing: more enhanced

Below is the third photo. This has been edited using the same social media editor to 100% capacity. Even bluer eyes, pinker nose and yellower fur.

british shorthair blue eyes colourpoint photo edited

And in many photos on social media you will see that the images have been far more edited even that this! 

It took literally took 20 seconds to do this. Social media websites are full of these heavily edited images and unfortunately, even breeder websites now feature heavily edited images as standard in many cases! Don’t get caught out by fake photos! Be aware, pay attention and examine photos carefully. Assume that photos have been edited until you know that they haven’t. 

When we get chance we will try to upload an example of an orange eyed cat for you with the same editing done. 

Read more: 

- kitten sale scams and how to avoid them 

Find out if we have any British Shorthair kittens available on our kitten page.