Monday, August 06, 2007

When Looking Great isn't Good Enough

An interesting look at how what we see in magazines is manipulated into a warped reality is presented today at Jezebel.com as the site looks at how Redbook recently took liberties in doctoring the cover photo of Faith Hill.

This is how the Redbook cover photo appears on magazine covers:





















This is how the original photo of Faith Hill looked before it was touched up:

11 comments:

  1. I looked at her arms first. No matter how thin I get, I don't like my arms. They don't look like the supermodel arms in the magazines. I was relieved and a little angry to find out that pencil-thin arms are a work of art, rather than nature...shame! :(

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  2. Faith Hill is gorgeous enough, she doesn't need airbrushing! We've taken beauty to the extreme and it's just plain sickening!

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  3. Anonymous5:58 PM

    What Jimmy Moore said! funnily enough she looks better in the untouched photo anyway!

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  4. Anonymous11:25 AM

    This kind of retouching is now routine. It's a little kept secret. Every photo that appears in a magazine is heavily retouched. When I first found out, I was shocked. I expected that imperfections would be air-brushed out, but I was surprised to find that it goes way beyond that. Proportions are changed, body parts reshaped, body folds erased, and the list goes on.

    Now whenever I look at a magazine I keep this firmly in mind that none of the photos are actually real. Actually this knowledge has made me stay away from magazines because they are nothing but fluff. Nothing in them are real, neither the picture nor the "articles".

    There are lots of ressources on the web that talks about this. Here is the first one I found googling.

    http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/retouch/index.html

    Some of them denounce this practice and some of them are simply portfolios of artists demonstrating their skill to prospective employers!

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  5. Fabulous work! I know that celebs have to work hard to keep skinny and are even then, retouched after all that... still, the retouching inspires me to want to know how to look good in photos without such work being necessary.

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  6. Faith does look better in the un-retouched photo!!

    Brings to mind the shoot that Jamie Lee Curtis did...natural and refused to allow any touch ups. She looked fantastic!

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  7. Anonymous3:30 PM

    That is the straightest arm I have ever seen! Looks like they gave her a prosthetic limb.

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  8. Anonymous3:51 PM

    The pose itself is awkward.

    She should have been posed in a more natural pose.

    Sticking her arm out like that made the photo concentrate more on her arm than the whole picture.

    Very bad posing and choice of photos. I am not sure if the choice was to make her look really really skinny and malnourished with a bad case of shrinking arm muscles or a case of doctoring the composition of the photo (pose) to make it more visually appealing.

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  9. I knew about retouching, but I didn't realize they'd actually turn healthy arms into stick arms! My god, that's disgusting.

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  10. Anonymous9:20 PM

    I've met Faith Hill and she looks more like the cover than the "untouched" photo. Live and up close she does not have those bags and crows feet and is actually thinner than she appears on television. I think it's just as likely Jezebel.com did some retouching to make a point.

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  11. Anonymous3:41 PM

    I've seen her in person and yes she does have crow's feet and other imperfections. So does everyone else..celebrities are not perfect.

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