Sunday, October 10, 2004 · posted at 2:01 AM
You probably think this song is about you.

This week on UPN's Top Model, the theme of the girls' photo shoot is beauty shots with a clean face. Meaning no makeup, no cover-up, just the camera, a tube of Nivea for their hands, and whatever insecurity they house laid out in the open.

During judging they showed a touched-up photo and the same photo without touch-ups. The non-touch-ups were not a pretty sight. They showed every bump, every bag, every wrinkle.

The rational for a bare photo? Airbrushing and the like is expensive and time-consuming. The less of it the better. And after editing the New York pictures, I really can't argue.

I don't know if it's because it was raining, or because it was the end of a 48-hour day, but the pictures from the Empire State Building were frightening. We all looked as though we had dipped ourselves into a vat of Kat's lip gloss.

There are people who are just naturally photogenic. And for the rest of us there's PhotoShop. A healing, clone stamp, and layering later, a picture goes from "yeee" to "yay."

For those of you who believe in virgin pictures – good for you. Go find yourself something flawless, something in a vacuum, something without sebaceous glands. As for me, I feel by PhotoShopping photos I'm really doing a service.

In the same way we crop random people out of pictures, use a red eye marker, or "rotate arbitrary" to improve the aesthetic quality of a picture, so am I improving the quality of a picture by making it easy to see the picture rather than be blinded by the light from my shiny forehead.

Things I've realized from fixing photos amateur-style:
  • The cloning tool works wonders. However, this procedure is very similar to skin grafts. While a skin graft can be used to cover wounds or burns, you need to have an unaffected area to retrieve the donor graft. Sometimes there's no perfect patch to clone.

  • It helps to have a tan. Trying to cover the shiny white from someone who's, well, white to begin with can get tricky.

  • Flyaway hair can be removed if covering less than 10% of the face. Beyond that, it's every Enkidu for themselves… Also, erasing baby hairs (see Jennifer Lopez) can affect hairlines. Be cautious not to Conehead the person.

  • Half-shut eyes can be remedied by copying a portion of the eye and layering it at its normal position.

  • Prevention, as always, is the best cure. We're blessed with oil-blotting paper. We really ought to utilize it.
And believe me I had to pay for my vanity. You think looking at uneven complexions and coruscating skin in a 4x6 is uncomfortable? Try sitting at the computer for hours and staying at pores magnified 5x. Yeah not so much fun.

Don't you. Don't you.

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