Take one glance at any newstand these days and it’s hard to deny that cover models have endured their fair share of digital alteration. Rare Digital Art, a firm whose clientele includes magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair and brands like Intermix and Yves St. Laurent, shines light on process of Photoshop retouching.
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
The time-lapse format seems like a smart way to make such a complex, technical process accessible to people who have no Photoshop background.
It’s interesting how the article frames this as both a technical craft and a controversial practice, especially with the mention of unrealistic beauty standards.
There’s something both impressive and unsettling about watching a real person slowly transformed into an idealized version that doesn’t quite exist.
The statement about other retouching videos being unrepresentative makes me wonder how many people have a skewed idea of what actually happens in professional workflows.
It’s wild how something that takes six hours of meticulous work gets consumed in a split second on a magazine cover without anyone questioning it.
I found the detail about adding pores back into skin fascinating, since most people assume retouching just smooths everything out rather than rebuilding texture intentionally.
The idea that pores are added back in later almost feels ironic, considering how much effort goes into erasing them in the first place.
The comparison between Rare Digital Art and Dove’s Real Beauty campaign highlights such a stark contrast in philosophy about what beauty advertising should represent.
Seeing nails elongated and facial features subtly altered makes it clear that these images aren’t just enhanced, they’re practically reconstructed from the ground up.
That contrast with Dove’s 2004 campaign really shows how long this debate has been going on, yet the industry hasn’t shifted much.
The founder’s point about poor-quality before-and-after videos online makes sense after seeing how nuanced high-fashion retouching actually is in these time-lapses.
I appreciate that the article mentions specific clients like Vogue and YSL, because it contextualizes just how industry-standard these heavy edits really are.
I didn’t realize how much attention is paid to tiny details like fingers and nails, which most viewers probably never consciously notice.
Watching a six-hour retouch condensed into 90 seconds really drives home how much manipulation goes into a single cover image, especially when you see fingers reshaped and teeth straightened frame by frame.