Photo-Retouching

Photo retouching is something that is part of our everyday life. For me the most important impact that photo-retouching has on society is when it is used on magazines, television and movies. Everything and everyone is just perfect. When looking at a cover of a magazine you see beautiful models. But are they real? Do they actually look like that in their everyday life? Well, make-up, hair and lighting do help a lot. Sometimes photo-retouching is not even needed. I believe photo-retouching is most used when they have people showing their bodies specially women. When you see a woman in the cover of Playboy, you just see her perfect body, is it really like that?





Influences

Photo retouching has a lot of influence in what society thinks as beautiful. Some girls that are happy with their bodies may see ads where other girls apparently are skinnier. That makes our whole society change their pattern of what is beautiful. In class we wondered about what guys think about girls being photo retouched in magazines. Do their girlfriends feel bad if they are looking at someone that is in a way “prettier” or “hotter” than she is? It also works the other way around? How do you think I feel when I see girls looking at a magazine cover a guy is showing his perfectly worked out six pack? I feel horrible. I know I will never have his body, not if I work out my whole life. So even though it affects the behavior and thinking on teenage girls, and grown women it also affects what men think about themselves.

Where else?

You can find photo-retouching in pretty much everything, that delicious hamburger you see on an ad, probably has wood wax to make it shiny, the pretty brad and lettuce probably photoshoped to look perfect on that one picture. Everything can be changes. If you want to visit that beautiful place you saw on that trip magazine, you might want to think twice, because that can also be edited to look better than it actually is. The one that surprised me the most and I have never actually thought about if before was the use of photo-retouching not to help someone’s image but to do the opposite, to start gossips or maybe create a good “fake” story for a magazine.







The harsh and cold truth!

Although we all know how bad it can affect younger generations and even ours, we have to face the truth. Nobody wants to open a magazine and see ugly people in it. It is something most of us don`t like to admit, but being someone that intends going into this business we have to analyze things from a lucrative and cold way sometimes. What do you think will sell more, a magazine with a beautiful girl, perfect body, face and hair or a magazine with a large girl on the cover? If it is not your main target, you always want to go for the beautiful. Now if your target is larger people, older people, business man, then go ahead and put whoever will get their attention. That is what Dove has done. It is one of my favorite brands, and two of its commercials are really lovely, one is the one on the post right before this where they have the girls and their insecurities. That is being smart they are not only targeting their mothers, but also the future costumers the girls that watch the ad are going to be. Another one is directed to older women, so there is nothing more soothing then to put older women in the ad, but pay close attention. Yes they are old, but they still have make-up, their hair is done, they have lighting and a good camera. They are still beautiful. Society likes beautiful, everyone likes to look at people or things that please their eyes. So, I don’t blame the people that order the retouching, they are just trying to sell more, and everybody knows that money IS what makes the world goes round. It costs money to retouch pictures; it gives you more money to have pictures retouched. If it wasn’t working, believe me, we would be looking at plus size models on playboy and guys with beer guts on the cover of men’s health.