Below are a few really good videos I saw over the weekend of the a photo being fully retouched. The main thing that people don’t realize about photo retouching is that you change everything… being incredibly through and idealizing everything to the point that the picture is almost no longer of the subject anymore. The trick is to not over do it or it becomes too noticeable and that breaks the illusion.

I see people in life looking at magazines and ogling at the “people” on the cover. I use the term “people” loosely because as previously stated and as the video examples below will show: no one looks this good ever – let alone all the time. To believe that these cover shots are real is akin to believing that Grim’s Fairy Tales is a historical text!

Reading a fictional book is fun, as is staring at a retouched photo of Hillary Duff. The difference is that we all know that the book is fiction, yet because our eyes can see it we decided at some point that the photograph is real.

As people view more produced events, whether it be an ad, a movie, or the Music Awards their attitude towards reality shifts so that the perfected reality as the norm, and anyone who is having a “normal day” is ugly by comparison. Such is the case when you see a person “untouched”. By comparison anyone without an army of stylists and photoshop artists is a second rate beauty at best.

Watch and learn.

I’ll post some tutorials soon. These guys all fly through their work.