Plastic fantastic
Thursday, 4. May 2006, 15:28:05
Whilst browsing one of many photo albums at Ivan Minic blog I came across Celebs photoshopped gallery. As the name indicates you can see befores and afters of some famous people there.
Now, you might ask what the deal is. We all know that magazines' photos and especially their cover photos are photoshopped, but I think we tend to forget it when looking at those pictures every day. That is the reason why seeing those made my eyes wide open. No wonder now why people love watching paparazzi photos so much where they can see celebrities kind of naked without make up and professional retouch.
After a short while a question crossed my mind. How difficult is it to create a retouch like that? I decided to check it myself. I have chosen one of the easiest one to make (hey, I am not a pro) and loaded Corel Paint Shop X (a cheap Photoshop clone, a 30-day fully functional trial available at Corel site), but you will probably do fine with free open source GIMP too.
First, the original before and after of our model. I have cropped the pictures a bit to be able to put them side by side without resizing.
Not bad, eh? Now it took me about 15 minutes to create a similar retouch. I also decided to play a bit with a few controls to give it a more glamour look (again that is probably another sign of me not being a pro, I know). Take a look at the end result:
A definite improvement over the original (i.e. if you define an improvement as removing all lines and blemishes).
My little experiment shows that nowadays everyone can look like a star, at least in their photos. Sure, they (I mean the pictures) might look a bit of plastic, but who cares as long as that will make you prettier.
I wonder how far that will go. And will we see a big come back of natural (or naturalistic) photos at some time?
Meanwhile, the artists creating 3d-modelled babes aim at being natural by adding imperfections to their creations skins. Funny, isn't it?
Take a look at examples of famous NVIDIA and ATI virtual stars: Dusk and Ruby. Those girls are not afraid to show their faces without retouch.
Now, you might ask what the deal is. We all know that magazines' photos and especially their cover photos are photoshopped, but I think we tend to forget it when looking at those pictures every day. That is the reason why seeing those made my eyes wide open. No wonder now why people love watching paparazzi photos so much where they can see celebrities kind of naked without make up and professional retouch.
After a short while a question crossed my mind. How difficult is it to create a retouch like that? I decided to check it myself. I have chosen one of the easiest one to make (hey, I am not a pro) and loaded Corel Paint Shop X (a cheap Photoshop clone, a 30-day fully functional trial available at Corel site), but you will probably do fine with free open source GIMP too.
First, the original before and after of our model. I have cropped the pictures a bit to be able to put them side by side without resizing.
Not bad, eh? Now it took me about 15 minutes to create a similar retouch. I also decided to play a bit with a few controls to give it a more glamour look (again that is probably another sign of me not being a pro, I know). Take a look at the end result:
A definite improvement over the original (i.e. if you define an improvement as removing all lines and blemishes).
My little experiment shows that nowadays everyone can look like a star, at least in their photos. Sure, they (I mean the pictures) might look a bit of plastic, but who cares as long as that will make you prettier.
I wonder how far that will go. And will we see a big come back of natural (or naturalistic) photos at some time?
Meanwhile, the artists creating 3d-modelled babes aim at being natural by adding imperfections to their creations skins. Funny, isn't it?
Take a look at examples of famous NVIDIA and ATI virtual stars: Dusk and Ruby. Those girls are not afraid to show their faces without retouch.
WIDGETIZE