I’m still plugging away on the panoramas from my recent trip to Yellowstone/Grand Tetons.
In my poking around in photography, I’ve come across various levels of photoshoppery. I try to keep it fairly light with my photos… not nonexistent, though. Stitching photos together into a panorama is by definition tinkering with the reality of the photo. Additionally, I fix flaws such as hot/dead pixels, or paint out the occasional missing bit resulting from misaligned separate photos in a panorama, or tinker with contrast, brightness, fade corrections, etc. However, I don’t do stuff like adding airplanes or birds to photos that don’t have ’em. Other do, and that’s fine; I just choose to have my photos be as representative of the actual reality of the scene as possible.
While glancing at Fark.com, I saw a discussion thread making fun of the official headshots of the Miss Arkansas contestants. It is clear that in many cases these women, or at least their managers, are fully in favor of photoshopping the bejeebers out of the women, with some results that are less than entirely realistic.
Somewhere in that thread someone posted a link to a website that takes a wholly different point of view from me on the merits of heavily photoshopping images:
*Note* These enhancements below are used for High Glitz Beauty Pageants,
which are meant to have an “over the top” retouching style.
Note: “over the top” doesn’t *begin* to describe what’s been done to the photos of child and toddler “models” (a disturbing concept even before the photo retouching).