cgardner Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Photoshopped models and actors in the Star? I'm shocked. Let's hope those Dartmouth guys didn't get a Federal Grant for that study.
But I wonder what percentage of articles get published in the NYT without any text editing? Also you gotta love the irony of the embedded ad for Portrait Professional on the right hand margin.
Writers have editors, painters have always edited what they see with their brushes. The idea that a camera accurately captures what is seen by eye is an illusion. A camera doesn't selectively adapt exposure and sharpness as it scans the scene like the human eye and brain to. Part of making a photograph more like the in person viewing experience has always involved some form of manipulation in the form of lighting control or dodging / burning during the print making process.
A common practice in newspaper photos before Photoshop was to create a ghost mask to gray out a distracting background to make the foreground contrast more. Even in the '60s you had to be pretty naive to think the women in Playboy really looked like that in real life. Those before and after body building shots have been around for years. Before: flat footed and square to camera, gut distended, shoulders slouched. After: Oblique dynamic pose, gut sucked in, shoulders back, chest out. The only difference now is powering the airbrush with electrons instead of compressed air and most photographers don't know how to pose and light effectively. Want to make a subject look 10 years younger and 20 pounds lighter? Stand on a chair to take their photo. That forces them to look up which tightens and slims the neck and puts head over body foreshortening the torso. It also puts better light in the eyes, a trick Joseph Mehling who shot the photo of Hany Farid in the NYT article never learned.
There are some forms of photography such as scientific, forensic and reproduction of artwork where modification is inappropriate and even lighting is tightly controlled to prevent it from biasing the impression the photograph creates. But even within those disciples there are modifications like sharpening required to overcome the limitations of the recording medium. Color reproduction accuracy is limited by fact the image is recorded in RGB and limited at output by the gamut of the device displaying or printing the facsimile reproduction. One of the reasons process control targets like the Kodak Q13 separation guide and gray scale or the MacBeth color checker are included in those types of photographs (or should be) is to allow fidelity of the reproduction process to be monitored.
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