Photoshop: Retouching and Research

This morning we had a lecture on different fashion photographers and how they use Photoshop to change their images, retouching in Photoshop and the digital ethics of photography.

Cecil Beaton 1904-1980

The first fashion photographer we looked at was Cecil Beaton. Beaton is one of the first original fashion photographers from nearly 100 years ago and used no Photoshop. Below is a picture that Beaton took of model Twiggy. You can see that he hasn't used Photoshop because you can see all of Twiggy's freckles and the faint lines on her face. If this had been edited in Photoshop you wouldn't be able to see any of the lines or freckles on her face.

Beaton would also be very creative and make backdrops from tin foil or try to use an abstract painting for the background instead of editing things back into the photos. All of his photos were very natural.

Bert Stern 1929-2013

Bert Stern was a self-taught American commercial photographer and very famous in the 1950's for taking the last ever photos of Marilyn Munroe, he called the shoot 'The Last Sitting'. 'The Last Sitting' is a collection of 2,500 photos all of Marilyn Munroe for Vogue magazine. It took three days to complete the whole shoot and was completed just six weeks before her death. He published a book all about the shoot which was published in 1982 and then again in 2000. Because 'The Last Sitting' was such a success and became so famous he has used other people such as Audery Hepburn, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Drew Barrymore and Lindsay Lohan to recreate a similar shoot that he did with Marilyn Munroe.

The image above is the recreation of The Last Sitting using Madonna. If you look at the image above of Marilyn Munroe you can see the same sort of poses between the both of them.

Brian Duffy 1933-2010

He was a photographer that based his work on fashion and portriat photography. Duffy is very well known at the moment for shooting portraits of David Bowie who he had an eight year working relationship with. He shot five key shoots over the eight year period three of which made Bowie's album covers.

This is one of the portraits that Duffy took of David Bowie for his album Aladdin Sane which was released in 1973.

We then went on to watch a video on what Dove did to one of their models that was promoting one of their products in order for them to get the look that they wanted to portray the project did. Below is what the model looked like before

Above is what the model was transformed into in order for her to fit Dove's brief. When I saw the video I was quite shocked to see how much they do to a person to change their apperance. My own personal opinion on the video is that I believe it's wrong to do this to a person because if the model came in to think that they wanted to use her in the way she was when she turned up then they are lying to her and making her feel bad when she sees the final image. It must be really strange for the woman to see herself completely transformed into someone completely unrecognisable.

We then got taught some of the basic tools to use in order to make someone's skin look smoother to give them the airbrushed look. In order to do this you need to take an image that has preferably been shot in RAW and open it up in Camera Raw. Once Camera Raw is open you need to turn the clarity up on the image so that the image is a lot sharper, then remove any blemishes and dust marks that you want to and open in Photoshop (make sure to save the image as a 'Open in Photoshop as Smart Object'). Once in Photoshop duplicate the layer and label one 'Sharp' and one 'Soft'. Keep the soft layer as a smart object but rastorize the sharp layer so that it becomes a Photoshop layer. Double click on the soft layer and it will re open back into Camera Raw and turn the clarity down. Open the image back into Photoshop and move the layers around so that sharp is on the top and soft is on the bottom. Then go to Layer, layer mask, reveal all. Click on the mask and select the paintbrush tool and paint over the sharp image. It should start to make the skin look a bit smoother and give an airbrush effect.

*before doing anything to anybody's picture that could effect the way they look you need to make sure you have their permission*

I tried this out on Photoshop with an image that we got given and it did work I only wanted to make the skin look a little smoother.

On the left hand side is the final image with the smoother skin and the image on the right is the original image. I am happy with how it turned out because the skin looks a lot smoother and the model whoever he is looks a little bit younger which is good for him!