January 03, 2006

• would it help if i said that there are bloogies on the first link?
• Nice how it's set up to show each step, it drives home the point much better than just a global before and after. Personally, I go the most expeditious route of sticking it to airbrushed ideals of "beauty" by not buying fashion and related magazines in the first place.
• Everything's retouched, though. Not just fashion magazines. And before the invention of photoshop, most or nearly all big magazine photos were retouched, except in those days they used this thing called an airbrush.
• I love the way Datepixs puts it: "Lose the 10 pounds the camera adds." Dang, that's tactful. And it's amazing how arbitrary some ideals of beauty can be. I mean, white teeth, clear skin, and a straight nose are always admired, but one facial or body type is in style, and everyone else gets to feel ugly. Or, as Tom Servo put it, "If Twiggy had been born 10 years earlier, she'd have had to keep her job at the dry cleaners'."
• other pre-photoshop techniques: smearing the camera lens with a light jelly or covering it with a nylon stocking.
• Chyren yes, however by "fashion and related" that means magazines specifically selling those airbrushed ideals (which is why I specified that), not "just" retouching . I can understand retouching of minor blemishes that doesn't alter the person's fundamental bodily attributes, such as airbrushing pimples, for instance, or increasing the contrast in a photo. That does bring up "where do you draw the line?" of course -- for me, to paraphrase what I just wrote, the line would be drawn at changing a person enough to make them look like someone they could never resemble in reality.
• Thanks, Rory. Very useful for my 9th grade media literacy unit.. Anyone see any sites about how they do up food for commercials, lemme know. I used to have a super video, but I lost track of it..
• This trickery exists, but it's a bit misleading - it is mostly for lesser magazines, ads, and celebrities. If you want a nice little article on Oprah for your magazine you don't want Oprah to have any skin blemishes. If a place has the appropriate budget to hire women from top modeling agencies, there is really very little retouching to be done - a pore and blemish here and there. The first link is actually very interesting - it was the 'this guy's' link that got me on this rant.
• except in those days they used this thing called an airbrush Oh, the joys of clogged, leaky nozzles; sticky stencils, slow-drying inks, shaky hands, noxious fumes... nowadays, whenever I stumble over some problem in Fotochop, I recall the joys of near-past hardware and exhale deeply.
• In the spirit of revealing the retouched, The original link. Awesome job they did. I'd like to see that for every cover.
• I hear ya, Flagpole, I spent quite a few years using the things. Funnily enough, at the time I praised the mighty airbrush above all.