High Fashion Retouching – inside the black box
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Using 90-second time-lapse videos, Rare Digital Art zooms up the 6 hour process, showing each and every detail that goes into the creation of a flawless cover model image. The original image becomes pinched and pulled, as the artist transforms the model’s hair, skin, nails, fingers and lips. The model instantly gets elongated fingernails and even a straightened set of teeth. Rare Digital Art reveals what really goes on when shaping a cover-model worthy standard of beauty.
Other brands, such as Dove, believe that altering marketing material in this way is controversial and creates an impossible, damaging standard of beauty for women. In 2004, Dove launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, featuring alternative sized models and appealing to “real women” whose appearances are outside of the stereotypical ideas of beauty.
The founder of Rare Digital Art spoke on the topic, stating that “the quality of the other before-and-after retouching videos available online are pretty terrible and not at all representative of what is typically done on high-fashion editorials and campaigns.”
She addded, “With all the talk about Photoshop use or overuse, I thought it would be interesting for people to see how we actually add pores to skin (we do this in the second and third videos, sampled from the girl in the first video).”
While others may agree or disagree, it’s definitely worth watching one of these videos from Rare Digital Art to get a behind the scenes look into the process of post-production photo retouching.
Written by Jade Nicolette
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