Photo retouching... DAMN

Might be of some interest to those playing around with photoshopping SL pics.

Clickety

Wow. I can remember several times trying to explain to women about the images they see in print and how fake they are and them not buying it. Some of the changes he has made, like the one to the Williams sister tummy are small and subtle, but make that perfect body. The changes he made to her face though were massive and impressive, lol.

Now you know why it can be so disappointing to meet models and celebs in person. I think Cindy Crawford said it best, "Even I don't look like Cindy Crawford."

That Glenn Feron's got talent, no doubt about it. Great eye for what does and does not belong in a photograph. My only beef with his work is that his skin tones are consistently a bit too orange for my taste, but that's not a big deal. Good stuff.

The company my dad worked at for decades did a lot of this. (retail catolgues, motorcycle magazines, calendars, etc)

Before Photoshop and the like, they had artists physically airbrushing the pics.

(Which reminds me - for my dad's 30th anniversary of working there, he had to have his picture taken to be displayed with the other senior execs in the front office. He had banged his forehead pretty hard on a camping trip, and had a fairly large scab there - they took it out and you couldn't tell unless you got an eye loupe out and really scrutinized it!)

It's amazing how much effect a few small tweaks can have on the end result.

OMG! panda, where did you get those?

Third row, third from the left. That is me!! I totally needed the money for tuition.

They did a great job with the touch-ups, though.

My favorite!

I love how all 6 boobs grow, AND he deletes a faucet!

People forget that photography is an art. Just because it looks real doesn't mean it *has* to be real. I'll never look like any of those photos...and I wouldn't expect anyone in real life to look that way either. I definitely support retouching, at least when it comes to portraying beauty. They want reality? Don't look at a *picture* of a mountain. Go out and *look* at a mountain.

good example of touch-ups.. and just how horrible they can be. yes, horrible.

while he did a good job of smoothing things over, he also did a good job of making them all look like mannequins. lost way too much definition.. has a penchant for negating cheekbones and ribs and the like.

personally, i would have been much lighter with my hand. many of the pictures were almost perfect as they were.

yeah, i'm not a big fan of "airbrushing".. not saying i don't recognize the talent that goes into doing that type of work, but i'm much more impressed when they enhance the natural beauty of someone, rather than simply wiping away things that aren't magazine-beautiful.. or adding that extra "bubble" to some of those butts.

some of the things i found most impressive was when he changed the angle of a foot or the like.

(ever been to Worth 1000? awesome stuff!)

Gah, that one was particularly bad as the center subject now looks wildly imbalanced to the right. And removing the faucet really reduced the Freudian content

I almost wanna send Glenn an anatomy book or even an issue of Playboy. With shoulders canted to the back, the distant breast *should* appear smaller. If soft-focus cheezy mall "glamour shots" was what he was shooting for, he got it. Ick.

Interesting observations, Malachi.

The removal of the faucet? Destiny's Child does not do dishes!!

Oh yeah I saw that site like yesterday actually. It's pretty interesting. Also, sometimes the pre-retouched photos look (in my opinion) better!

He definitely goes a bit overboard on smoothing the skin for my taste. Some of them end up looking like they're wearing masks.

This is the one I like better untouched:

http://glennferon.com/portfolio1/portfolio25.html

For some reason, "Shiny Happy People" is now playing in my head. I don't know why. They don't look happy. They look like they were going for sultry but never quite made it past surly.

We spend so much on cosmetics, surgery, hair transplants, spas, fad diets, hair removal, etc, etc, all trying to emulate the fake smoothness of airbrushed/photoshopped photos of emaciated models and celebrities. I vote we ditch it all, get a copy of Photoshop, perfect our image and just paste it over every mirror in the house.

Or, perhaps, we all just need a very talented cursor.

I'll be taking one of those magic fingers, please.

Before. After. Before. After. Before. . . .

I really thought most of the original photos looked better. I also agree that a few seemed to go a little too far in making them look like mannequins.

Maybe it is my frequent exposure to real peope that makes me prefer the normal lines that humans have.

This is an interesting page, in the same vein as the topic. The before and after images on this page show different applications, use of layers and whatnot. He explains each photo as well. I like the shoe pic, its already good looking, but he really cleaned it up. And, the woman on the middle left is pretty amazing, an example of how far air brush can go.

http://homepage.mac.com/gapodaca/digital/digital.html

Agreed. I do these kind of images for fun and one of the important things is maintaining the fast that people have PORES.

(edit) I do these for practice to see if I can. Helps reinforce how fake magazines etc. are. I dont trust anything now. hah! And thats a stock photo I found online. (edit)

This is turning out to be an interesting thread. I agree with many of the comments about the mannequin-ish look in the pictures, but I still think the work is good. Consider the destination. These are magazine photos. I think he does a great job of capturing the look that certain magazines want, as is evidenced by his resume. Myself, when I do photo retouches, I don't go as "overboard" (as Chip well put it) as this guy does, but then I don't do magazines. My clients are just everyday people who want to be able to recognize themselves when it's done. If I were doing magazines though, I suspect I'd do what Glenn here is doing. The artist in Loki's link (good link, by the way) said it pretty well, "What the art director wants, the art director gets."

One of the criticisms in this thread was about the way he makes cleavage symetrical, even when the figure is angled slightly away from the camera, which is obviously impossible. Well, symetrical cleavage sells magazines. In that light, I can forgive some "creative perspective". My opinion is it all comes down to what the goal is. If it's to model the actual person, then keep it real, and just correct for lighting, shine, minor blemishes, etc. If it's to model the magazine the photo is going into (which is what magazine pics are ultimately for), especially the types of magazines that this guy services, then by all means go for the plastic mannequin look because, like it or not, that's what those magazines tend to want.

I've recently been handed the job of perodically doing just a little touch-up work on our company's recognition plaques.

These are meant to be hung in dealerships, and they show a photo of the General Manager, a business quotation with a blown-up version of the GM's signature, certification/award record, a couple of complimentary letters from customers, etc.

Occasionally, we'll get an out-of-spec background on a photo, and I'll have to slip a company-standard mottled blue behind a head shot. And, I sometimes have to tune perfectly good photos to allow for gamut variations in our color printers. (We have a top-end Xerox Fiery on order, and the output I saw on the showroom floor was dazzling...I thought it was wax-transfer when I first saw the samples. The saturation was incredible, and the fleshtones are dead-on. That's due for installation in a couple of weeks.)

Anyway, I'm not really that good at Photoshop, yet. I'm getting the hang of color correction, but it's a real art, and mastery could take me years. (Sidenote: It's amazing how many so-called professional photographers there are charging folks for really bad shots.)

The execs are big on hard-working Real Folks, and don't care much for Barbie & Ken dolls, so we minimize the plastic surgery. But we had a special request from a young lady who was up for a recognition poster a few weeks ago...she was suffering an eruption on her forehead and chin at the time the photo was taken, and she was horribly self-conscious about it...I have to say, Photoshop's Healing Brush is the most amazing damned thing I have ever seen in a graphics package.

-- jj

That's excellent work, Launa! (not that I'm surprised) You kept it looking very natural while doing a great job of evening out the skintone.

This guy is definitely very talented with his tools. One has to wonder how much he decides to do of his own volition and how much is dictated by the publications he does them for. For all we know he may not like having to go as far as he does with the smoothing either. I'd say on about half of them I like the original photographs better.

The only serious photo retouching I've done was way back in the late 80's when I worked in a photo lab and did some restoration work, and in college touching up dust and scratches on black and whites using a brush and inks.

It's no wonder people feel the need to spend 1000s of dollars on cosmetic surgery, skin treatments, etc. The people they are triyng to emulate aren't even real. But that's the point isn't it? To dangle an unattainable carrot in front of people, so that they spend more money on products that can never truly match the results of photo retouching.

P.S. I agree with Chip on his appraisal of Launa's touch up - she managed to do it without making the woman look too fakey.

This was a link on BoingBoing a while back:
The Horror

Urrghh...

That is scary, what the hell is up with the possessed-by-a-demon eyes?

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!