The New York Times ran an article a week ago called Smile and Say ‘No Photoshop.’ It basically focuses on how magazines have gone overboard with digital enhancement. Thanks to the Photoshop wizards who work their magic on models that are already gorgeous, pimples can be removed, teeth whitened and hips whittled. But Kate Winslet wasn’t happy with the result when she posed for British GQ a few years back. She complained the cover photo didn’t look like her because her legs had been Photoshop-ed to look longer and skinnier.
In a recent issue of French Elle, Sophie Marceau appears on the front cover without make up or any digital tinkering. She looks fabulous of course, although it seems sad to me the magazine has to tell us that nothing has been done. Should we consider everything is inauthentic unless we’re told otherwise? And where do you draw the line?
I gave Emma’s boyfriend Bryan this picture of them for his birthday, and I must say Photoshop came in very handy here. I combined three different photographs to come up with a composite that worked. But I didn’t remove any blemishes or whiten any teeth. I try and avoid doing this for the most part, even though I’d be tempted to fix myself up if I was working on a picture with me in it.
5 comments:
I must say very good retouch job:) It is a bit scary though -- you really can't trust what you see printed anymore. It should be required to credit the photo if any significant retouching had been done. Kinda like irradiated/gene altered fruit and veggies:P
I love what you did and they are a sweet looking couple. It would have been very different if you had Photoshopped in Brad Pitt or Prince Charles:) This is good work and not a misrepresentation at all. Lovely work as always.
Lovely photo and the combination of images worked out very well. Nice work! It makes me laugh a bit, though, to read that magazines are complaining about digital enhancement, because they have always been the culprits. Photoshop makes the job easy and fast, but for decades magazines employed people whose job was "photo retoucher". It was a complex job and would take hours -- but photos have been routinely "airbrushed" to remove imperfections etc; it's not a new idea and for magazines to suggest otherwise is simply disingenuous. The technology has just improved the task so well that I'm sure many staff members in a magazine's art dept take it overboard simply because it takes so little time or effort to make changes that they can't resist. But isn't that where technology has taken many of us? Typewriters are gone, cameras are digital, etc. :-)
A friend of mine who is a photographer said that photos are manipulations of reality from the second they are taken. The photographer decides the frame, what is in and what is outside the frames of the photo. He chooses the angle, placement regarding the sun or light. And then there is all the stuff he could do in the darkroom. So it is not a new phenomena.
I think editing a photo has lots of good sides to it. BUT I also understand how one should be very sceptical about it within the News.
It is also a shame how we are so spoiled with beauty, or should I say mainstream beauty, that we don´t even settle for photoshopping images of ourselves, but a show like Extreme Make-over has millions of viewers, and thousands who act upon it, getting their own nip-and-tuck. But I guess that is a different discussion :-)
Amazing!
Linda
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