i worked as a makeup artist for years and had a lot of frustration about my work being somewhat irrelevant when there were so many digital tools at the photographers' disposal to essentially change what i spent years learning and practicing and perfecting by hand. i understand that retouching is also a nuanced art, but if you're going to so drastically fuck with a picture, why bother hiring me?

The cosmetics industry makes a packet off the back of this stuff too - there's nothing on the market as effective as a tube of Photoshop, but it doesn't stop idiots like me from buying powder, spackle and gum to try to look as if we don't actually have pores. 'Cos the *pretty* ladies don't have 'em, right?

There's always going to be some market for the flat look the photoshopper in this post seems so proud of, but even LaChapelle has started backing away from this sort of troweled-on effect. Take heart, ingopixel!

Fashion photography has never been about photographing real human beings. It's about creating a specific look. Even pre-photoshop when all the retouching was done via air brush and film development tricks models were heavily altered. Photoshop has just made it easier.

I occasionally model for my own jewelry creations (I can't afford to hire a model) and my day to day look is nothing like what my model photos look like. What frustrates me about photo retouching like on that site is that the original photos are so bad. I take better lit photos in my living room without any professional equipment. Photoshop has seriously downgraded the level of proficiency a photographer needs which I find pretty sad. I take a lot of pride int he fact that my photos need a minimum of retouching.

Those women were beautiful without the retouching. Probably even without the makeup. I like real women, not digital pixies.

@5, I think you have a very good point. Skillful artists, either makeup or photographers, can make a model look spectacular and in need of minimal retouching. I can't tell you how many times I saw incredibly inexperienced, unskilled makeup artists getting work because it would be so easy to correct their mistakes later when the equally unskilled photographer inevitably photoshopped the whole mess into oblivion.

I gotta say that as a photo retoucher myself, whoever did these photographs did an excellent job- they replaced blimishes with actual skin texture, and left a few imperfections to make it seem realistic. It always bugs me when I see pictures where someone obviously learned the old "blur imperfections into oblivion" trick and made the model look like plastic.

This is not news. And this vid is probably a better example of how important each step in the process is (including yours, ingopixel), and how far the end result looks from the person in front of the camera.

i saw these earlier today and mostly thought about what a shitty make up artist they hired!

This has been going on for at least a half century before the invention of Photoshop. Film fashion photography has been airbrushed beyond recognition long before computers existed. Even Playboy photos from back in the 1960s were heavily airbrushed.

I'll concede that it has become easier to do and more common recently, but the concept and practice is nothing new.

Agree @5. What jumped out at me most about these photos was how lousy the original images were. When your photos turn out like that, you NEED photoshop. Unfortunately it seems that since they know they can just "fix it in post" they don't bother with the quality of the original image.

Well to be fair - this site is someone who is selling his retouching services, so he has a stake in making the before look as crap as possible.

I did some portrait shooting and retouching as a low-level pro for a while. I quickly came to realize that the image in the camera is nothing but the raw material for a subsequent process of digital "development" and adjustment. You can do a little or you can do a lot, but there's no way the image gets from the camera to the screen or print without artistic and technical choices.

Ya women > pixels

@13, Bingo.

To me, it looks like he retouched the "originals" in the opposite direction - most look highly overexposed, or as if the colors have been washed out or imperfections added.

Which, to be fair, that would also be an example of his skill, but I'm not sure how accurate the "before" is compared to the "after." Several of the pics just seemed off.