Thursday, June 3

Bad Photo Retouching in Photoshop

by Karen Robert

This posting isn’t necessarily about cards. In fact it has nothing to do with them. But pictures are often a component on many cards, so I am showing you a trick I learned in Photoshop. I know that in the past I’ve said that I am hopeless at Photoshop. However in the last year I’ve been working hard at remedying  that situation by taking a series of Adobe courses. I must say, I ‘ve gotten quite good for a middle aged lady. Today’s lesson was on how to retouch photos.  Our assignment was to take a normal photo of Clare Danes and make her grossly over-perfect. Apparently newer high resolution cameras take photos which are very detailed and the magazines and tabloids end up with pictures which have “too much information”. This is industry -speak apparently for seeing all of the lines and blemishes on a woman’s face. As I was doing this I thought that poor Clare looked so much better before I began and I started to feel sorry for all of these actresses. Silly me.  My teacher, who used to retouch photos for magazines, told us that, on the contrary, many actresses have contracts with magazines which REQUIRE that their photos be retouched. Sigh.

Here is what I came up with; this is Clare Danes before:

And here she is after I retouched her. I deeply apologize to the beautiful Clare Danes for what I did to her. To accomplish this abberation,  I made her hair more blonde, I smoothed and evened out her skin, I lifted her eyebrows, made her eyes bigger and bluer, I lifted her eyes at the sides, made her nose smaller, gave the nose more of a lift and I pumped up her breasts. I could have touched up her roots and done a more subtle job on her hair, but I ran out of time. I hate to admit it, but it was sort of fun to play God, and I am sure I went overboard. However, we have all seen seen many photos  which are as extremely perfect as this one. Check out the website photoshopdiasters.blogspot.com which shows overly Photoshopped ads. Some of the work on this site makes mine look positively professional. Here is one of the Photoshop hack jobs they posted:

Obviously they were so busy removing her slight belly flab and perhaps slimming down her silhouette that they didn’t even notice that they had removed her bellybutton. Or perhaps they thought that a belly button was a blemish! While this is an extreme case of photo retouching, ads like this expose how much pressure our daughters are under to be perfect. They see photos of actresses with perfect skin, and models with perfect bodies and feel they can never measure up. How sad that our fashion and tabloid industry spend so many man-hours removing women’s “imperfections”. I wonder if they spend as much time removing men’s imperfections? In my opinion, moles, lines and a little belly jiggle are what make us beautiful in the first place.  I earned that belly flab by being pregnant with my kids and I earned those lines worrying about them as they grow up and make mistakes. How is it that physical perfection has become the new norm?

As I write this, my young teenage daughter came in, saw my retouched photos and said, “Cool, can you do this to one of my photos?”  Oh God, what have I done?

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