Cheaper Than Botox
I find these sites fascinating. You can see with a simple mouseover the before and after of celebrity retouched photos. This company (click on Portfolio) removed a fat roll from Beyonce, changed the shape of Penelope Cruz, and basically hacked away completely at Kelly Clarkson (boo). I love Cate Blanchett’s before shot, with her mussed hair and freckles. Just saw Notes on a Scandal and my god, is that woman beautiful. Her after shot looks a little sterile. All hope is not lost, though: They did add some curves to Julia Stiles and Cameron Diaz!
(See a few side-by-side shots here. Thanks, K.C.)
If you want to see the opposite of that, kind of, you can see Stars Without Makeup in People magazine. I grant you that Rashida Jones is stunning, but I’m sure Photoshop and lighting are involved there too. And Stephanie notes:
There is a video clip with Katharine McPhee as she gets ready for her “no make-up” shoot. In this clip, McPhee is sitting in a chair as a makeup artist is most obviously putting some kinds of touch ups on Katharine’s face. It’s not just moisturizer. Again People, no make-up means nothing, nada. if you need a makeup artist to look natural, it’s NOT natural.
So there you have it. Stars get a lot of help to look as amazing as they do. I mean, check out Eva Longoria without makeup. She’s kind of average looking, am I right?
Posted by mo pie
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I’ve always maintained that if I had a professional make up artist, perfect lighting and photoshop I’d be ten times hotter than most stars out there. I doesn’t really matter if I don’t actually look myself does it?
And the pics of those little girls are creepy.
To think, we women get a complex because we think celebrities embody all that is beautiful. I think they should have left Kelly Clarksons hips and such intact. She is such a natural beauty.
Why does the industry think it’s so terrible to see celebrities as they really are?
It’s amazing how they distort some of those bodies.
I agree about Cate’s photo. I always think her eyes look a bit strange when they get rid of the natural eyelid shape below the eye.
The “after” px of the little girls made themlook like they were plastic. Or stuffed.
Reminiscent of Jon Benet.
Uber Creepy!
Amazing. I can’t believe how much they nipped in Katherine Heigl’s waist. And they made Eva Longoria’s thigh bigger, but her waist smaller!
Also, those kids’ photos are bizarre. In the first shot of the baby, I want to eat her chubby cheeks, but in the retouched version she looks like something out of a Chucky movie.
The child ones freaked me out. The rest of them I found disappointing but not surprisingly sadly.
Aug – I can’t believe anyone wanted to have that done to their children. At least it looks like the photos were *supposed* to make the kids look like dolls, and that’s not someone’s idea of an ideal look for a living child. At least I hope not. And the baby DOES look like Chucky (only less expressive).
I agree – the gorgeous Cate Blanchett looked WAY better ‘before.’ Ditto Julia Stiles – the overall lightening they do to wash out shadows and blemishes before they airbrush the rest also washes out expression, and that’s a huge part of what makes both of those women so attractive.
And why does every woman have to have that same frickin’ body? It’s reassuring to see how few of them actually really have that “skinny hourglass” shape. The before photos show just “skinny,” with little variation from bust to waist to hips. That makes a lot more sense.
I also found it interesting that almost everyone’s arms were monkeyed with, including that bohunk in the bottom row, whose right shoulder was photoshopped up 2 inches to make him look – I don’t know – more shrugg-y? The reason for that one completely escapes me.
I was mesmerized by the shot of Brittany Murphy. I kept moving the mouse back and forth – now you see the undereye bags, now you don’t! Bags – no bags!
They took out Julia Stiles muscle definition in her arm.
All of those women had plastic Barbie arms!
I think those kid pictures had to be a gag though.
I used to work in the marketing department at Sears years ago. It was my first real exposure to all the things that can be and are done to make things look better in print – remove wrinkles in clothing, change seam lines, change the ethnicity of the model, add her, take away there….
It can’t be that hard to be a print model these days, doncha think? Give me a photo of me, a computer with the right software and about 15 minutes and I’d be looking like Eva Longoria too.
You are absolutely right about the People magazine shoot. “No makeup” in that article obviously meant “natural-looking makeup.” And the black and white photography was incredibly forgiving as well (and undoubtedly touched-up).
Did anyone else notice how the guys mostly had their skintone smoothed out with no significant shaping, and with the majority of the women they’re doing the photoshop equivalent of major surgery: tweak in waist, raise boobs, de-muscle arms, move jawline, smooth over lower eyelid…
That’s the freakiest one, I have developed a bit of a complex about having undereye bags and dark circles, and looking at these touchups I realise thats not bags, it’s the LIDS, which gets retouched away in magazines. I always marvel at the undereye shape on models, the complete lack of anything resembling an indentation, now I realize it’s mostly photoshop. Who decided women have to have alien eyes and no freckles? Freckles are sexy!
Wow! No wonder I can’t get my complexion to look as good as these women–their skin doesn’t look that good! They all kind of look like drug addicts before the retouching–especially Rhys. Does anyone want to retouch the bags under my eyes?
It’s no wonder that Kelly Clarkson can’t go to the beach without people saying how much weight she’s gained. She hasn’t gained weight – she’s just actually being seen without retouching.
Oh my god…I just went and checked out the site those kids’ photos come from. It’s a retouching site for pageant photos, so the freaky doll eyes ARE supposed to look good – not kitsch.
There’s a listing under every photo set that describes just what horrors have been visited on these kids’ snapshots. The one that creeped me out the most was “mouth replacement.”
There was also one pic of a little girl all tarted up in her pageant attire and looking like she was hating it. The loving parents had the photo retouched so she looked, in the words of the photo retoucher “serious” (and creepily sexy) instead of sad. I feel slimed.
Mary Garden :
I can’t believe that people pay money for that!
Hell, I do a better job with photoshop on My pictures.
That’s just really disturbing.
Of course…those little girl beauty pagents are disturbing by nature
“Bohunk?” Really? We’re really saying bohunk anymore?
The funniest change was the calf chunk removed from Beyonce’s leg. Maybe they just should have changed her out of those dammed awful boots!