Natural beauty kicks ass.
Glenn Feron is a retoucher by trade. He takes a photo and works it over in Photoshop to make it perfect for a magazine or an advertisement. He provides a page of his work, with the originals viewable on mouse over. He's just plying his trade and giving the art directors what they want, but I prefer the originals in almost every case.
It's fascinating to see where the nips and tucks take place. A tinier waist here, lower jeans there, little changes to make the women more sexy. This is a primer on how the "female ideal" is created for the slick advertising world, the ideal that real women can't possibly attain.
Give me natural beauty, please! Danica Patrick with her helmet off after a race, not all dolled up for a magazine shoot. Elizabeth Vargas in her T-shirt reporting on location, not all hairsprayed in the World News Tonight studio.
5 comments:
That picture he retouched of Serena Williams—he took out all of her muscle tone! Lord forbid that a highly accomplished female athlete might bear the merit badges of all of her hard work. Better to make the abs and thigh muscles go away so she fits some unrealistic standard of beauty.
I'm torn between being aghast (not that I didn't know this happened before now) and wanting to admire his retouching skills.
I gotta agree with Joe. Some of the look absolutely cartoony. Look at the close up 5 or 6 from the left on the top row. Maybe it's more noticeable with the "before" segment but you can tell that many of the details are washed out.
Plastic is a good word for what's wrong with some of these shots. I also agree that I wouldn't mind getting paid to stare at some of these pictures for an hour or so. :)
Fantastic link. As someone collecing way too many digital photos and upsetting the wife because I want to 'touch' them before putting em up somewhere, I am fascinated by this,. and it is getting so much easier to spot in mags now.
The one that showed how process must match your audience was the second from the top left -- I just can't imagine my editor saying "we need more booty!"
Juz beat me to comment on the 2nd example on the site. Inflate!
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