(Update) Otaku House Cosplay Idol: Should This Be Allowed?

(original post)

Ok, we have received, many, many, MANY emails regarding one of the finalists in the Europe category.

Everyone knows we allow digital enhancements to our contest photos to make their cosplay pictures more interesting and create a ‘story ambience’ to accentuate their cosplays. Many examples of digital enhancements that we frequently see in our contest are instagram-style filters for ambience effects; weather elements like snow, mist or fire; backdrop ‘teleportation’ to an alternate universe etc. While these are obvious enhancements, the more subtle touchups to costumes may escape everyone, like which button’s color was changed, or which damaged zip was repaired digitally.

So seeing as we can’t disallow photoshop because we cannot enforce by hiring photoshop forensic to scrutinize every photo for any photohopped buttons, now comes the problem of where the line should be drawn.

Apparently, this finalist have photoshopped the armor of the Loki costume that actor Tom Hiddleston (look fan girls, you don’t have to scream every time you hear his name) wore in the Thor promotional movie poster onto her own costume (and then some), and many are screaming murder to us.

So we are in a dilemma. On one hand, as mentioned, we can’t ban digital enhancements in our contest because we cannot enforce it (Please stop bugging us about this already). On the other hand, photoshopping part of a costume from a movie poster doesn’t seem right.

So here we are, being very transparent to everyone. Since this is a public voting contest, we want to hear from the public.

Tell us what you think in the comments below. Should this be allowed?

The following images are sent to us from members of the public.

1. Loki Cosplay.

This Loki cosplay costume is one of the photos submitted to our Finals. The contestant admitted in her deviantart that the armor was photoshopped on. What she said in her deviantart caption: “The chains I’ve made for myself… I faked the armor with ps but everything else is real.”

However, she left out this important detail in the description on our contest. We’ve received many protests that this as an attempt to deliberately mislead the voting public since the armor is one of the main focus of the costume. Her official description for the same picture in our contest reads “Edited with Photoshop, to get the real look.”

Source: Deviantart and Thor official movie poster.
Stitched image submitted to us by a member of the public

2. Frost Cosplay

Full kudos to the cosplayer to openly admit she photoshopped the crystals and staff in the photo on her deviantart. However, she appeared to claim to have made these in her description submitted to us.

Caption on deviantart photo: “I shopped the ice crystals on to my hoodie and the leather straps on the trousers, and faked the staff as good as I could. What do you think so far?! I can’t wait to have hoodie, trousers staff finished for real.”

Description submitted to the contest: “I made the cosplay myself. It was fun to dye the pants and paint the hoodie and add all the details.”

I suppose grammar nazis would point out that you can’t assume she manually added ” the details”, that she could have meant she digitally added “the details”. Our opinion? The sentence do sound incredibly misleading since the ice crystals are a main detail of the costume too.

Source: Deviantart and Cosplay Idol contest page

We need help from the community. Tell us what you think in the comments below. And no, we are not asking you to tell us that we should “get a panel of judges”, so please don’t hijack issue. We will take everybody’s opinion into consideration before we make our decision on whether to allow this finalist to continue with the contest.