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Before/after – what retouching looks like

Since postings here today seem a bit thin on the ground, let me recycle a link which I’ve already featured on my Culture Blog, but which I think is interesting enough to make a posting for the mass media. (I originally found it at b3ta.com.)

I’m talking about this, this being a site which includes something I’ve read about a lot but never actually seen demonstrated with the relevant contrasts. I’m talking about the ancient and now technologically rejuvenated art of picture retouching.

The most striking is the picture you get to straight from the link, but there are lots of others at the same site.

Okay I admit it, at this point I did pause a bit to think of a political moral to stick at the end, a thing not needed on a Culture Blog. But I think there is one, concerning the degree to which cameras do or do not tell lies. Put it this way, I think maybe I’ll give this site a mention at White Rose as well. An awful lot of credence is placed these days on photographic evidence. What this before/after site reminds us is that photos are only as reliable as a way to tell the truth as are the people in charge of them. (You have only to think of Stalin’s graphics department.) As it gets easier to manipulate images, so our readiness to trust them ought to diminish.

This site shows what is the result of retouching. But does anyone here know how long it takes to do this kind of thing, and how difficult it is? And can all of it simply be done with Photoshop?

12 comments to Before/after – what retouching looks like

  • S. Weasel

    ‘Twas ever thus.

    My art teacher in High School (in the seventies, thank you very much) was once employed airbrushing the eyeballs of New York’s top fashion model. She was crosseyed, apparently. No, I didn’t get her name.

    Then there was the (probably apocryphal) story of Burt Reynolds’ famous Cosmopolitan centerfold. The story goes that the editor was so concerned about getting rid of three wrinkles on Burt’s stomach that no-one noticed his navel had been airbrushed out, and the first print run subsequently had to be destroyed.

  • Julian Morrison

    Go view the “whole body at once” image, then roll over it with the mouse… does anyone else agree with me that the “before” is actually far more interesting than the plasticky looking “after”?

  • lucklucky

    hehe i dont agree Julian 🙂

    Well i am professionally in that area, more in 3D modelling but also video editing etc.
    The answer Brian is yes . A pro can do that with Photoshop easily in an evening.
    Have no doubts today will be the technological dream of a communist picture retouching artist.

    A little more dificult can be done also in vídeo too, but theres no need to make it frame a frame
    since pixel tracking can move the effect over frames, problem is that light changes.

    Good applications for that vídeo editing are Discreet Combustion and Pinnacle Commotion.

    if u want to know where is the technology
    http://www.imagineersystems.com/mokey/

    go and see vídeo examples, like the dog and the person the car etc.

    Just a simple PC and know how.

    More bad quality has the image easier is to do that.

  • willc2

    for a pro, there is essentially NOTHING you cannot fake given enough source material and time (measured in hours and days, not weeks).

    Go to worth1000.com and see what amateurs are doing every day in their spare time.

  • Well… “he he”, I DO agree Julian. 😉

    The “before” is indeed far more interesting. The sensuality of curves shaped naturally as opposed to a sort of constructivist implementation of the cheap advertising vision of women fantasized by a third rate prepuberal Frankenstein unsure of his own sexuality.

    And I’m being polite and friendly.

    In my opinion, the “after” is not only pretty scary, it also denotes a pathetic conceit of feminine beauty “standards” (just look at what part have been “enlarged” and what parts have been “slimmed”) and is also terribly boring for the true aesthete, amateur of womanly magnificence (at least those of us who weren’t ruthlessly hunted down and emasculated by the Feminist Horde) such as it shines, somewhere between the Venus of Willendorf and the Callipygian one.

    The eye just slide on “plastic babe” and eventually falls, having nothing to cling to, while the, er, “real plastic”, has so much more to tell and focus on.

    Each and every “incident” wrinkle, plumpness or natural curve just seize the eye one after another, has a story to tell and, well, rejoicing perspectives to cast, if you don’t mind me saying so.

    Good thing the default roll over state is on Frankenstein’s plastic babe.

    Else, I would definitely need that cold shower I guess.

  • lucklucky

    Do you know me?
    Dont tire yourself psyching me you’re wasting your time.

    You seem very childish…maybe you must know that first rule with women beauty is that there is no rules.

    I’m usually usually very conservative in this things, i hate make up, and such adds, not in this case, the skin texture of the “real” woman is awfull.

    (“real” because that was also probably edited to show stronger some defects)

  • Tony H

    The Photoshop alterations shown on the linked site are far from extreme, and perfectly usual – though I personally agree that “plasticising” the model’s skin is not pleasing, makes her look like a Playboy centrefold, i.e. totally unreal andf therefore not so erotically appealing as the real thing.
    As for photographic truth/untruth, I’ve always wondered where the “camera never lies” thing came from, and why it’s repeated so often. If you want a generalisation, it would be less misleading to argue that in fact the camera always lies: a photo almost never actually says anything by itself, but needs to be tied down by a caption – which, of course, can say almost anything. I’m a photographer, so I find it especially amusing that so many photographers (as well as a great many others) are so passionately attached to what they consider to be the great power photography has to convey truths, messages and so on, and thereby change the world. A classic instance is the way many will drone on about how media coverage, especially photography, supposedly brought the Vietnam War to a premature halt (BTW I’m not talking rights & wrongs here): I point out that since it ran in a pretty active way for ten years or so, it was actually among the longest wars of the century. In the Western cultural tradition we also like to think that “truth/accuracy” is a given, something fixed and unarguable, but of course images of people have been “sexed up” since imaging began, whether it’s the bikini babe or a medieval monarch. A photograph is a pretty flimsy item on which to hang a great deal of credibility.

  • Do you know me?
    Dont tire yourself psyching me you’re wasting your time.

    Are you the Art director mentioned under that girlie’s picture, the guy who requested the retouch?

    If not, you apparently missed the point: the prepuberal Frankenstein wasn’t aiming at you.

    Funny you should jump on it and take it for yourself though…

    But hey, I’m not going to waste my time psyching anybody.

  • lucklucky

    You must be jocking

  • I remember when Sega became desperate to sell Saturns a few years ago (hmm, maybe early 1996), they had a two-page ad featuring the most poorly done “composite” naked woman I’ve ever seen. At one point, it had been a real photograph, but they went wild with the Soften filter.

    It would have been better just to include a true polygon woman at that point.

    What really blew my mind was the film Final Fantasy. I wrote about this right HERE. Most of the characters had flaws — Aki’s low-grav hair, some stiffness, some over-smoothness.

    But the older doctor… woah. Flawless.

    And that was animation. Some of the still portraits I’ve seen done in Rhino and Maya are startling, but only because you’re supposed to know they’re not real. If you just ran across something like that, say, as a captioned photo at a news site, you’d never give a second thought to whether the picture was real or not.

    Maybe we should.

    One thing they’ve absolutely mastered is cars. The average Road & Track issue contains some photos and some computer renders of new cars, and there’s not a thing you can do to tell the difference unless the text clues you in.

  • Tony H

    “One thing they’ve absolutely mastered is cars. The average Road & Track issue contains some photos and some computer renders of new cars, and there’s not a thing you can do to tell the difference unless the text clues you in.”
    Yup Kevin, and I’d mention that one of the standard ways of shooting cars for advertising photography is to mount a camera on a hefty boom projecting from the car’s front quarter at an angle, and subsequently airbrush (pre-digital) or Photoshop the boom out…