Retouching – a controversial topic
Over the last couple of months, lots of “exposing celebrities photoshopping themselves” and similar stuff has been circling around the internet. This is a trend that has two sides. On one hand seeing so many photoshopped / facetuned /edited images can be very toxic, on the other hans seeing the comparison to the “before” image gives us a little reality. Nobody looks like what they look on Instagram.
Photo from www.instagram.com/celebface
Even “normal” people spend time on posing, the right light and angles, makeup etc. when taking a selfie. Celebrities / models can take it a step further. Behind every high end photo is a whole team of people: Make-up Artists, Hair Stylists, Photographers, Retouchers and many more.
I think the things we can do with Photoshop in the retouching process are amazing, and retouching may even be my favorite part of the whole shoot. Once you gain a little bit of experience it’s super easy to not only do things like removing pimples, adjusting the light etc., and you can also easily liquify an image. Liquifying means actually changing the face’s features – like making lips bigger, arms smaller, hips wider and so on.
The liquify tool has gotten a very bad reputation lately, but doesn’t have to be used this way. I personally use it to make lipstick look more perfect / the lipliner look more even, and I adjust the lips if they look a little weird due to the Make-up. Weird as in the right side of the lip is bigger than the left side, because the lipliner is a tiny bit higher on that side. So I’m correcting the Make-up, not the face.
Here I purposely made the model’s lips bigger in the right photo. It still looks natural and only took 5 seconds, but it’s a big change to her face. This edit is only for this article, the photo on the left is my actual final photo.
I am aware, that photoshopping / facetuning / editing professional and personal photos is normal nowadays. And I don’t think it’s all bad. I just think we need to be very transparent with what is edited and show the real, before photos from time to time.
Especially younger people on Social Media can be influenced so much and these photos can change the way they look at themselves. And because this is already happening big time, we need to be transparent and like I said show what is done to the final photos.
I do my little part by showing before and afters in my Reels on Instagram or occasionally on TikTok . I’m not stating that my photos are supposed to represent any beauty standart or be idealized, but by simply putting them out there in the open I am contributing to “the beauty standard” etc. So in my opinion, saying that the photos aren’t supposed to look natural doesn’t make a person less responsible. Actually showing the real photo, the behind the scenes, everything that went into that one photo – that’s what’s making up for posting heavily edited photos. And I hope showing the “before” photos will be just as normal as the edited photos some day very soon.
left: straight out of camera. right: after Lightroom & Photoshop.
Today’s post was a little bit of a brain dump. I’ve been seeing people saying “oh but it’s not supposed to be natural” a lot, and it’s making me a little upset. Only saying this doesn’t change a thing about the actual problem. Tell me your opinions on this topic in the comments below, I would love to chat about this topic!