Digital image production: Post production-how far is too far?

Digital Image Production: Post production-How far is too far?

Image manipulation has found to been going on since the 1800's even before technology like Photoshop was around, they did this with painting skills like an early airbrushing of the 1800's. We discuss whether photos nowadays are too edited and does it give off an unrealistic reality to people, to prove this we watched a video called 'Time lapse, 90 minutes of retouching in 90 seconds' which shows people an ugly truth behind professional images and how much editing is done to them which in the end barley looks like the original person that they took the photo of. This went to further discussion highlighting that by creating images that show an unrealistic image of people can effect others viewing it in many ways. For example, if these images are put in teen magazine teenagers may not know about these post production editing and they could possibly start questioning themselves like why they don't look like the girls in the images, when in fact neither of them do. Then later we were shown images of famous celebrities in adverts and photo shoots that had been banned, this was due to the false advertising it portrayed to the general public. It made me relies how much some images where edited and that all these famous celebrities where all very similar to the general public and that they don't always have perfect skin etc.


So therefore by learning all this information about editing and that post production should only be a small part of the image we were given a task to take three of our own Beauty shots; one front view, one angled and one side profile (which have to have three in 'Colour' and three 'Black and white' images). These are the images that I produced as a practice photographs:

With these images I have only done a small post production editing to them. I have with all the images changed the contrast and lighting, blurred out one/two markings on the skin and with the picture in the middle changed the filter to black and white. 

By Amelia Richmond-knight