Medusa: photoshopped

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

PHOTOSHOPPING GONE MAD: THE SKINNY ON THE FAKE & REAL IMAGES OF MODELS ON THE INTERNET...[UPDATED]

Fake

Real

Below are just some of the comments I've received on this post from readers...

"Anonymous said...

Great Blog Medusa...keep it up!

I'm sorry to say that some of these pictures have the wrong Fake and Real tags attached to them.

I don't know where they came from, but aside from the "few" that look like they came from tabloids/rags,Perez-type who would want to over emphasize the headline..."Looks who dying of anorexia!", most of these are backwards. I am in the Fashion industry, and am involved with "photoshopping" the images and I know for a fact that the very sad fact is that most models, famous or not are horribly anorexic. We have to go in and airbrush OUT the rib-bones and round out their arms and legs to make them look more normal and even toned, or no one would buy the clothes/jewelry/Designer if they saw the real model. Look at your comments....no one wants to buy the stuff on the anorexic models, but the ones called Real, will sell. They are fake.

Go back up and look at these examples:

--If you look at the girls having a water fight, the "real" image posted is actually the fake...it's the final printed article with the copy already placed in the upper right. The fake was the the first unretouched shot.

--For the girl boxing, you can see that the "real" pic is actually the retouched fake one. See the bikini wasn't silver enough, and they made it much more bright silver and bigger, along with the high heels.

--One of the first photos...the girl on the catwalk in the cut-out white outfit, the "real" one is the "fake". See how in the second, they made the fabric a perfect square and a perfect white and moved the fabric around?

The awful, sad reality is that those models are REAL, and DYING everyday from anorexia. The "Brands" cannot sell clothes of women who unfortunately look like Holocaust victims, so we add enough curves and cleavage, and of course make the CLOTHES look great in order to sell the items.

I would redo this section to show how the ugly tabloids do the disgusting "skinny" photoshopping, but the "Advertisers/Retailers" HAVE to make the models look better and with a little bit more curves...certainly NEVER rib cages showing..

This article will have HUGE effect if all the girls/women out there can actually see how horrible their model idols look in reality without us going in there to add fat and curves to make them appealing. Yes, those thin models that people envy are starving themselves, but because they are popular, they get the jobs, and we retouch almost everything about the pictures. We even change necks, and legs and arms from one model to another. Nothing is impossible nowadays. I remain anonymous to not giveaway who I am, but I have worked on photos of all the models, including a ton of Victoria Secret's models, and most of them have ribs very pronounced and elbows huge compared to their upper arms...so we fix it. Every protruding "bony" body part is rounded out.

If you would like my professional opinion on how these tags need to be changed, please feel free to post and somehow we can talk.

July 15, 2009 7:47 PM"

A response to Anonymous:

"Anonymous said...

It's funny how easily people believe things, isn't it?

Look at the girls playing with the water. The anonymous post said the real photo was the one with more protruding bones, and the fake one was the final shot with the captions on it.

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed that this "real", according to anon, photo is conveniently cropped so as not to include those captions?

hmmmm... Let's apply some critical thinking skills here, shall we? Yeah models are terribly skinny and anorexia is a serious problem in the industry, but sensationalism is not the solution.

July 18, 2009 9:29 PM"

And another response:

"Anonymous said...

I think the funny thing about these pictures is that the ones where the models are "fleshed out" are still grotesquely skinny women. Also, if you look at some of them, such as the one of the girls boxing, not only is the caption cut off at the exact right area, it's also a shot of Karolina Kurkova. We all know what she looks like, she is NOT that emaciated. I actually use photoshop to retouch my own photos, and not that I've ever used it to make people look thinner, but I've used it to cut out objects, erase flyaway hairs in people's eyes, and things of that nature. I have to say, I'm not entirely convinced of anonymous' conclusion... some of these are quite obviously retouched to make the models emaciated, all you have to do is look up other photos of the same models, such as Karolina Kurkova.

That said... in alot of them, there isn't all that much difference between the two, throw in a few ribs and sinewy muscle, and you've got an anorexic.

Unfortunately, the actual size of the woman stays much the same. Scary."

And another:

"Delirium said...

the person who wrote to you saying that the tags of fake and real were wrong is clearly incorrect. The faked ones (i.e most of the superskinny ones) are photoshopped. Badly.

Sorry, but it's obvious which are. The work is poor.

I'm a graphic artist. I can see bad photoshop a mile off.

Sorry.

P.S Like this blog. :)"

After receiving the first comment above from Anonymous, I removed all the "fake" and "real" tags on the photos, but have since added them back.

Your thoughts on the photos?

MY ORIGINAL POST:

The Internet is rife with photoshopped images of skeletal models. Unfortunately, many young girls cruising the Internet, who aspire to have stick-thin figures like the models in the images they see, begin deadly starvation diets, not realizing that the pictures of many of these models have been photoshopped...and some drastically.

Here are just a few examples of these photoshopped pictures...