Showing posts with label Disasters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disasters. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Sex, Lies, and Photoshop

Yesterday I had to email some photos to a printer in New York so that I can get 9"x 12" laser prints for my portfolio. The photos are from a test shoot I did a while ago (I wrote about it here and here), and I never printed them out because 1) I don't like them all that much (I really hate my expression in these!) and 2) I can't afford to spend my money on these things at the moment. But, I have a casting in the city tomorrow (yep, I'm road tripping up from Delaware and will be in the city for less than 24 hours), and my agent specifically asked me to get these pictures printed.

As I was going through the cd of pictures from the shoot, I was struck by how different I look in the originals and the retouched photos. I wish I knew a way to put the retouched photo over the original so that as you moved your mouse over the picture, it would toggle between the two.

As it is, you can see that there are some pretty major differences between the two. I'm obviously paler, with ivory skin, but also you can see that the bags under my eyes are gone, as well as stray hairs, veins, and my infamous (some people like it, others hate it) cleft chin.

The biggest difference in the second set of photos is that I have instantly lost ten pounds (or 4.5 Kilos). My left hip seems slimmer, and the right leg conveniently disappears into nothingness.
Retouch 2

Retouch 1

Of course by now many people in the blogging community know of the snafu that was Complex Magazine posting an unretouched picture of Kim Kardashian on their website. As soon as the gaffe was realized, the magazine pulled the picture and put the retouched one in its place. Judge for yourself how much work was done on her in Photoshop.

kimkardashian

I'll leave it for you to decide how you feel about the retouching of celebrities and whether magazines should let readers know what they're doing.

This is a recent video from The New York Times that deals with this exact subject.

Picture 5

And, just for a bit of humor here, be sure to check out Photoshop Disasters, a website that posts pictures of some pretty awful photoshopping.

XOXO,