Celebrities do not exist
Posted by Johnnie
As a pretty proficient Photoshop user, I’m often called on to touch up or alter an image, sometimes in a minor way and sometimes in a major way (for one of the shots in BloodSpell I had to animate a character’s mouth movement frame by frame, because we forgot to puppeteer it when we took the shot).
I know that image manipulations tools such as Photoshop can have a profound effect on a final image, and I also know just how much work has been done to the images that grace the covers of fashion and celebrity magazines. I sometimes find it difficult to get this across to people, though – if you don’t have years of regular Photoshop use under your belt it’s difficult to comprehend just how much influence you can bring to bear on an image. Finally, I’ve found a perfect example. iWANEX Studio have put several example images online (Flash-based site. Click Portfolio to see the images). Mouse-over the final image and you can see the original shot. Pay attention: this is what celebrities really look like. Greasy, fat and spotty; rather like you and me. The reason Kylie Minogue’s butt is so impossibly pert is because it is, quite literally, impossible. Those buttock cheeks do not exist. They’re no more real than Lara Croft’s funbags.