Not for the squeamish...

Some may have already seen this, but I thought it would be churlish not to share the unspeakable horrors contained herein with you all.

http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retouch4a.html

Glad I left the knives downstairs - makes me want to slit my wrists

Aaaargh! Horrific Thanks for frightening me half to death

Has Derreck Pye started a new business? The retouching quality is in line with his wedding photography!

Is there another extra charge to get your little girl back to normal?
Just gotta say, WOW. Truly nasty.

Why do parents want their kids to look plastic?!

If only I had known in time for the "self portrait" competition. Seems I did something wrong

The eyes have to be the worst part.

They will make a fortune

This is the Bride of Chucky...

Horrors...

Sadly, I think you are right.

Americans can't deal with reality.

As kcmadr observed:

Separated at birth?

It was seeing Brian moving in this direction that ignited the blue touch-paper of my "ICBM".

I think photography, as we used to know it, is doomed, unless people take a stand with their own, personal, non-commercial photos.

Commercial photography will of course follow the money, as Lilly predicts. But non-commercial photography might survive as a genuinely photographic medium if people want it to.

So what is a genuine photograph?

For me, it is an image that is conceived in the mind of the photographer, and realised using purely photographic tools.

Of course, the darkroom is now a computer, but purely photographic tools in the digital age are those which do what could be done in a traditional darkroom, but using modern (computerised) methods.

It's allowable, in my view, to reduce noise, because noise is simply sensor error. A better sensor would have low, or no, noise.

This is the essence of it. If imperfections in the system introduce things that you didn't see in the viewfinder, it is permissable to remove them. What is not permissable is to change or remove things you DID see.

Why is this important? Simply because if your final image is not what you saw, it is no longer a photograph. It's some bastard amalgam of photography and painting, or "imaging", or spray-painting, or air-brushing.

A great photograph is one which shows us what we saw (or would have seen had we been there), but didn't notice. The photographer, or artist in the medium of photography, saw something that the ordinary person might see, but wouldn't SEE, without the insight and imagination of the artist.

A few years ago there was an exhibition of Picasso's sculpture (the word is defined loosely) in London. One piece which struck me forcibly was an old pair of bicycle handlebars placed above a bicycle seat. It formed a bull's head, a symbol of Spain. Anybody else would have passed it by on the rubbish dump, but Picasso saw it, and created an iconic work of art from it.

It's this ability to see what others don't that defines the photographer, whose task is simply to record what he saw, as well as he can, but without embellishment.

That's my view, anyway.

G

And mine.

Even Worse!!

http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retoucha.html

http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retouch1a.html

The whole thing is flat, fake and SH!T! You might as well take pictures of dolls or just stitch the whole thing from composite bits.

This is not photography and it most certainly isn't what I'd consider retouching. More like falsification, and very poor quality at that.

I think the true measure of a photographer's skill is measured by the RAW image he produces. Let the Image Editing Software gurus dolly it up. Anybody can fix a photo, but not just anybody can take one.