[jam1212]

Nikolas,

Excellent points. I feel that nicely sums up the real heart of the issue.

[Zepplinn]

My wife think I do not like her face. Yesterday I was cleaning a picture of my and her. I was cleaning spots and smoothing her skin, when she asked my this. In real life she sometimes complaining about the spots and the skin. I see nothing wrong by doing this. It is done in every magazine, movie poster, papers. Why can we not do this?

[Nikolas]

Hi Zepplinn

I don't think, by any means, that we can not retouch photographs. But when it is not in a professional environment, where a client has hired you to retouch a photograph, I think that you need to have respect for what the person in the photograph wishes to be done to their image. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Canada, the person owns the right to their own image, and has the right to deny persons the ability to change their image. Oh, and newspapers wouldn't ever be allowed to alter an image, just like a television news company wouldn't be able to alter an image beyond colour correction. It has to do with ethics of the press.

I would say that if your wife has asked you to not retouch her pictures, respect that. Also, maybe next time you could ask her if she minds you retouching her photographs. Perhaps ask her to sit with you as you retouch them, so that she has a say, and so that she can see the entire process. Who knows, she may like it too, and wish to take up a new hobby.

[AltIvan]

Woman use make up and as many things as they can to look beautyful, so is hipocrit to talk about "Ethics of Retouch". We just do wath they arent still able to do with cosmetics.

If images are sent to you for retouching then the client wants them retouching... If you don't do it, someone else will...

Hitmans thinks the same way.

[hillfan]

I do it for friends all the time...take off a chin, fix a blemish. I feel it is art work and everyone loves to have a great picture of themselves. anne Photoshop. by me doing this for my daughter, it has taught her how the industry works in the land of models. How a picture is not always as it seems..

[Maroon]

I've always thought that camera film is unfair to models. Sure, it captures them accurately, in the sense that it is an exact copy of their appearance at one moment in time, but that's not how we normally look at them. When you see a pretty girl, you don't zoom in and scan her face for blotches and bumps--you wouldn't even be able to.

When we're face to face with someone we look mostly in their eyes, while just glancing at the other major parts of the face and probably focused more on them as a person than on their physical details, so we don't pick up small wrinkles and blemishes and our mind sort of smoothes out any characteristics that deviate from the norm; and it has often been said that pure normality is the definition of beauty. Retouching usually involves sharpening the eyes and removing distracting details so the end result is closer to how we would really see the model, sort of like how they say HDR is closer to how we would really see a scene because it takes into account our perception.

A raw, static image addresses only our analytical vision. Retouching is an attempt to add a bit of emotion.

[Mike]

This thread made me think of this:

http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouc...uch/index.html

If some customer wants all or part of this, we try to comply. I have not really thought of such acts as being unethical, to me the unethical retouching is what is done to the little girls in the pageant's.