  Although it is generally believed that the solar photosphere is not
magnetically force-free owning to its high plasma $\beta$, the estimations of
force-freeness using observed magnetograms have produced disputable results.
Some studies confirmed that the photosphere is largely not force-free whereas
some authors argued that the photosphere is not far away from being force-free.
In a previous paper of ours we demonstrated that, due to the fact that the
noise levels of the transverse field in the magnetograms are much larger than
those of the vertical field, wrong judgements on the force-freeness could be
made: a truly force-free field could be judged as being not-force-free and a
truly not-force-free field could be judged as being force-free. Here in this
letter we propose an approach to overcome this serious problem. By reducing the
spatial resolution to lower the noise level, the heavy influence of the
measurement noise on the force-freeness judgement can be significantly
suppressed. We first use two analytical solutions to show the success and the
effectiveness of this approach. Then we apply this new approach to two large
datasets of active region magnetograms, obtained with the HMI/SDO and
SP/Hinode, respectively. Our analysis shows that the photospheric magnetic
fields are actually far away from being force-free. Particularly and most
notably, the mean value of Fz/Fp (where Fz the net Lorentz force in the
vertical direction and Fp the total Lorentz force) is as low as -0.47, with
more than 98% of the active regions having |Fz/Fp|>0.1, when using the
SP/Hinode magnetograms of true field strength.
