narcsblog

Magazine covers and adverts are clearly mental. They are designed to grab your attention in a split second, but rarely stand up well to close scrutiny. That’s fine if you are aware this is what they are doing, but if you begin to let them influence your world view you’re in trouble. Take, for example, this advert that I’ve pilfered from the glorious Photoshop Disasters blog. Brasil’s popular brand M Officer, has ridiculous ideas of what a woman looks like

It’s impossible to ignore how unrealistic this image is isn’t it?  Yet how people end up with strange figures like this in adverts is pretty obvious.  Imagine the list of demands from the client; Eye contact is a must to suck you in, they also want you to see the cut of the dress which is why her back is to you.  It goes without saying you should make it sexy, which is why they’ve painted on under boobs and had hands hitching up the hem, and they want you to think its slimming so they’ve made her head bigger and her arms long and her waist non existent.  This is clearly batshit crazy but also in commercial terms, totally logical.  Many people clearly like feeling sexy and thin.  So how many parts of this photo is cropped together?  Well I’ve quickly marked up a shot so you can see where I would imagine the main areas of composite are

And that’s just the start of it.  in fact I forgot to add a line to indicate the entire cutout on the ribcage too.  Then there would be literally hundreds of layers of work on this sho.  This is nothing new though, and it’s a skill that precedes Photoshop.  Check out this shot of Grace Jones by Jean Paul Goude

This iconic pose is immediately striking but also impossible, and actually the result of creative compositing

This Grace Jones project is clearly fantastic, and the airbrushing is flawless.  But so few examples of modern photoshopping comes anywhere close.  I find it frustrating that people seem to suspend disbelief when viewing modern composites and judge them as if they are intended to be realistic examples of humanity.  Clearly they’re not realistic at all!  They are complex pictorial stories that are told in a blip.

Look at this image from http://www.exploratorium.edu

can you tell the difference between the two shots?

If you scroll down you’ll see below

Clearly our ability to see distortions in images is far less astute compared to our skill at spotting bad CGI in moving image.  Perhaps this inability is the reason that fashion and advertising photography is so problematic.

This week I saw another laugh out loud example of a photoshop disaster, which is being discussed at length on the internet

people can tell this photo is clearly nonsense but what part of it do you think is drawing the focus of peoples ire?  The armpit!  Hillarious no?  clearly there are bigger points at play.  Like for example the head spiced on to the body?  I’m going to hazard a guess that the original face was angled more like this

but the more I look the more lines of cropping I see.  The hair is massive, the face is stupid.  The outline has no relation to the body within it.  The flesh is a drawing, the corset has been squeezed in and then the whole thing is coated in a sheen of gloss.

and all people have to complain about is the armpit?