I think Kelly Clarkson looked better au naturale, but yeesh, Nicole Sheridan is something else.
Hmm, now that I think about it, Drew Barrymore has a recent TV ad with some amazing close-ups. Do you suppose they have the technology to “photoshop” live action now?
I’ve seen some pics of celebrities without makeup. Some of them look pretty busted. Hell, some female friends I know look like shit with no makeup on.
(Not my gf though, fucking gorgeous.)
Yes, video software should have no problems with a little automated wrinkle reduction. Detecting and smoothing skin tones is already a built-in feature in some cameras, even.
And of course there’s always the “soft focus” lense.
For regular SDTV, the relatively low 720×480 naturally blurs many of the small lines and imperfections. Also remember that they are wearing a shitload of makeup too because the lighting washes out a lot of their features.
I guess I really don’t care. I’m not comparing myself to people in magazines and TV anyway.
:insert usual lament about how these folks really aren’t all that hideous:
:additional lament about how most of the retouch deals with fixing color problems with the photograph that the photographer should have accounted for in the first place:
Skin tones are notoriously difficult to deal with in digital photographs, and almost all cameras I have shot with have a magenta bias in the skin tones. If you calibrate your camera to retain pleasant skin tones, you usually do it at the sacrifice of deep reds in your pictures. If you want saturated, accurate (as measured by a MacBeth Color Checker) reds, you’ll end up with skin tones that look sunburnt.
Color correction has always been a normal part of the photographic process, even in the days of film.
My post should read “color and lighting problems.” Maybe I’m too much of a noob, but a lot of the Before pictures linked above just seem really poorly lit.
And maybe I don’t understand the word saturated as it applies to photographs, but many of the photos linked above look grainy and poorly color filled.
Didn’t mean to dump on all photographers. Just seems like many of the problems could have been addressed by methods less shady than photoshop.
And even before color, there was spot retouching; something I do in PhotoShop without scruple. Digicams don’t have dust spots, you say? I’ve also been know to tidy up the carpet!
What the heck. All I take pictures of anymore is cats. Or whatever I’m building now. Or both.
Yeah. I mean, I know about make up and to some degree, I and most people I know use that to smooth out my own skin, but when you actually see the degree to which photoshop can change things…you realize that everyone’s skin tone has some imperfections…bumps…skin-ness. I mean, the slick smoothness you see on TV and in magazines is just too good to be true.
Some of the photos could certainly have been lit better. But there’s nothing shady about using Photoshop to correct or adjust the colors. Neither film nor digital produce “true” colors of any sort. Both mediums have their color biases (that’s why there’s so many different kinds of film), and if you want total control of your work, you need to go in and tweak the color to how you like it.
Holy crap that is scary bad. And so is this sample.shiver I kept clicking through, hoping that something would hint at this being a joke website, but I’m afraid it appears to be completely sincere. Wow.