Everybody seems to retouch the crap out of everyone who doesn't need retouching and to skip retouching on the unfortunate souls who could benefit from it. I prefer to light people in a flattering way rather than spend a lot of time converting their skin into smooth plastic. A young woman like Dyan really doesn't need you to flatten out and smooth over every pore... Just thinking about all the portrait images I've seen lately with laser sharp lips and eyes and then skin like a glass of milk. Forget body image issues for a second; I'm now worried about complexion image issues. Since when did ultra smooth skin become a mandatory "feature" of portrait photography?
10 comments:
In my teens (having a Superikonta) I read my father's collection of (Swedish) photo magazines from the 1950s.
I remember the recurring discussion of "portrait lenses" with some spherical aberration built in so as to soften skin when used wide open versus "soft filters" giving a cruder effect and missing the nicer transition to out of focus.
Addendum:
- or even stretching a nylon or silk stocking in front of the lens.
I see on TOP it is impossible to comment here.
Thanks for the comments. My pet gripe is when they retouch the face to plastic, then leave knuckles and elbows rough.I try to keep it real. Even when the subject and end use call for a good bit of work I try to leave a little real texture.
Yes. Clayton. It's absolutely impossible. But one could try filling in a comment blank and pushing "publish." The vicious moderator would then leap into action and sort the comment for publication. But only if it paints the blog owner in a good light..... KT
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The skin requirements for portraiture became mandatory about the time the cosmetic industry convinced people their skin was bad.
Juuust take a look at 1) the wedding industrial-complex and, most importantly 2) Instagram personal accounts. It's all due to the highly desired Instagram Filter Look, which has spilled over into weddings and now metastasized into ... business portraits. Folks now create selfies that they then use filters to erase all semblance of reality. And some want that for professional portraits.
If you really want to be horrified, do some searching for "China selfie phone". There are devices specifically made to feed the Chinese appetite for wildly retouched selfies, and devices which will capture and create them with a single button push. Look at the app "Meitu" as well.
It started innocently enough on our shores with the Kardashians and frequency separation reality-altering. It is now in the mainstream visual lexicon ...
Amen to that, Kirk. I also don't understand the cold blue/green pastel look, or contrasty crunchy desaturated video game look in editorial portraits.
*Please* think about getting a Zeiss 1.5/50 ZM C-Sonnar and Leica M to m4/3 adaptor for use on your Panasonics. Wide-open, there’s undercorrection of spherical aberration leading to a pleasing softness with a highlight “glow”. Stop it down and it gets progressively sharper until it’s sharp all over. If you don’t want to spring for the current Zeiss version (with its revised optical design and T* coating), you can get the original Zeiss optical formula made with original Zeiss equipment in M39 LTM as the Soviet Jupiter-3 in Zorki mount. The images look like they’re from the 1940s or 50s, and for portraits there’s nothing wrong with that. You also liked using long Sonnars on Hasselblads (before the Sonnar and Tessar names stopped referring to specific optical designs).
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