Ironically, the mirror is the one most likely to be misrepresenting your image. In addition to being a flipped image of what you look like, anything but the most perfectly flat piece of glass is slightly distorting your proportions. And some mirrors are built to intentionally distort your appearance to make you appear more flattering to yourself.
Camera lenses are also distorting?
Your eyes as well
Boy do I have news for you about what smartphone cameras do.
Least mirrors don’t filter [much(?) yet(?)]
The right one looks like a mii
The right one looks like an Italian version of you?
In addition to being a flipped image
Common misconception. Mirrors reflect images, but do not flip them. If you put two items next to each other, their order is preserved in the reflection, not inverted.
The reason people think mirrors are flipped is because writing on shirts appear backwards, but that’s because your shirt is facing the wrong direction. Write a word on something clear and hold it up to a mirror. It’s not flipped. Put the word up against your chest like it was written on your shirt. Notice how you flipped the word in order to do that.
It is flipped. The mirror is showing you the reverse side of the card, so the image in the mirror is flipped twice. Two flips make a normal. A person looking at that card from the mirror side would see it as reversed, but the mirror flips it again so it looks normal to you.
The mirror is showing you the reverse side of the card
Yup! See the guy’s finger is on the reverse side of the card? It’s touching the N on the right side of your view. If you looked at it from where the mirror is, you’d see the guy’s finger touching the N, but now it’s on the left side of your view. Because you flipped, not the writing.
Most phone cameras also have a much wider focal length than our eyes though, which makes faces look a bit skinnier. I definitely look better in wide angle than in reality or telephoto.
Took me until my 20s to figure out that this is why I look like shit in close up photos. Phone cameras make my nose look suuuper disproportionately large. It’s a relief that I look better irl.
standing in front of a mirror
Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me so hard.
Flip your selfies along the Y-axis. Most phones have a setting to do this automatically. That’s the “you” that you’re most used to seeing in a mirror. It won’t fix everything, like the limitations of focal length, lighting, or camera quality, but if you’re the type to really obsess over how much “worse” you look in selfies, that trick can do a lot.
Flip your selfies along the Y-axis
Now both are lying.
Yeah, it’s better to switch the setting in the mirror instead.
Take a photo of yourself in the mirror. Where is your god now?
Imo mirror selfies do on average tend to look a lot better. I think a lot of it must be that the photo is taken from further away. This causes two things…
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The picture isn’t a detailed because the shot is simply further away. Wrinkles, acne, and other imperfections are not as clear or pronounced.
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Features like your nose, chin, eyes, etc. appear smaller in far shots than close shots. In close shots, there is a bit of a “fisheye” effect due to the perspective, even if you aren’t using a fisheye lens. It exaggerates a lot of facial features and isn’t how you normally see yourself when you’re looking into the mirror because you just aren’t that close.
No, it’s just just “because the image is flipped” which is what is repeated ad nauseum online. The biggest thing is the second point I mentioned.
There was a gif out there somewhere that very simply and easily demonstrates this phenomenon of how wildly different your facial features can look from this.
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At least one*
The mirror serves up organic photons.
I find that analog reflections have a warmer, more pleasant tone.
It’s the camera. A wider lens will help immensely, but you’ll need a dedicated camera for it. I never use my cellular camera for selfies.
The lens doesn’t matter.
To help stem the downvotes from people who don’t understand, if you take a picture of a vase with various mm lenses from the same distance and then crop to the size of the vase, every picture will be the same. It’s only distance that matters. Taking 20 pictures in a grid really close to your face with a telephoto lens and stitching them together into a single picture will result in a wide angle shot.
True but the point of using a different lens is that you move closer / father away from the objective. You get the best head shots from a distance with a telephoto lens. Not really practical for selfies of course.
You get the same shot from that distance with a wide angle lens. All a telephoto lens does is optically crop the picture.
Okay, that’s simply untrue. Look into dolly zoom to see the difference in action
A dolly zoom moves the camera, that’s the entire point of a dolly zoom. The zoom while moving the camera is only there to keep the framing the same, the actual visual change is caused by the movement of the camera, not by the changing of the focal length. You’d get the exact same effect if you used a fixed-focus lens and just cropped the resulting video to keep the framing constant.
Okay, now I get what you’re saying and you’re absolutely correct. But from the perspective of the photographer, it doesn’t really matter. The motif you’re aiming for is fixed. What you then influence is distance and lens and lens I can directly read from my camera. If I shoot with a wide angle, I have to get closer to get the motif that I want, if I zoom in, I need to step back. So, yes, technically distance is what matters but the distance correlates with the lens I’m using. That’s why tips like “shoot portraits with 85 mm to get the most natural look” still make sense although you’re right
It’s actually true though. Only difference is you need to crop the image on a wider lens, making the quality lower.
Yes, I realized they are right but their original statement that the lens doesn’t matter is still wrong. I can’t crop without losing quality and uncropping only works in shitty movies
I didn’t notice for a while that by default the camera on my Pixel 8 was using a filter that makes your eyes and lips bigger. Every time I open the camera, I have to turn off the filter because there’s no way to change what the default filter is.
Have you considered upgrading to GrapheneOS?
Provider locked. Can’t install Graphene.
I had to pay mine off before I could unlock the bootloader too.
That’s shocking. I’m currently evaluating my prejudice as that sounds like such a Samsung thing to do (as much as I hate Google and alphabet, I thought the Android crew were fairly upright)
They very much are not. Think of google as android for profit edition. The hardware is pretty solid though.
I’ve disabled Face Retouching (smoothing) and it stays disabled. Where is the eyes and lips filter setting?
Focal length makes a real difference. Cell phone cameras have a really hard time with that; that’s why photos from a selfie stick look better than just holding the camera, even at arms length.
According to YouTube wisdom, people don’t like seeing themselves in images because they’re not mirrored like people are used to. Camera apps nowadays “correct” for that and do mirror the image for preview.
VSauce: INSIDE a Spherical Mirror
Camera apps nowadays “correct” for that and do mirror the image for preview
Huh, I always thought people who post flipped photos are just technically challenged (and/or have really poor eye for detail to not notice it). Never considered someone doing that on purpose just to further their own delusion of what they look like.
It’s more about the image being saved looking like the one I saw in the preview when taking it.
Or maybe it’s just what the camera defaults to and they don’t bother changing it because why would you? Which is a more reasonable assumption than calling them delusional
Um… that’s what I said was my assumption. But according to the comment I was replying to, people prefer the flipped version because it looks like what they see in the mirror, i.e. what they think they look like.
The depth perception also makes quite a difference. The side of your face can clearly be seen in a mirror to be the side of your face, but depending on lighting, the side of your face can look as if it’s part of the front of your face in a picture as you don’t have the depth perception. The result is that photos make you look fatter than your mirror image would.
Seven days….
Both
The mirror is how you see yourself. The camera is how you’re seen by others.
