Akademik

n.

Photographers' euphemism for the digital retouching techniques used to make subjects look younger and thinner.

—digital diet n.

It's a Hewlett-Packard (insert spying joke here) digital camera that offers a special "artistic effect" called "slimming," which basically takes a digital image and sort of smushes it, creating a narrowing effect. That's right. Now body dysmorphia isn't just in your head! You can actually execute your self-distortion in your own photos — just like magazine art directors do to the models who give us our own warped senses of what the female body is supposed to look like to begin with! Yay!

The best part about the Hewlett-Packard advertisement is, of course, the women they've decided require a digital diet. Two models are shown. Unsurprisingly, both are beautiful and utterly healthy looking. But not beautiful enough. Nosirree. They need to be slimmed!

—Rebecca Traister, "Digital dieting," Salon.com, September 19, 2006

At last, good old-fashioned ingenuity has found a way to address Americans' battle with their waistlines — no sweat. Instead of the latest diets or an annoying new exercise fad, the easiest way to look slim is a click of a button away.

Hewlett Packard's latest digital cameras feature an in-camera "slimming" function. In addition to getting rid of "red eye" with a click, the camera's software can manipulate the image so that the middle is slightly compressed and the outside edges are slightly wider.

—"Digital dieting; Cameras to make you look thinner," The Record, April 24, 2006

Among photographers, it's called digital dieting: the digital enhancement used on celebrity and model photographs today, making the subjects look freakishly flawless.

—Amy M. Spindler, "Making the Camera Lie, Digitally and Often," The New York Times, June 17, 1997