Post Production - How far is too Far?

For this digital image brief we have been given the theme of natural beauty, so our images will have minimal retouching, but this is not the case with the beauty industry at the moment where images are heavily retouched. 

"The best retouching is to trick someone into thinking that nothing has been done at all."

Retouching started as early as the 1860's, Abraham Lincon used to get edited into pictures to make it look like he had posed for the image, George Hurell retouched his pictures very subtly to make the stars look glowing and elegant. 

Retouching has become such an issue that some adverts have been banned this included images of twiggy for Olay even a Dior and Lancome ad, these images are heavily retouched to the point that they do not look like the celebrity or model anymore, this has become a problem because young girls look up to these images that they see in magazines and they aren't real. it becomes a question to think if this is a product of what the consumer wants or what the celebrity wants for example un retouched images of Beyonce were released where you can see a noticeable difference in her skin in the two pictures, you have to think if the images were that heavily retouched because Beyonce wanted them like that, or if it is due to consumer need.

Personally i think retouching is a good thing although it can be very deceptive, I am very fond of looking at perfect images in magazines because it gives you something to look up to and at the end of the day it does sell products, however people especially young girls need to be educated that the things that they see in magazines are not real. I do not personally believe in heavy retouching though, it can look fake it has the uncanny valley effect, this was a concept identified by Masahiro Mori, Moris original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic until a point is reached which is beyond the response and will quickly become a response of strong revulsion. However, as the robots appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a being, the emotional response becomes positive again and approaches empathy levels. 

*Mori, M. (1970/2012).
The uncanny valley (K. F. MacDorman & N. Kageki, Trans.). IEEE Robo'cs & Automa'on Magazine, 19(2), 98–100.