06/11/2014
I’d like to take a moment to present my views on the role of Photoshop in photography. While I agree that there are some photographers and retouchers that really go overboard on its use, I honestly believe that there is both a need for it, and a desire for it to be used.
First, let’s look at the “need” for it. We live in a world driven by advertising. Good, bad or otherwise, that is just a fact. If an advertiser needed a picture of a woman’s face on the side of a bus, and Photoshop didn't exist, would you model for that picture? A picture of someone’s face, anyone’s face, that is 10 feet across is going to show a lot. Every wrinkle, zit, mole, nose hair, and vein in your eye, will be enormous. The hair growing out of a mole will be the size of your finger. Think about that.
Beyond trying to find a model that would actually allow a picture like that to be released, those things are distractions. They distract from the intent of the advertising. If you’re selling makeup, you don’t want a model to have significant facial blemishes. This is the same reason that when you’re shopping for “shapewear”, the models wearing it don’t need it. Is it false advertising? That’s debatable. But when it comes down to it, women want to be pretty, sexy, and desirable. Not because of culture or advertising, but because it’s how we continue as a species. We’re hard wired to procreate. It’s what we do. S*x is our reason for existence. The desire to survive is locked to our desire to pass our genes to the next generation.
How does Photoshop factor in to this? It’s what’s often pointed out as the “sexualization” of our culture. Pictures are manipulated to “push our buttons”. When you see a model with soft, even skin tone, full breasts, bright clear eyes, perfect teeth and shiny hair it triggers something in your brain. Those cues say that that person is healthy, desirable mate that will give strong, healthy offspring who will then become healthy, desirable mates in the next generation. Your genes will survive for many generations. If you’re a man, you want her. If you’re a woman, you want to *be* her. (And vice versa for male models. Yes, they’re photoshopped too.)
Outside of advertising, there is photography in general. It doesn't matter if its senior pictures, engagement or wedding pictures, or a corporate head-shot for the lobby wall, people want to look their best. If you’re paying to have a picture taken, and it’s a picture that will be seen by countless people, you don’t want them to see your recent breakout, a facial scar, bloodshot eyes, or whatever it is that you see in the mirror every morning and don’t like. Why? Because it’s a distraction from what you look like.
When you think about someone you haven’t seen in a while, you can picture them in your mind. You don’t think about the mole with a hair growing out of it on their face, or the zit they had on their forehead, or the way their bra strap made their side look weird. You don’t see the distractions, you see the person. That’s what Photoshop can do. It can remove the distractions. When you look at a picture that someone gives you, they want you to see them, the way they want to be seen.
In the case of my own picture, in color, I have a lot of red in my skin tone. By lowering the saturation in the red channel, I can give myself a more (IMO) normal skin tone without making the picture black and white. In one of my pictures, my neck rolled out over the collar of my leather jacket making what looks like a “neck muffin-top”. I used Photoshop to make that disappear. I had a 5 o’clock shadow when I took the picture, so I played with the contrast and sharpness to give more definition to the texture of my face and beard. It gives the picture a “gritty” look. I was looking for a “bad boy” kind of a look with the leather jacket, and I think it works.
If you look at pictures of models, it doesn't take long to start comparing what you see to what you know actually exists. We know that skin has texture, eye lashes aren't straight, and *everyone* has small blemishes on their face. When you see a model with absolutely perfect skin, know that there is a 99% chance that he or she has been photoshopped. Perfection is an illusion. It just doesn't happen. Your body has a history. A small scar from a bicycle crash when you were 10, acne when you were 16, a car accident when you were 22, walking in to a cupboard door when you were 35. The marks are on you forever.
When I retouch, I try my best to make it look natural. I try to reduce (or eliminate, depending on what it is) some of those life lessons we carry on our face. I want to get rid of the noise so the signal can shine through. Bad retouching can create a plastic, Barbie Doll looking skin, unnatural whites of the eyes and weird, zombie looking irises. It’s fine if you’re going for a surreal, fantasy look, but not when you’re looking for a portrait.
Fixing blemishes, reducing the red in skin and smoothing out skin doesn't make a person look “different”. It just removes the unimportant bits from a beautiful picture.
(The picture is the unedited, uncropped picture of me I was referring to above.)
