Airbrushing images – a useful tool or a step too far?
There’s been a lot in the press about this recently, so it’s a topical subject to write a blog post about. We see it on just about every fashion magazine cover in the high street these days, and nobody is safe from it. Tennis star Andy Roddick had his biceps ballooned so that the image would go with the ‘Big Arms’ headline on the cover of Mens Fitness, Kate Winslet was airbrushed on the cover of GQ to appear slimmer, and Keira Knightley had her bust enhanced for the promo shots used on the King Arthur film.
So what is airbrushing? What steps are generally involved in manipulating an image? I’ve been meaning to write a post on this subject for a while, but thought it grossly unfair to pick on one of my previous portrait or boudoir shoots and show how it’s done. I’m sure that the subject would have something to say about that! I needed to find somebody with imperfections and who isn’t bothered about them, and who doesn’t mind being the subject of a post about making their old features look younger.
After a couple of days of thought I realised I knew the perfect candidate. And here we are, the result is my first venture in front of the camera rather than behind it!
The camera (a Fuji S5 Pro with Nikon 85mm lens) was tripod mounted, a softbox placed close to my head on the left and a reflector on the right. The self timer was set to two seconds, and the exposure underexposed by two stops.
Right then, let’s get down to business! Any of the images in this post can be clicked on to show a higher resolution version. The original image straight off the camera was this one below. The softbox provides a fairly soft light, but if you click on this image you’ll see all the imperfections in the skin, lines in the forehead, bags under the eyes, spots, moles, in fact everything!
The first step in airbrushing is a bit like the first step in makeup – and that’s dealing with the base layer. Many imaging software packages have a skin softening tool built in. This effectively allows you to select the skin colour using an eye dropper tool and then apply an amount of blur, and then allow an amount of detail to show through. This adjustment only applies to the skin colour, so hair, eyes, and lips remain sharp and unaffected. The image below shows our test image after this step has been applied.
This has taken a lot of the texture and blemishes of the skin out, the difficulty is doing this without making the skin look plastic. So, now we have smoothed the skin the next step is to make me look a few years younger. The lines in the forehead need to go, and this is done by using a cloning tool in Photoshop. Basically, we paint over the lines in the forehead with a texture sampled from another part of the skin. We can also remove some of the larger spots or moles. The result is shown below:
The next step is where the fine line in airbrushing is often crossed, and that’s by physically adjusting the appearance. In the glossy fashion magazines this is where waistlines are slimmed and other parts enhanced, but with my photograph I think I’ll fix the nose I broke when I was six, remove the bags from under my eyes (it’s been a tough week!) and slim my face slightly. And while we’re at it lets whiten the eyes! The result follows:
The last step is purely a choice of style, and that’s converting the image to a toned black and white version. A little film grain effect is added – this also helps cover any over enthusiastic smoothing of the skin. We’ll bring out the eyes a little, and finally add a soft focus effect. The final version is shown below along with the original.
If you would like to view each image in sequence to see step by step results then click on the colour image above and then click the arrow that appears when you mouse over the right side of it. Continue until you get to the final black and white image.
And there we have it. So, is airbrushing a useful tool that an art director can use to make a model look his or her absolute best, or does it set a dangerous precedent, where impossibly perfect models appear every day on the front cover of magazines in full view of impressionable youngsters who feel that they can never live up to an image that society expects of them?
It’s a difficult question to answer, and I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on it. I think ultimately it depends on the purpose of the image. For example, if on one of our boudoir shoots I was asked to retouch an image then I probably would without feeling too guilty about it. These are private images, usually between a couple in a relationship, and they aren’t going to be seen by anybody else. If the subject wants a little help to look their absolute best then why not, but within reason.
I think it’s a different question when we’re talking about images in the public domain though. A little bit of skin softening here and there isn’t a bad thing, and if a customer turns up to a portrait shoot with a big spot then it’s easily removed. In fact it’s not too different to what most ladies do with their make-up anyway. When it comes to physically altering a body to conform to what’s seen in society as being ‘beautiful’ it’s a worrying trend though. Nobody should grow up believing that they are not normal based on an opinion formed from an airbrushed image in a magazine, especially when the person portrayed in that image is a role model to the viewer.
So what do I think of the images now that I have been airbrushed? Well, I’m not too offended by the end result, but I can’t help but feel that it isn’t really me. I think I could comfortably take it as far as step two where a little bit of skin softening has been applied but features and lines are still visible. After all, it’s these ‘imperfections’ that make us who we are.
