DeCloud retouches seniors’ photos, Zoe Royer and others speak out

by Libby Hyde

It all started with a post on senior Zoe Royer’s Reddit blog. From there, Zoe said, it escalated into a situation she didn’t see coming – international news coverage of her photoshopped student identification card.

“I thought it would be interesting for [Reddit users] to see that [photoshop issues] are actually happening,” Royer said. “I didn’t think my post was going to get this big.”

When Royer received her ID, like many other seniors, she was surprised to find a foreign face. Instead, as Zoe wrote in her original Reddit post, she looked like “a prettier twin sister,” evident with face smoothing, skin and lip recoloring, eyebrow reshaping and face thinning.

Within 24 hours of Royer’s original post on Reddit, other media sources, such as Jezebel, Cosmopolitan and Fox News, began their own coverage of the same issue. Many of these outlets attempted to contact Royer and to find the name of the school, which had not been released in the original Reddit post.

According to Royer, the most frustrating part of this entire situation was the inflammatory coverage from outside sources. While some articles held the correct information, others posted accusatory headlines that targeted the administration of the school rather than DeCloud Studios, who has since taken responsibility for the mishap in an article in the Kansas City Star.

“I was just really angry because there wasn’t anything I could do to make them change the titles,” Royer said. “It was just frustrating.”

While Royer’s story about her retouched photo received extensive media coverage, many other seniors in the class of 2015 received similar editing.

Since all of this media attention, STA president Nan Bone has requested that Royer and other students direct requested interviews to the administration instead of talking to reporters.

“They’re now having to fix the publicity of the school,” Royer said. “Even though everything I have said to the media about the school has been positive, [Bone] asked me because of publicity reasons. It kind of made me upset because it kind of felt like she was blaming me about the negative attention the school was getting.”

Bone has since explained her request that students not take interviews.

“I can’t guarantee that 600 students know the facts,” Bone said. “That’s why I said we have somebody here that is in communications that has checked the facts. So it’s better if we give them the facts. When Fox News said that the students wouldn’t talk to them, I said, ‘well we have great girls, they usually do what they’re told.’ It’s not that you girls wouldn’t do brilliantly anyway, it’s just that we can’t guarantee that you all have the facts right.”

Since giving those interviews, Bone has confirmed with DeCloud Studios that the student IDs were sent through a processing system that automatically retouches all photos. DeCloud declined to comment on the subject.

Senior Lindsay Roush, the yearbook photo editor from Mill Valley High School, confirmed that her school experienced very similar problems with the seniors’ photos. Mill Valley also works with DeCloud Studios.

“It was crazy, almost, that each senior’s photo was unrecognizable,” Roush commented about senior photos given to the student staff to be used in the yearbook. Roush said a representative from DeCloud met with her associate principal to discuss the mishap and admitted it was on part of DeCloud but did not comment on how the situation happened.

Reflecting on her own retouched photo, Roush said the most noticeable changes were evident in her fattened upper lip, slimmed face, added eye makeup, and darkened hair.

“I didn’t notice how weird I looked until one of my friends walked by my computer and asked if I was looking at the photo of a new student they hadn’t recognized,” Roush said.

Mill Valley seniors were all given new IDs that were unedited and assured the unedited photos will be the ones used in the yearbook. STA has done the same.

Royer, who has now stopped giving interviews to outside news sources, wanted to remind students that the whole point of this media scrutiny came from a place of emphasis on the importance of positive body image.

“The one thing I want students to remember is how all of the seniors reacted,” Royer said. “It was really powerful to see all of these young women look at their photos and see that’s not me and that’s not what I want to look like. People wanted to be remembered for who they are and not photoshopped. All these girls wanted to be themselves.”