Woman Standing in Airport

This is a digital photograph that has undergone some major retouching. As you see it here, it is a photograph of a woman standing in an airport, taken with flash, in front of a wall with a large sign pointing to the departure gates. But that isn’t at all what the photograph originally showed.

The original photograph was taken in a hotel room, with a desk and a balcony window in the background. The model was strongly backlit and a bit underexposed, and the image had a slightly warm cast. I matted out the background, adjusted the color so that it more closely matched the coolness of a flash, created a white background, put letters and writing and an arrow over the background (which now looked like a wall), and created several layers of shadows required to give the subject that flat cast-shadow look that you see in flash photographs at close range taken from the front (crisp dark shadows on a distant wall). I also added grain to the computer-generated items to better match the grain of the model’s image. I used several nearly transparent shadows and highlights to create the impression of a specific orientation for the flash. Finally, I changed the model’s eye color (she actually has dark brown eyes). All of this was done in Adobe Photoshop 5.0.2. The finished image has nine layers. It took perhaps forty minutes to accomplish (mainly because I kept trying all sorts of different things).

This is a fairly amateur retouching job, and yet, if you weren’t expecting a retouched photograph, it might never occur to you that this photograph had been heavily modified. Now, if an amateur like me can produce something reasonably convincing like this so readily, imagine what an experienced professional can do. It’s something you might want to keep in mind the next time you are leafing through Vogue or Elle, since almost every photograph in every fashion magazine nowadays has been digitally retouched before publication, sometimes quite extensively. The same is true of print advertisements and television commercials. You just can’t trust a photograph anymore (you never could, in an absolute sense, but now retouching is far easier and more common than it has ever been in the past.

Yes, I know that there are lots of mistakes in the retouching. But be honest: If you weren’t looking for signs that the image had been retouched, would you have noticed them?